Hacker News Reader

Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

I've run for office as a Libertarian, but in general I find the philosophy distinctly lacking. I definitely have a strong distaste for Objectivism.

I think it's good to have the libertarian voice at the table when discussing policy. I dread the thought of it being the dominant voice.

View on HN

Not all libertarians are objectivist Ayn Rand enthusiasts. I am not one.

I support the social safety net. I would disagree vehemently at the current implementation of the social safety net and people who want to expand it in at current form, especially without raising taxes to pay for it.

Both sides want more government support but no one wants to pay for it.

You sound more neoliberal than libertarian.

I have never heard of a libertarian in favor of a government-based social safety net. Could you expand on what a libertarian social safety net would look like?

UBI is quite popular in some libertarian circles. In theory, it would have minimal administrative overhead and distort the market less than the present regime of labor laws.

I've heard many libertarians who are in favor of universal basic income, because it solves many of the problems that current welfare systems introduce. Also, there are some who are in favor of universal healthcare. There are indeed a wide range of views in the libertarian spectrum.

They are impostors. True libertarians protect the right not to pay for other. You can support whatever you want only after you get this right.

Coerced wealth redistribution is about the furthest thing there is to libertarianism.

In broad strokes, my ideal safety net would be means tested (if you are poorer you get more) but gradually phase out as income increases in order to incentivize working, be a cash transfer to let people spend however they want without layers of make-work bureaucracy and political lobbying (farm lobby pushing food stamps, etc.), and be actually funded rather than through deficit spending.

That sounds a lot like food stamps, if you scrape the ideological patina off it.

No, this is nothing like foodstamps. Foodstamps can only be used for approved products in the food category. This encourages certain industries, such as farmers, to lobby for increased welfare dollars to flow to foodstamps. It also requires an enormous bureaucracy to manage the foodstamp program and creates a political agenda and interest groups around it.

We should eliminate existing welfare programs, of which there are many, and turn it into a simple cash transfer to the recipient's bank account. If society wants to give $X in welfare to person Y, then let's give $X to person Y and not have all of the other drama and waste around it.

The reason why food stamps work and wealth transfers don't is that increasing food production to match the demand that food stamps add isn't all that difficult, especially given that so much food already goes to waste. A direct transfer of money that could then be spent on things like housing or healthcare doesn't result in an increased production of those goods as it stands today since it won't result in a rapid increase in the number of doctors or the amount of housing available at lower price points.

I keep seeing conservative/libertarian groups propose things such as negative income taxes and UBI, but feeding the beast that is capitalism wont necessarily provide individuals substantially better conditions than exist today without additional major policy changes.

A free market is the most efficient way to distribute resources and it does this via price signals. Quantifying welfare as a single number, paid for in dollars, is maximally efficient. What you are arguing for is to split welfare into buckets, such as the food bucket (SNAP) and the housing bucket (rent control), but still let individuals spend freely within that bucket.

It’s an argument, but I think the simple solution is just to have one bucket and trust that individuals know what they need to spend money on best.

The twist you have, that food is a unique resource we grow too much of and SNAP is essentially free because we use food that would be wasted, is very strange and I haven’t heard it before. I don’t think government purchasers buy food from the trash pile, it all comes from the market.

> trust that individuals know what they need to spend money on best

Have you met people who struggle with addiction?

I suspect placing money explicitly into a food bucket is the only thing keeping a lot of children fed.

This is paternalism, and philosophically I think it’s best to let the individual decide what’s best for them rather than society telling people what to buy. You are essentially saying that the poor cannot be trusted to know what they need, whereas I think the poor are intelligent, rational people who will allocate their resources best.

I've helped keep a young drug addict alive for the past several years. I can assure you that good financial planning, and decision-making in general, does not always coincide with poverty.

And it's fine to argue that if people make poor decisions, they should be allowed to suffer the consequences, but that downplays the consequences that those around them suffer as well, especially children.

It's perfectly reasonable to say the money should be in a single bucket, but don't delude yourself that people are rational actors.

You are implying that enough poor people are junkies, or are poor because of some debilitating personal failure, that it is better not to trust any poor person to spend their welfare, in order to save the poor from themselves.

