Hacker News Reader

But "the government" is people. Society said, "let people take care of people", and government is the answer to how to do that. The government is "full of corruption and waste" because people are.

We constantly try to find ways to organize society (and government as a crucial part of society) in ways that minimize corruption and waste, or mitigate their effects.

> That is something that no government could ever accomplish.

What you're suggesting is simply a new form of government. It might be great; it could perhaps work. But it's certainly not something to suggest offhand. Our current form(s) of government is a result of centuries (and millennia) of gradual, and sometimes revolutionary, progress. I wouldn't just throw it out the window. But hey, if you want to start a revolution, by all means – go for it. It's been a while since we've had a good revolution in the West. And if you're American, then it would be doubly great because we haven't seen any political revolutions in America since its founding (though if you're American you probably won't, because Americans like complaining about their government and alienating themselves from it, but they tend to do very little to improve it; at the end of the day, they're just too docile).

> And if you're American, then it would be doubly great because we haven't seen any political revolutions in America since its founding (though if you're American you probably won't, because Americans like complaining about their government and alienating themselves from it, but they tend to do very little to improve it; at the end of the day, they're just too docile).

Some notable events in American history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement

I didn't say "no notable events". I said no political revolutions (although the civil war almost counts).

If the US Civil War doesn't qualify as a political revolution, then I would argue nothing possibly could.

It started as a political argument in fact. It was about how to govern, and what rights the states possessed as part of the United States. Every aspect of the Civil War and its outcomes were political in nature.

It was absolutely a political revolution first and foremost. The war settled the political dispute.

Government being responsible for social security is a pretty new idea. The charity driven system he describes was the main way of doing things through the 1900s.

Churches, professions (benevolent funds), and clubs (as in masons) looked first after their own, and their children, when they fell on hard times. That was what they were for. That was why they were so vital in society.

You remember in Oliver Twist, where child orphans not lucky enough to descend for a professional are put to work as pseudo slaves in a workhouse? You remember when they escape to work as thieves and probably prostitutes for an older gangmaster? Not in your production of the show?

Anyway, that's what a small state, and charity driven welfare looked like.

I totally agree with the sentiment, but "government being responsible for social security" is certainly not a new idea. The bible [1] established a sort of central welfare, and the Roman Empire provided welfare as well[2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe#Mosaic_law: The third year was called "the year of tithing" (Deuteronomy 26:12-14) in which the Israelites set aside 1/10 of the increase of the land, they were to give this tithe to the Levites, strangers, orphans, and widows. These tithes were in reality more like taxes for the people of Israel and were mandatory, not optional giving. This tithe was distributed locally "within thy gates" (Deuteronomy 14:28) to support the Levites and assist the poor.

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare#History: In the Roman Empire, the first emperor Augustus provided the 'congiaria' or corn dole for citizens who could not afford to buy food. Social welfare was enlarged by the Emperor Trajan.Trajan's program brought acclaim from many, including Pliny the Younger. The Song dynasty government (c.1000AD in China) supported multiple programs which could be classified as social welfare, including the establishment of retirement homes, public clinics, and paupers' graveyards. According to Robert Henry Nelson, "The medieval Roman Catholic Church operated a far-reaching and comprehensive welfare system for the poor..."

> But "the government" is people.

The way matter is subatomic particles. The same thing at very different scales exhibit very different properties, and although technically true, it's misleading to consider governments as sets of people. They lack some essential features exhibited by individuals and small groups, features which we aptly call _humanity_.

The parent's proposal is to delegate stuff which require humanity to much smaller groups, which operate at scales where humanity still exists. It's a good idea, albeit not a new one: decentralization. It's very difficult to execute properly. Moreover, humanity isn't only composed of positive qualities: poorly executed decentralization easily turns into tribal clientelism.

Poorly executed centralization easily turns into communism, which fails spectacularly on anything but tribal scales.

Decentralization sure has its problems, but tends to beat the alternatives. Of course, where you end up in each system and how you benefit/suffer there may influence whether you agree.

I certainly wasn't advising against decentralizing. Only warning against thinking of it as an easily implemented no-brainer, a la "just decentralize everything, and everything is going to start working smoothly, like magic". Naive libertarianism hasn't proved to be more effective than naive Communism, and most people including myself believe it isn't.

Wasn't intending to contradict you; sorry if it came off that way.

