We all know it was in the intrest of Democrats to perpetuate poverty...

[Drake Tungsten]

What does savings give you when you are dead?

Ask not what your savings will do for you; ask what your savings will do for your country.

What on earth are they spending on, and what are they saving for? They're dragons sleeping on piles of gold, heaping it up for its own sake and never spending it. That attitude is deranged.

You're the one who's deranged. Rich people aren't putting their savings into an Uncle Scrooge-like money bin; they're putting it into banks or investing it in corporations, which provides necessary capital and helps the economy grow, which makes everyone better off.

[Rafe]

I’m not a republican myself but I believe there is some merit to the idea that various groups benefit from perpetuation of poverty. The war on poverty in America has been deleterious and, like most wars declared in modern times, a total failure. If we consider Peltzman’s research and generalize it: that is as you reduce the cost(or in our case socialize the cost) of failure/dependency/accident you get more of whatever it is you discount. Szasz’s research also seems to indicate that individuals will alter their behavior, employing dependency or ignorance, to get things from other people. I think the major crack in the armor of the nobility of charity can be elucidated with Robert Trivers research with regards to the evolution of reciprocal altruism published in 71. Trivers attempted to elucidate why altruism could be a evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) that does not reduce the fitness of the locus of evolutionary selection, the individual (yes I know about group selection theory).

What is the most salient feature of Trivers in this regards is not that altruism may occur via non-kin but that altruism becomes a ESS under particular environmental conditions where you have high population viscosity and a relatively low population. These two variables maintain the stability of this behavior because reduce the efficacy of free-riding recipients of aid. Under conditions of high population viscosity organisms cannot move around so far, there is no exit; this is important as a recipient cannot obtain aid and then defect the system only to repeat the strategy. Low population is important because the brain serves as a market evaluating the importance or aid others give to us. As the population of a social system increases the ability of the human brain to feel close ties to additional individuals diminishes; the monkey sphere or Dunbar number argues after about 148 faces we begin to see others as objects and not people. To sum up “love doesn’t scale”, it works great at small levels but at large levels it peters off logarithmically as a f(x) of population size.

If we consider these two variables we must realize that they are without a doubt inverted in modern society. Population viscosity is very low in a modern world where I can be in Tokyo tomorrow or can rent a house for a year in Michigan, hell I can buy a house in Michigan for 1 dollar now. Population is tremendously large and to believe we can ever evaluate everybody who ever helps us in society with our brain is not convincing; complicating our memory to quantify the value of others vs others is that the industrial production process has become too complex. Thousands of people may be responsible for the construction of your car and no reliable mechanism can be employed to remunerate somebody in Singapore who assembles a silicone array that manages an anti-slip braking protocol for your cars computer without some sort of price mechanism.

The tribal dynamic of exchanging value for value cannot be grafted over such a complex system but I believe altruism is fundamentally the primal analogue of modern day markets. Altruism was the proto-market in tribal, pastoral or horticultural orders we spent much time evolving in.

Extending this to the subject of your topic, in a society where there is abundant need for aid there are plenty of opportunities for individuals to take advantage of or attempt to “socially monetize” that need. Saving the child of your neighbor in the hut-next-door from drowning would no doubt be acknowledged and lauded by members of your tribe or small social order. If by some chance you had the good fortune to save every tribesman’s/woman’s child at the same time your tribal market value would likely increase. If by some totally improbable chance you had the opportunity to save every
tribesman’s/woman’s child at the same time every week for 3 years your value to the tribe would vault into orbit and you would likely never have to hunt or repair your hut again, you may even receive sexual rewards which would just facilitate enhancing the % various genes you carry in society would be expressed in the population. Actions like this with low risk vs. high reward ratio would net robust fitness gains as other members of the tribe would see you as an asset and there would likely be incoming gains from members who observed your superficially beneficent actions. Yet under the hood we are likely optimized to wanting to engage in low cost sacrifice for others bcs it makes rational economic sense with regards to potential gains from proximal agents.

The welfare state, forced redistributive regimes or pro-active impositions facilitate this primal desire. All that’s left is for the human mind to rationalize the desire. The poor cannot help themselves, Marxian class conflict theory, predatory pricing, labor theory of value(not to beat up on Marx, I find his sociological definition of capitalism right on the money with regards to rent-seeking and public choice theory), Georgism, social justice, Matthew 19:24 “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.", as reasons to install coercive institutions to transfer wealth. The bible is full of extollations the poor and admonitions of the rich I believe. These polylogisms perpetuate to attempt to re-instantiate the tribal market onto the global economic order where we offload our immediate evaluations of ordinal utility onto the decentralized emergence of a global cardinal value system that billions act on to make decisions.

Via these normative institutions like the welfare state not only can the social currency seeking behavior have a massive domain to channel itself into, but the costs of providing abundant aid are low because they are socialized to all members of society through force. Fundamentally I don’t believe charity has any more nobility than pursuing gain in any other market channel. In fact if we consider it this activity may be deleterious.