Your anecdote does not change my opinion. I trust that most poor people are hard working and honest, not one foot in the grave with dope like your friend.

It's pretty much like SNAP, as I said, minus ideological cruft. SNAP is means tested and cash-like. Farmers are lobbying for more SNAP? Do you have some references about that? I haven't been able to find much. You get to buy most non-prepared food on the open market, it's not like you stand in line to receive a government-procured potato. As to 'enormous bureaucracy' - over 93% of SNAP funds go to directly to benefits. As far as I can tell, your idea is pretty similar to SNAP but you don't want to say it is because, I dunno, government and welfare are bad. That is, in the words of political economist W. Sobchak, an ethos but it's not all that much of a serious argument.

Agriculture is an enormously important industry in the US and agriculture lobbyists are extremely embedded in the government, from farm-state senators, to insurance, to tariffs, to myriad tax breaks. Arguing that farmers don’t influence government, SNAP being one issue of many, is laughable

That's an 'everything is related to everything' argument about something that I did't actually say.

> would be means tested (if you are poorer you get more) but gradually phase out as income increases in order to incentivize working

What's "in order to incentivize working"? That feature is infamous for the fact that it disincentivizes working. Incentives not to work don't get any more direct than paying people not to work.

If you decrease the amount provided by welfare less than the increase in earnings through wages, you slowly decrease the support. So if you made $100 in welfare, then you earn $100, you now get say $75 of welfare, for $175 total income. This continues until welfare reaches $0. This is very standard economic thinking.

Sure, and it's a disincentive to work. The welfare program you describe taxes those $100 of earnings at a rate of 25%. Fewer people will be willing to do $100 of work for $75 than would do it for $100.

Or working in the other direction, that welfare program represents a standing offer to people working for $100 that it will pay them $25 to quit.

You're misunderstanding.

If you do 0 work, you get $100 of welfare.

If you do $100-worth of work, you get your wages plus $75 of welfare. You net more money working than not working.

This is opposed to having benefits "fall off a cliff" if you earn above a certain threshold, which is very much a disincentive to work. Instead, the benefits gradually taper off so that each step toward more employment is always a net positive for the worker.

What exactly do you think I'm misunderstanding? Try to identify something I said that you think is a mistake.

There is no difference, to the recipient, between "getting $100 of welfare and $75 of the $100 I earned working", or "getting $75 of my $100 of welfare and the full amount of the $100 I earned working".

And there is no perspective from which a means-tested welfare program in which benefits phase out with increasing income does not represent a disincentive to work.

We're comparing not working to working. So it's a choice between $100 welfare, $0 working; or $75 welfare, $100 working.

And anyone who still qualifies for public assistance is not paying income tax yet. Not 25% at least.

But that's beside the point. The point is that it is possible to structure the benefits so as not to penalize gainful employment. You make sure that it's worth more money to work than to not work.

But the benefits you're describing penalize gainful employment very heavily. Look at the cash flow:

Before: 0 labor output, $100 income.

After: $100 labor output, $175 income.

You've gained $75 by doing $100 of labor, which means that the welfare program is taxing your labor income at a 25% rate. This is a fairly strong disincentive to work, and a substantial penalty on gainful employment. In the reverse direction:

Before: $100 labor output, $175 income

After: 0 labor output, $100 income

You'd expect losing $100 of sales to represent a loss of $100 in income. But it's only a loss of $75, because the welfare program will subsidize you to quit your job. This is, again, a disincentive to work.

To evaluate whether the program is an incentive to work or a disincentive to work, you have to ask whether, in the presence of the program, more work or less work is done than would be done in the absence of the program. It's not at all relevant that the marginal tax rate implied by the program is always less than 100%. As long as it's more than 0%, it is a disincentive to work.

The point may be to avoid a discontinuity? Some programs in the past paid full amounts below a cutoff, and nothing above it. So, if one were close to the cutoff, working would be extremely "disincentivized".

As a (soft)libertarian I have to acknowledge that social spending can be such a great value that it's almost imperative - for example if we were to drop taxpayer funding of education, it would put our country at a severe disadvantage to other countries. Those more economically successful countries could over the long term buy our assets. Public-health vaccinations also come to mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com