HMS Vanguard wrote:Pablo Sanchez wrote:It is something else entirely, because I'm right. The market economy in itself does not care at all about human suffering, so government has to muscle it into a shape that will serve humanity more effectively.
That isn't an argument, it's just an assertion.
Its a statement based on the fact that market theory has no component which evaluates human suffering as a component aside from items such as the statistical value of a life. In other words market theory makes no positive or negative judgements about the value of human quality of life as a goal in and of itself.
Government has a broader perspective which allows it to see value in large projects that private entities would find to be of dubious value, such as the 19th railroad and canal building that enabled the USA to become an economic powerhouse. These projects simply would never have happened without the government taking money in the form of taxes to pay for them.
I don't know much about the history of US canals, but the first US railways were private ventures and made a profit. It is of course quite possible that the subsidised railways may have been built later, or smaller, or not at all, but you haven't presented a valid justification for this being a bad thing. You assert that the US's economic growth is (entirely?) down to the state subsidises railways, but provide no evidence for this. In fact, if money is more believed to be more profitably employed elsewhere then this would result in higher economic growth than otherwise.
Except that the early US Railroads, lets take the B&O since its a great example and one of the oldest US railroads, several of the principal investors were the governments in the relevant jurisdictions. That is while the venture was opened as a private enterprise it requied investment from the state to fully finance its initial operation. Virtually all rail operations benefited from huge government grants of right of way and/or power of eminent domain which entails a huge benefit provided to the railroads which a purely commercial venture would not have. While its entirely possible that railroads would have arisen it is almost equally certain that items such as the transcontinental railroads would never have been built until decades later. Your final assertion that if the railroads hadn't been supported and had taken the extra years to develop thus denying their benefits to consumers ignores the interim reduction in average quality of life that would be experienced.
No, I dispute it and offer the counter-claim that the vast majority of government spending is necessary and useful.
I didn't offer just a claim, I also offered several examples of your own claims failing in practice, which you have not responded to.
The USSR collapsed in no small part due to internal pressures of a fractured politcal bloc tied together under authoritarian stirctures, Maoist China never collapsed did though it did change itself and the British state enterprises I can't speak to. Conversely if we look at modern state enterprises the NHS in the UK costs less per person for a greater overall health index (in everything from infant mortality to treatement of certain diseases) which indicates that the US healthcare system is a hideously disastrous enterprise and in a true free market system if the government was a corporation all health care dollars would be moved there. The TVA in the US was actually a profit generating government charatered corporation that also disproves your point.
Black and white fallacy.
Not at all - if money tends to be spent better by the state than by markets, this does indeed imply we would be better off overall if all money were spent by the state, even if some (smaller) amounts of money are spent less well. Indeed, people
used to argue this before it became very obviously wrong. Your position is actually a lot more extreme than that of the Keynesians you purport to defend.
Expecting that the statement does not assume that state spending is superior in ALL cases which is the claim you are providing as the alternative to state spending in NO cases. You don't recognize the fallacy of not allowing for government spending in some but not all or no cases?
I think the problem with the American school system is due to the fact that it has less government direction than it's counterparts in other states. American schools have their curriculum and goals determined by state and local boards, instead of being directed on a large scale by the national government as in Germany or France.
Wow, you really do think the state is the answer to
everything. You are like an anti-libertarian! I'd be interested to hear why you think the national government directing curricula would fix the problem, especially as some US states are the same size as France or Germany (which dont top the OECD rankings, btw).
You do realize that the disparity of scores between the states is the part of the reason why uniformity would be of benefit?
Also, the reason for inefficiencies present in medicare/medicaid is most likely due to the fact that they are operating as part of a mostly private health care system; socialized medicine as used in Europe is vastly more efficient than the American system.
Medicare and medicaid aren't private - thats the point. Somehow the US state manages to spend more per capita on health than supposedly health-care socialist Britain.
...because they operate in an environment where the facilities which offer the care are not able to be price negotiated by the state. Medicare and medicaid programs in the states face severe restrictions in the attempt to negotiate for savings in the cost of healthcare that private enterprise in the US doesn't. Your point ALSO ignores that the supposedly superior free market enterprises produce worse resutls than the UK while ALSO spending more per capita. Saying that US state programs spends more per capita is a pointless statement in a vacuum since it ingores the fact that they still outperform their commercial counterparts.
Again, inefficiency and corruption in the DoD probably doesn't make up more than a small fraction of its budget and it would be on you to prove otherwise.
I just rolled out a list of wasteful projects, so go right ahead and respond.
You rolled out a list from the last 20 years...do you have any examples of projects from before then or is it just a Republican's in Congress and the White House problem?
Or, as in the case with New Deal employment programs, you maintain people in a loss-making work force until the economy improves and they can be moved to private sector jobs.
Errr, 'until there is a world war that makes us ditch most of these programmes, and draft everyone into the army'.
What happened after the world war? That's right they went to work.
*In the meantime I found an updated graph with 2007's stats, that show a 36% increase including the extra year -
http://www.powerlineblog.com/HouseholdI ... -thumb.jpg .
See above, you need to check your stats.
Median household income represents a person of average income, not the poor, whom you referenced specifically.
No Median HOUSEHOLD income does not represent a PERSON of average income. What you are missing is that average household size has changed and the number of wage earneres per household has increased, in turn this means more work for increases in real median income.
Well, I do, because the national parks increase general utility.
Ah, you're the mystical arbiter of General Utility. Well, there is no such thing. Parks are great, if you like parks. If you don't, they're not. For Person A, who doesn't like parks, no utility is being imparted by being forced to pay for Person B's park hobby. The utility isn't 'general', it falls on Person B, while the cost is shared equally.
Which ignores any attempted analysis abotu how many Person A and Person B's there are. "General" does NOT mean "Universal" and your attempt to have it be so is disingenuous at best.
First off, the nation's railroads were built privately but were funded almost entirely by enormous government subsidies.
No, only some of them were. The first were not. In Britain, the entire railway network until WWI was built privately and without subsidy.
Since we are discussing the US system the British system is at best a distraction with minimal applicability
Second, it is difficult to calculate the economic impact of America's well-serviced road network because it is so integral and so many industries were affected or created (e.g. trucking), but it was probably enormous.
This argument is total nonsense. The market price mechanism doesn't break down into a heap once something becomes important enough or sufficiently infrastructural. Oil is pretty damned important (indeed, without it you may as well have no roads or railways* at all!), yet the oil infrastructure was privately constructed. I agree that you personally cannot calculate any of these relative 'utilities', but the market incentives - profits for building roads that allow one to charge more in turnpike fees than construction and maintenance costs, losses for building roads to nowhere or that cannot compete in terms of cost with other modes of transportation - work just the same as everywhere else.
You miss the point here entirely, the point is that entire sectors of the current US economy are dependent upon the existence of the national highway system. Thus arguing about the economic viability of those industries is impossible in that we have no comparable data to see if or how they would have arisen in an environment. In other words it would be immensely difficult to try and figure out what the value of public roads is to industries that may or may not have arisen without them...do you say that the entire productive output of the interstate trucking business is due to public roads, do you assign some percentage to them on the theory that some level of trucking was bound to arise with private toll systems, do you deduct for the reduction in economic impact of the rail system or not? In other words the economic value of the interstate road system is difficult to quantify and would probably rate a masters or doctoral thesis in economics. Since no one here seems set to offer one then I'd say "difficult to calculate" is a pretty accurate assesment.