Excellent reply. My take on this is. People who spend other people's money by the truckload are rarely going to spend it in the wisest possible and responsible way. The other points are these... With government spending the money, a small percentage of people are distributing this money that was collected from the general populous and the feeling of giving someones money away to others is not the same as if it were your own money (especially when it is going to poor results programs)

"But "the government" is people. Society said, "let people take care of people", and government is the answer to how to do that. The government is "full of corruption and waste" because people are."

The government is one answer for how to do that.

Society and government are not the same.

People spending their own money are almost always less wasteful and more careful where that money goes.

Almost everyone wants to help needy people. Most are just too busy, don't want to see that part of society, or don't know how to get involved.

If someone that you knew said that you could pay $1000 less in taxes next year if you looked through a list of families that needed help and wrote a check to them for $1000, how many people do yo think would refuse?

Do you think that they would spend more than 30 seconds randomly looking through the list for the person they will be helping?

The government largely only cares about that family in terms of employment and re-election. They are nothing but a number in a database somewhere. Most people don't even know the level of suffering some people right here in the good ol USA go through on a daily basis. The more money that one has, the more insulated from that reality they are. This will provide a window at least.

This illustration does not exactly follow the original concept, but hopefully you get the idea of an individual vs govt.

>What you're suggesting is simply a new form of government. It might be great; it could perhaps work. But it's certainly not something to suggest offhand. Our current form(s) of government is a result of centuries (and millennia) of gradual, and sometimes revolutionary, progress. I wouldn't just throw it out the window.

Where on earth did you get "new form of government" and "revolution" from? I am merely suggesting that social services be reformed heavily. This is certainly something that could be evaluated on a small scale (state level perhaps). I do realize that while the concept is simple, the implementation would be far more complex.

Everyone here keeps coming up with all these wild reasons of why this is a bad idea. Funny thing is, almost all their reasons (such as corruption, fraud, ETC.) already exist in the system today. I am not saying that there would not be any regulations, oversight, ETC. I am also not saying that there wold never be abuses. All I am saying is that the government is certainly not the best at getting this type of job done and tax money going to the poor and people not even seeing it happen is dehumanizing us.

>What if you could take the percentage of taxes that you spend every year and choose whom to help with it.

You realise that, especially where I live, one can make tax deductible donations to a wide variety of organisations? I give away thousands and get to write off much of the tax. In fact, I give away a few thousand and can technically qualify for a different tax bracket, I believe.

>We would have charities all over the place competing for this money, competition would produce far better results than the abysmal record of the state/federal social services.

No, you would have charities spending this money on advertising and gimmicks to get their share of your dollar. Some charities today spend large proportions of their budgets advertising and engaging in lawsuits (e.g. Susan B Komen)

What the government does is use it's uniquely large scale to help people. Education, healthcare, housing, welfare - for many countries in the world, having the government provide these services results in an relatively efficient system. I for one would rather pay the Medicare Levy in Australia than pay for private healthcare in the US - last time I was living there, the US system left me about $1500 worse off, and that was a year without any medical mishaps.

>You realise that, especially where I live, one can make tax deductible donations to a wide variety of organisations? I give away thousands and get to write off much of the tax. In fact, I give away a few thousand and can technically qualify for a different tax bracket, I believe.

But most people doing this are still experiencing a net negative. You might donate $1000 to save $200 off your taxes. This is a rather small incentive.

>No, you would have charities spending this money on advertising and gimmicks to get their share of your dollar. Some charities today spend large proportions of their budgets advertising and engaging in lawsuits (e.g. Susan B Komen)

Fine, but these organizations would not last. People want results, not more/better commercials. Did you not read my whole post? I mentioned that these orgs would be performance analyzed and all the data published. All their financial records would be public.

>What the government does is use it's uniquely large scale to help people. Education, healthcare, housing, welfare - for many countries in the world, having the government provide these services results in an relatively efficient system. I for one would rather pay the Medicare Levy in Australia than pay for private healthcare in the US - last time I was living there, the US system left me about $1500 worse off, and that was a year without any medical mishaps.

It is far from efficient, even if it was - the greatest benefit would be humanizing citizens (this would naturally branch into and benefit many other facets of society). Also I am talking about welfare/social services here, not medical services.

Sounds like a recipe for even worse corruption. Pay into your friend's charity, have your friend pay into your charity. Make a deal with a homeless person that if you get back half of what you give them you'll give them a lot of money. You can continue on your own.

Not to mention taking advantage of the deduction by "volunteering" at your friend's charity in some kind of fuzzily-defined "advisory" role, probably by attending a series of "thought camps" with your friend at his villa in The Bahamas or chalet in Klosters.

But would everybody take advantage like that, or even most?

I think humanity would still gain a lot, even if we cause a few new problems here and there.

