PierzStyx
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Which Congressperson Would You Trust With Your Taxes?
- Thread starter Xerographica
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helmuth_hubener
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So, this has gone on long enough I suppose. I really was not arguing against Pragmatarianism in this thread thus far. And I really don't know where my most recent line of reasoning would have led, I was just letting truth and reason guide, injecting occasional ideas as they occurred to me, but our friend the Pragmatarian has chosen to cut off further communication in that line, so it will have to remain a mystery. He had no interest where it might lead; why should I?
Anyway, as I say, this has gone on long enough. I don't know that it's really worth my time to think about Pragmatarianism, much less argue against it, but Rothbard condescended to address Georgism, and am I better than he? So let's at last look closer at Pragmatarianism.
At least one element has been notably missing in the Pragmatarian's discussions of his proposal, and that is rigor. Careful, rigorous, line-upon-line thought, designed to get at the definite truth of things. That element which he has scorned I will undertake to embrace.
Our buddy Bastiat, has given us a key. He says the bad economist looks only at the obvious -- that which can be perceived immediately. Looks only at the first effects, ignores all further consequences.
Pragmatarianism is the proposal that taxpayers earmark their taxes to go to certain purposes. The taxpayer still must pay the same amount of taxes; that does not change. But he directs what programs the money is spent on (probably by filling out some sort of form) and his directions must be obeyed.
In this case, what is the obvious? Choice > non-choice. Inject choice into a situation and that will be better than the situation without choice. And that's as deep as the Pragmatarian ever cares to dig. Choice is good; choice is freedom. Non-choice is bad; non-choice is central-planning. Choice lets everyone take their own perspectives into account and weigh their opportunity costs and exercise consumer sovereignty and leverage decentralized knowledge and in short bring every economic buzzword the Pragmatarian knows of into action to create the most optimal and efficient outcome possible.
Are there any less obvious things to consider? Any secondary or tertiary effects? Any other considerations?
Let's go back and consider why choice is economically beneficial at all. What happens in a transaction on a free market? Party A meets with Party B and together they agree to swap goods because A values B's goods more than his own goods which he gives up for them, and B vice versa. We know that they are both better off, because if they were not they would not have made the swap in the first place, since the transaction is voluntary. Because both A and B have been left free to make whatever transactions they like, we know that whatever transactions take place are ones which improve the well-being of all involved. No one would intentionally and voluntarily choose to make a transaction which is detrimental to their interests, any more than they would choose to engage in any action detrimental to them. Thus, giving free choice free reign leads inevitably to economic benefit.
What is happening in a Pragmatarian transaction? We can immediately see several stark differences between a Pragmatarian transaction and a free market transaction as described above. In a free market transaction, the terms are guaranteed to be favorable to both parties, because the terms are completely open-ended -- they need not be anything in particular, because ultimately, the transaction need not even take place! If the transaction does take place, we know that it was favorable to both parties, for both parties have complete control over what they agree to, and a final unappealable veto over the whole business. Every factor is open to negotiation: the type of goods purchased, the number of goods, from whom one is purchasing them, the price paid for them, the reversibility and other terms of the exchange, etc. The Pragmatarian transaction is very different indeed.
In a Pragmatarian transaction, Party A is the taxpayer, Party B is the state.
Type of Goods Purchased
Party A determines what type of goods he is going to acquire (by earmarking his tax dollars to go to certain programs), and Party B has no say in the matter. Also, through legal tender laws requiring taxes to be paid in legal tender, Party B determines what type of goods he is going to acquire, and Party A has no say in that matter. This is in contrast to the free market transaction, wherein both parties mutually decide what type of goods will change hands. In a Pragmatarian transaction, both decide unilaterally what type of goods they want, and force the other party to provide it to them, whether they like it or not.
Number of Goods Purchased
While Party A, the taxpayer, determines via earmarking what type of goods he will purchase, he does not determine the quantity of those goods he will receive. That is determined unilaterally by Party B; Party A has no say in it. That is, "A" may say: I wish to put $1,000 of my taxes towards building a new road, but he cannot determine just how much road he is going to get for $1,000 -- that will be up to the State. He is not purchasing "twenty feet of road" as he would purchase twenty gallons of milk or 20 square feet of factory space; he is purchasing "as much road as $1,000 will get me," and just how much that is is left wholly up to the discretion of Party B. This is quite important, since the quantity of goods is usually a major factor in the decision-making processes of economic actors. While twenty pounds of butter for $5 may be a good deal, a teaspoon of butter for $5 may not be such an attractive offer, and the actor may choose to forgo the latter exchange while they would have jumped at the former. Removing quantities from consideration makes it a very different situation for calculation. Instead of "20 lbs. butter" or "1 tsp. butter," all that is available to the consumer is "butter," just "butter" -- take it or leave it. Pure, platonic butter, as a concept, not as finite units.
From Whom Goods are Purchased
In a Pragmatarian transaction Party A has no choice as to who will be his trading partner. In a free market transaction, even if one party seems to have a stronger bargaining position, to have the upper hand, so to speak, his power is mitigated by the fact that others can provide the good he is offering, and most often they are providing it at that very time. A is not bound to trade with B and only B, he can go to C instead. This introduces the factor of competition, a factor which famously plays a very large role in the market. Few would call a system without free competition a free market system.
So, in a Pragmatarian transaction, there is one vendor: the state. A will be making his purchase from B. That is the end of the story. That is how it will be. There is no C. Thus, B occupies an overwhelmingly and disproportionately strong position in the transaction. There are no alternative vendors, neither extant nor which could theoretically arise, to mitigate his power in the least. B has a coercively-maintained monopoly over the market. This transaction's lopsided power disparity means that its terms will likely not be very favorable to A, and will be very favorable to B. The powerful monopolist, B, is likely to benefit quite a bit from such a transaction, while the hamstrung and weak A is not likely to benefit very much, if at all.