The utility of the political agents involved is potentially augmented along the social currency seeking agent. No doubt some who are really in need are helped but if Peltzman is right many are potentially harmed having their incentive destroyed or their future autonomy crippled because the cost of not obtaining socially valuable skills was transferred to somebody else. It is those that do not support the transfers also that are harmed. If there is an ever expanding abundance of people in need then many may see this unconsciously as if there is an expanding means of extracting value like some sort of poverty entrepreneur; Mother Theresa being a great example of this, see Hell’s angel on Youtube

“Mother Teresa’s cult of death and suffering depends for it’s effect on the most vulnerable and helpless abandoned babies or the mentally ill who supplies the occasions of charity and the raw material for demonstrations of compassion.”- Hitchens

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WQ0i3nCx60&feature=PlayList&p=A3AC8CB4D261EF88&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=31

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKkcDgeYBdk&feature=PlayList&p=A3AC8CB4D261EF88&index=32&playnext=2&playnext_from=PL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGuzFUeDDgY&feature=PlayList&p=A3AC8CB4D261EF88&index=33

or Christopher Hitchens “Missionary Position”. No the gains needen’t be specie or any form of material gain but fame, respect or even the assumed celestial reward of immortality.



Rejection of the welfare state, I find, is sometimes responded to with histrionics or extreme anger. You’re accused of being greedy, selfish, you hate the poor, fascist, a capitalist automaton or are a parasitic tool of the bourgeoisie who just wants to ****** the Marxian dialectic; racist has been climbing the charts also with the application of Afro-Leninism or Cultural Marxism to the repertoire.

These histrionics themselves might just simply a cunning dramaturgy that is for the benefit of others fundamentally advancing how they view us, boosting our current market value in the eyes of those proximal to us. The human capacity for self-deception that creates gods and ghosts might even serve to make it difficult for introspection to detect our own pro-social entrepreneurial activity. Admonishing the greedy would have potential gains not only enhancing the admonisher’s social value but potentially activating the stigmatized target to become more “giving” with his/her assets through the chain of the social calculus as the memory of others with regards to you dispatching justice or potential goodies the target abandoned might go to you. This itself must be a fitness maximizing behavior that Christopher Boehm talks about in “Machiavellian Intelligence 2” with regards to primatology. Research into the evolution of “altruistic punishment” may also yield additional insights.

In fact those that extol the virtues of giving and charity risk very little for engaging in these actions. If by chance several people in a small enclosed social order modify their behavior to satisfy these saccharine pleas the advocate of the charity is likely to gain himself. I don’t see how calling for charity in a group can ever have social costs unless it’s done to some insane extreme. Even Marx argued that there would be abundance and you would not be called to bleed into the circulatory system of your comrade to support his largesse; your comrade would engage in labour free from alienation just because he wants to satisfy his human aspect.

With the power to marshal the coercion of the state the ability to extract social currency has reached new perverse heights. I don’t see poverty going away as long as there is forced transfer, the subjective preference to feel good for advancing violence based normative institutions and the means of generating tremendous value at somebody else’s cost by fostering the growth of need like a central banker eases the supply of specie.

[Asher]

Welcome?

[Elok]

You're the one who's deranged. Rich people aren't putting their savings into an Uncle Scrooge-like money bin; they're putting it into banks or investing it in corporations, which provides necessary capital and helps the economy grow, which makes everyone better off.

I'm not getting into a discussion of supply-side economics or whatever that is here, I'm talking about the logic of wanting to accumulate money beyond what you can actually use. To me it's not a question of morals or social good (in this particular discussion, at least), but of genuine personal gain. Or its absence.

[Elok]

Welcome?

Yeah, I guess, but damn, that's a wall of text. I can't be arsed to check thoroughly, but I strongly suspect he's using much more jargon than necessary to make his point.

[MrFun]

Welcome?

You had to go and create another DL.

[Rafe]

Yeah, I guess, but damn, that's a wall of text. I can't be arsed to check thoroughly, but I strongly suspect he's using much more jargon than necessary to make his point.

Basically i'm saying the welfare state adn forced transfers are NOT good.

[Asher]

Basically i'm saying the welfare state adn forced transfers are NOT good.

Thanks

[Rafe]

Thanks

NP, thanks for the welcome.

[Asher]

np. I'm the friendly guy here. Ignore *******s like Elok

[Elok]

Asher is extremely friendly until you disagree with him. I'm often pissy regardless of a person's views. You decide which is better.

[Asher]

I'm a benevolent dictator with a gulag in my basement. It's best that you get along with me.

[OzzyKP]

Welcome Rafe. I'm generally a nice guy regardless.

[Asher]

Ozzy is nice until you take away the rights for 8 year olds to vote.

[Rafe]

Ozzy is nice until you take away the rights for 8 year olds to vote.

Then i better not tell him my opinions of democracy

Thanks for the welcomes all.