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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

This argument makes no sense. Even if the government is not efficient with money we still want it to be funded because they provide services that make no sense for any one person to provide. In that context taxing high income more still makes sense, even if the efficiency is not high, more input still leads to more output.

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That's not necessarily true, it depends how inefficient the government is. for example, in my city the city controls trash pickup and tried to social engineer more composting/recycling by cutting trash pickup days to once every two weeks instead of every week. A private enterprise has sprung up offering the second pickup for the same price the city charges. They are able to provide that in the vastly less efficient setup of only a few people on each block using them, the city being dicks and not letting them collect from the city provided trash cans, etc. That tells you for this service the correct thing for the city to do is fire all the inefficient people they are employing and support private enterprise in gaining the efficiencies from automation and a bigger market and providing an even lower cost service. I suspect there are tons of services the city provides that are extremely inefficient as above.

They probably don't pay living wages. Its easy to be cheap when you don't pay living wages.

There's no such thing as a living wage because no matter what price you set labor at someone will fail at living there, be pointed to as an excuse to further manipulate the labor market. All there really is is the value at which the labor market clears. That they seem to have no problem providing the service at the price they are says they are paying at or above the price that would clear the labor market so there's nothing to talk about other than the government clearly overpaying, perhaps in the pursuit of a frankly stupid idea such as a living wage that is never clearly defined, constantly ratcheted higher when whatever number was mentioned previously fails to end poverty, and of which the only thing economic theory can say for certain is if the living wage price is set below the market clearing price of labor it will be ignored and if it is set above the market clearing price of labor it will cause unemployment and dead weight loss to society making it utterly ridiculous. The whole talk of this stupid idea honestly detracts from real discussion about real problems in the labor market interfering with actually making things better (i.e. the rampant monopsony and general geographic market power at the low to mid end of the employment market, the abuse of non competes at the mid to high end, etc.)

More input implying more output is a poor model, because there is rule of law in the middle.

input -> rule of law -> output is a more correct model. Maybe RuleOfLaw(Taxes) -> [Output distribution] is better.

When rule of law is weak, the powerful arbitrarily exercise their power to shift the output to them. When rule of law is strong the output is used for the public benefit.

So the efficiency of taxes depends greatly on the integrity of the legal system and therefore integrity of the legal system must come before the expectation of the usefulness of taxes.

When the legal system has no integrity, money siphoned from taxes to private interests increases the power of those private interests which further hurts the legal systems integrity. So more (general population) taxes in the context of weak rule of law is damaging to society.

If you want to increase rule of law (reduce arbitrary exercises of power), then the less powerful must become more powerful (unions), the more powerful must become less powerful (tax the rich or ask the french), or the institutions of society itself must ensure that there are consequences for arbitrary exercises of power (the people in power choose to exercise it responsibly), or a culture that respects rule of law must pervade (only possible through education).

It’s not strictly necessary for the government to provide everything that might interest more than a single person, so the premise of your rebuttal is already flawed.

I have no clue how people are ok with the government squandering away hard earned money. If people would like to donate to the government they are free to do so. Otherwise demand effective use of the tax or minimize collection.

To put it another way, should all of your income be taxed and you simply receive some sort of stipend from the government? Why or why not? Low efficiency is a problem because the alternative is population driven allocation which is definitionally superior in such a scenario.

> more input still leads to more output.

Not when people are involved

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