Also because of this lack of choice in trading partners, the forces of free competition will be non-existent, forces which are so successful in driving forward innovation, efficiency, and progress of all kinds. The Pragmatarian will contest this, claiming that competition does exist, between the various agencies or divisions of the state. The road division will compete with the police division, each attempting to gain the consumer dollar. This is a contrived and very partial form of competition, though, and one without the power of true, full, and free competition. Free competition means first and foremost: free entry. In the artificial quasi-competition of Pragmatarianism, each division of the state is a monopoly kingdom, with absolute hegemony over its domain. No one else can come in and start offering to provide roads or police services. Such a new upstart would be bopped on the head and his venture razed to the ground. No, this is a kind of mercantilism, each division with a clearly defined and static domain, and that is its "turf," which it owns forever and no one can come in and compete with it on its "turf." This is a stagnant and artificial "market," and very much in contrast to the dynamic, open, ever-changing market of free entry and thus free competition.
Total Size of the Transaction
In the free market, the total size of transaction is up to the parties involved. One might choose to buy a single Quarter Pounder, or a five-pound roll of ground beef, or to go to the farmer and buy the whole cow. In a Pragmatarian transaction, on the other hand, the size of the transaction is a given. The price A will pay is fixed. That price is his tax bill, and what that total comes to is a completely separate issue from Pragmatarianism, not coming under its loving purview.
So what does this mean? For one thing, it eliminates the opportunity cost of the transaction from consideration entirely. No longer will Mr. A weigh the benefits of spending one additional dollar on beef vs. the foregone joy of spending one additional dollar on funny hats. Now any alternative joys are already foregone; he has no choice about it. It's a done deal. No need to weigh anything. His tax bill is what it is and there's nothing he can do about it. He's giving $10,000 to the beef man this year and that's it.
For another thing: the Pragmatarian likes to take each individual earmark that A makes ($20 to French diplomacy, $200 for zero-gravity toiletries) as a separate transaction. This fiction makes his construct appear superficially slightly more like a market. However it is fiction. In reality, the entire tax payment is one transaction. The transaction is not divisible and separable. One cannot itemize the separate items on the tax bill and treat them as separate transactions. One can often do exactly this in a world of market transactions, because in that case each separate line-item could have, in theory, not taken place, had the purchaser decided not to purchase it. Thus the main cable service, the movie channels, and the extra WWF channel, could all be considered either one big purchase or as separate purchases, because each is separable and terminable. If the consumer had chosen to forgo the joy of world wrestling, his bill would have been $20 less, so he did in a sense pay $20 for the wrestling. That is not true for the line-items in a Pragmatarian transaction. In that case, the price is set. Mr. A may cancel the wrestling, but he's not going to get his $20 back; he merely gets to redirect it towards some other good that B offers. The tax payment must be considered as one lump transaction, even if the taxpayer directs it to be spent in 500 separate divisions.
Consequences
What results can we expect to come about due to the nature of a Pragmatarian transaction and its differences from a free market transaction? Some have been mentioned as we went along: lack of the forces of free competition, disproportionate power for B and weakness for A, lack of ability to take into consideration opportunity cost external to the transaction, etc.
Another interesting dilemma is that Party A is no longer able to ordinally rank discrete units of goods in terms of their value to him. This means that the forces of the diamond/water paradox will be in full swing. What is the diamond/water paradox? If given the choice between water or diamonds in an absolute sense, everyone would choose water. Water is fundamentally essential to life; diamonds are mere frippery. Yet diamonds are very expensive, water is virtually free, indicating that diamonds' value is high, while water's value is low. Why? Only considering goods in term of units can this be solved. You may prefer all the water in the world to all the diamonds in the world, sure, but we never make that choice. We choose between units, between this particular gallon of water and this particular diamond ring. And in that case, since we already have 10,000 gallons of water a month, it might indeed be more valuable to us to have a diamond ring rather than another 500,000 gallons of water. But what happens if we are artificially flung into a bizarre system wherein we must choose between diamonds and water as pure concepts, with no units? If everyone knows that water is more important, will anyone ever choose diamonds?
The perverse incentive problems of the state are still in full swing as well. A good way for a division to get more funding will be to fail horribly at its given task. Then people, wanting the service, will have no choice but to earmark more taxes to that division. This perverse incentive for failure and incompetence will be stronger the more indispensable the the division's services are (or are perceived to be).
The Pragmatarian system lowers the transaction cost of participating in the auction of government largess. It essentially is a program which makes it easy and effortless to "be a lobbyist from the comfort of your own home." I will draw a parallel between it and the negative income tax. The negative income tax (or guaranteed minimum income) is the idea that people with incomes less than such-and-such just receive a check, automatically. No bureaucracy, no hassles, no case workers, no filling out applications and getting approved. You just get money. Seems like it would be an improvement over our current convoluted welfare system, right? I do not think so. I think the bureaucracy and the hassles of the current system is its only saving grace preventing it from destroying the poor even more rapidly and thoroughly than it already is. The red tape and the hoops you've got to go through and the whole demeaning process is a barrier to entry which prevents many people from going on welfare. The hassle is a transaction cost. Remove all that and yes, the system would be more efficient, but when the system is destructive, is efficiency really what you want? Likewise the Pragmatarian trumpets his system's "efficiency." It may be more efficient, but more efficient at what? It will be more efficient at allowing extremely large numbers of people to have control over the disposition of state largesse. It lowers the transaction cost of participating in that great auction that is state spending. Pragmatarianism makes it easy to be a consumer of tax dollars. No longer must you be a professional lobbyist and move to Washington. No longer must you represent an interest at least large enough to support such a professional lobbyist. