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Comment by _yosefk | Hacker News Reader

"Incentive"? Really? You mean a president looking to be reelected for another 4-year term has an incentive (as opposed to a moral imperative) to prevent future illness in people who're 20 today where the symptoms will become visible 30-50 years down the road?

What is that incentive, and how is it stronger than the incentive to create jobs or lower prices right now for people who vote today by allowing some environment-destroying industry to expand, said expansion being the cause of future illness (a hypothetical or maybe not entirely hypothetical example)?

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> What is that incentive

Those people are and will be paying the pensions of the current voting population.

QED.

Or even simpler: these are not people from the Government perspective. We are talking about tax payers here. You'd rather have more taxpayers than less, right?

If a Government needs to spend $100k in tax payer money to save somebody's life and this somebody pays back $200k in taxes, this is good business, isn't it?

But the people who're governing young taxpayers now will no longer be governing those taxpayers when they get older and will suffer from diseases caused by today's policies - policies which will raise the standard of living of the same taxpayers today. And a future government will simply blame past governments for the problem (rightfully, though not very usefully.)

"The government" (why the capital G?..) as an organization might have an incentive to protect taxpayers' health but individual people making up said government do not have the same incentive. I think they call it the agency problem.

(Some people go as far as advocating benevolent dictators with a hereditary right to rule; of course in reality few dictators are benevolent, and a hereditary right to rule prompts people to kill off ruling families. I conclude that setting up incentives such that everything works out smoothly is rather damned hard.)

> But the people who're governing young taxpayers now will no longer be governing those taxpayers when they get older and will suffer from diseases caused by today's policies

That's definitely a problem. Problem with democracy though and not capitalism. The policies are designed to have 4 year lifespan because elections are held every 4 years. Actually, it is quite a big flow when you think about it. Politicians are not only incentivized to look short-term at their policies but also to design them in the way where long term negative effects are desirable if one can be sure that the opposition party will take over after next elections.

That's why Western democracies are watching places like China carefully where you can design long-term policy and still benefit from capitalism. I believe that the main reason behind the US to introduce more and more authoritarian policies (i.e. militarization of police force) is because they see that it works well for China. I mean marrying soft authoritarian form of government (like in China) with capitalism might be superior (economically and socially more effective) compared to having liberal democracy combined with capitalism.

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