>Sounds like a recipe for even worse corruption. Pay into your friend's charity, have your friend pay into your charity.

I never said that there would be no rules or regulations. If fact, I mentioned that the government would be needed for this purpose. I don't claim that there would be no abuses, but I can't see how it could possibly be as riddled with abuse as our current system. I think with the taxpaying citizens personally involved, they will demand a high level of adherence and enforcement. They will also feel a greater sense of personal violation when someone they know abuses the system. I know several people who claim that they know so and so who are collecting welfare and making all kinds of money under the table. If they feel a personal with that money and that system, they are more likely to report that person or at least discourage them. Likewise, the fraudster is going to feel more pressure by the whole movement to avoid committing the abuse.

> What if you could take the percentage of taxes that you spend every year and choose whom to help with it.

Then it would be spent on pet shelters and the national trust instead of homeless shelters and the national health, because middle class people fundamentally don't like poor people, and are mildly frustrated taxes go to them at all, except as a means to clear the streets of nuisance beggars.

Photogenically poor people in exotic places we can feel superior to are different, of course. Those, the middle classes will tithe to, provided it goes to "schools and infrastructure" to civilize them up.

Excuse me, but where does this generalization about the middle class come from?

Maybe they just want to do their part in a more effective way than having it stolen out of their income, then whittled down to a few percent, which is then distributed in obtuse ways which ruin the market forces which once made these people's lives easier year-over-year.

Did I not mention that there would be rules/laws involved? You may say that those with lots of money can get those laws bent in their favor, and generally this is true with the government. The people of America today are so uninvolved and uninformed that this happens without repercussions.

With this system, people are going to be watching things a bit closer. They are personally vested in this whole process.

> Here is a wild concept, mandate that people take care of people. Use the government only to enforce this.

> [...]

> That is something that no government could ever accomplish.

I think there is an inconsistency in your argument. You've just suggested a mode of action by government, not something government cannot do.

As to the particular mechanism, however, it is unlikely to work. The basic idea...

> We would have charities all over the place competing for this money, competition would produce far better results than the abysmal record of the state/federal social services.

...is fundamentally flawed. The theoretical efficiency of competitive markets is intimately tied to the assumption that both the benefits and costs are known to and born by the participants in the decision making processes, aligning rational self-interest with efficient decision making. In the charities competing for money from givers to provide services to those in need, the features which make markets theoretically efficient do not apply.

> All we ever see from the media is bad news. We never see lives being turned around from welfare or other social services.

That's because bad news is good for selling media (the perception that the world is a dangerous place and you need to keep consuming the media source from which you got that impression to know where the next imminent danger is very useful to holding an audience, independently of any connection it has to real circumstances), not because lives aren't turned around by welfare and other social services.

>I think there is an inconsistency in your argument. You've just suggested a mode of action by government, not something government cannot do.

You have a logical point but I think everyone understood what I was saying just fine - so your point does not apply to the reality and context of the situation. Some might say you are "trolling" myself, I think that you are just very anal.

>...is fundamentally flawed. The theoretical efficiency of competitive markets is intimately tied to the assumption that both the benefits and costs are known to and born by the participants in the decision making processes, aligning rational self-interest with efficient decision making. In the charities competing for money from givers to provide services to those in need, the features which make markets theoretically efficient do not apply.

Your argument may again carry weight by logical reasoning, but that is your fallacy. The competition would be maintained by the citizens emotional and humane (these are not logical things) drive to see the money coming out of their pocket actually directly and effectively help someone in a meaningful and lasting manner. That is what the competition is all about.

>That's because bad news is good for selling media (the perception that the world is a dangerous place and you need to keep consuming the media source from which you got that impression to know where the next imminent danger is very useful to holding an audience, independently of any connection it has to real circumstances), not because lives aren't turned around by welfare and other social services.

You missed my point. I was merely stating this example because the majority of people never see any tax dollars taken from their paycheck helping a fellow citizen. They never see any emotional or inspiring linked good come of it. The majority see what is in their local community and what is on the news. They have no natural connection to the needy. This is a very bad thing IMO.

>What if you could take the percentage of taxes that you spend every year and choose whom to help with it.

Kinda like just spending your own bloody money. The great thing about this alternative is that 100% of it goes where you want it, rather than the low tens of percentiles.

P.S. "ala the grinch" doesn't really make sense, it should be "a la grinch" since la handles the "the".

Mandatory charity is by definition not charity. It's a form of forced labor.

Charity: n. the voluntary giving of help, typically in the form of money, to those in need.

>Mandatory charity is by definition not charity. It's a form of forced labor.

Please have a better argument than semantics and proper English usage. Everyone knows what I am talking about.

Also, if this is forced labor, so if mandatory tax filing, mandatory Obamacare ETC.

Charities existed, in robust force, for a long time before the government stepped in and confiscated so much money from people they didn't have much left to care for others as they saw fit. We had charities all over the place competing for this money, and did produce far better results than the abysmal record of the state/federal social services, until the government stepped in and made it terribly difficult to provide such charity - on the grounds of closing the inevitable gaps which government still fails to close (and never will). The competition to provide charity is being destroyed by a government regulating competitors out of existence.

I leverage an opportunity to provide food to the poor. It's amazing how many places can't take bushels of bread for distribution thereto because of governmental regulations. In requiring better donations (vanishingly small improvements at prohibitive cost), nothing gets donated and the food all too often gets trashed.

Just change tax code to allow 1-1 deduction of charitable donations from tax liability (instead of taxable income), without limit, along with relaxing burdensome regulations on charities (realizing that something done poorly is better than nothing, and requiring something better leads to nothing).

Gubbamint is keeping the hungry from these bushels of bread not fit for human consumption, why can't they see the harm they're doing? Isn't bad food better than nothing?

>realizing that something done poorly is better than nothing and requiring something better leads to nothing

Oh my god you actually typed it.

Or we can adequately fund our social programs so that they are held to a certain standard and don't depend on the whims of the middle and upper classes.

Socialism works great until you run out if other people's money. ...which we have; the pipeline just hasn't emptied out yet.

I would think one day even those like you would realize... Money is rarely the answer. Same with our prison and criminal justice systems, education, ETC.

Spending has ramped up dramatically in these areas and yet the results are either not improved or worse...

What would you consider "adequately funding" our social programs.

More government(especially federal) is not the answer. Your type is always saying, just a bit more, just a bit bigger, even when things get even worse you think a bigger government can fix it.

How blind you are not to see that the government often caused the problem to begin with.

I'm not sure that mandatory required charity is anything more than asking for trouble. People should give, people should help, but they should do it willingly. If you force them to do it, they will resent both the charity and you. That is a scenario that offers short term benefits at best.

>'m not sure that mandatory required charity is anything more than asking for trouble. People should give, people should help, but they should do it willingly. If you force them to do it, they will resent both the charity and you. That is a scenario that offers short term benefits at best.

Every study on the subject has consistently found that giving creates a sense of happiness and fulfillment. These feelings more often than not encourage the givers to give more, to encourage others to give and to also give their time and efforts (not just money) to help others. It increases their humanity.

Why would people giving to someone of their choice (the receivers are of course qualified recipients) and seeing the good it does that person VS the government taking the money out of your pocket, wasting half of it and spending the other half on programs that under perform cause more trouble?

I may very well be wrong here, but I don't think someone with your opinion has ever given directly to a needy person...

>Every study on the subject has consistently found that giving creates a sense of happiness and fulfillment.

Willful giving. You cannot force charity, people will resent it as they will resent anything else you force them to do. As others have suggested, it will become nothing more an exercise in tax dodging in the best case scenario.

>I may very well be wrong here, but I don't think someone with your opinion has ever given directly to a needy person...

Also, don't be a passive aggressive asshole.

I've had similar thoughts on social security. It would make a lot of sense to simply require citizens to save or invest a certain portion of their annual income.

You could have enforced diversification (certain percentages allowed for high vs. low risk), and accreditation boards to vet and approve mutual and index funds.

Also, the investment would have a very stimulative effect on the economy, and you could probably also set it up in such a way that it works on autopilot (like a 401(k)) for those that can't be bothered..

It would be quite a bit less draconian than the government simply confiscating the money. In the private sector, the current setup would rightly be called a ponzi scheme.

That's only viable if you also force salaries up dramatically for low earners, or what you are doing is requiring people to starve.

No, I'm saying individuals would invest in lieu of social security. Those low earners are already losing part of their income to social security.

There would obviously have to be a transitionary period where the government makes up the shortfall, in order to honor the commitments made to retirees. It would be painful, but only a small addition to the 87 Trillion in current liabilities of the U.S. government.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732335320...

No, most low earners are receiving more back in benefits of various types than anything they pay into the system.

Thus if you replace these systems with mandatory investments, you are reducing their available cash.

I think you're either misunderstanding me or how social security works. I'm only talking about replacing social security, not "these systems".

Everyone who gets a paycheck pays their 6% in social security, regardless of income level.

But the curve that determines your payout is dramatically tilted towards low earners: That is, SS pays a much larger fraction of your highest earning years income if that income was low. As a result, low earners have to live only a few years past 65 to receive benefits greater than what they put in. High earners have to live decades.

> Everyone who gets a paycheck pays their 6% in social security, regardless of income level.

Social security tax is 12.4% on the first $113,700 of wages or self-employment income, and 0% on income from all other sources and wages and self-employment income past the first $113,700, so, no, you don't pay "6% in social security, regardless of income level".

(Note that on wages, but not self-employment income for obvious reasons, half of the 12.4% is paid as 'employer share', so that the employee never sees it, so it might appear, if you look only at wage withholding, that the rate is 6% -- or rather, 6.2% -- but that's not accurate.)

> It would make a lot of sense to simply require citizens to save or invest a certain portion of their annual income.

Not to serve the purpose of social security, which is to serve as a minimal fallback defined benefit pension to to mitigate the effects of old-age poverty in the event that personal retirement savings fail due to investment risk (either by failure of personal investment, failure of private pensions, etc.)

It would be a nice public subsidy to the financial services industry, which is why that industry and their political proxies keep recommending this, but it wouldn't actually serve the purpose social security is designed to serve.

> It would be quite a bit less draconian than the government simply confiscating the money.

Not really; either way the government is seizing the money and directing its use.

>It would be quite a bit less draconian than the government simply confiscating the money.

Oh, the irony.

> The government is full of corruption and waste, they are innefective in matters that require an actual soul.

Something totally unheard of in charities or churches for that matter?

> What if you could take the percentage of taxes that you spend every year and choose whom to help with it.

I cannot see how this would not lead to a very disproportional distribution of welfare. Very few people, I guess, would rather give their money to rehabilitated murderers or sex offenders than to orphans or abused women for example.

>Something totally unheard of in charities or churches for that matter?

The difference here is that charities can easily be replaced or you can choose a different one. There would definitely be oversight to expose problems and shut down fraudsters.

>I cannot see how this would not lead to a very disproportional distribution of welfare. Very few people, I guess, would rather give their money to rehabilitated murderers or sex offenders than to orphans or abused women for example.

You would be surprised. Sure those like you would give it to orphans and widows. Also, charities generally don't "turn down" people because they just got out of jail. If fact, I suppose that it could be mandated that they don't.

There are easy common sense rules for all these types of concerns.

> Also, charities generally don't "turn down" people because they just got out of jail.

No, but there are many charities that serve a very specific purpose. And I would bet that there are far more who are involved in work with children than with convicts. Actually I know there are (I have my own limited experience in this specific area), but more to this later.

> Sure those like you would give it to orphans and widows.

I would be very surprised if "those like me" would not turn out to be in the vast majority. By the way, I picked rehabilitated criminals for a reason. During and for a while after university, I was living in a self sustained formerly occupied house and we has decided to reserve one floor for former prisoners to offer an easier start back into a regular life outside of social housing. Yet over the years due to people moving out and new people moving in and lost romantic ideas (who could have guessed that most people serving long time sentences are not highly educated and politically left-leaning) of how this living together would work, a majority of the house voted the former convicts out. Some of us tried to help to set up an alternative and work together with local welfare organizations or churches, but again they either lacked funding or met resistance of their members (mainly on the side of the churches). This experience let me to doubt your plans.

But something I would really love to see, and something you might probably be able to agree on too, would be some kind of mandatory community service. Maybe one or two weeks per year in an area of choice. I think that could result in more compassion and social cohesion than "just" giving money.

mandate that people take care of people. Use the government only to enforce this.

That sounds far more difficult, subject to corruption, and less efficient than having the government care for other people directly. Sure, having everybody be good to each other could be much more efficient than government aid, but having the government mandate and define "good to each other" is so very difficult.

I encourage you to become more familiar with the IRS and the Dept of Welfare and Social Services, the cost they ensue, and the level of fraud/corruption/waste.

I also encourage you to personally meed and observe those being served by WSS, see the ineffectiveness and vicious cycle these people are trapped in.

With the possible exception of some sort of enforcement, I think you may have just described what I always hoped churches(1) would be to their communities. So few seem to care for much more than a bigger parking lot and a taller... whatever the hell they build on the front of those things these days.

(1) Mosques, Synagogues, Temples, etc.

I'd agree, if each person had equal percentage of control over that tax money. So, Larry Ellison would have as much to allocate as a homeless person. (Otherwise, allocation decisions concentrated in hands of those already with more power over those decisions.)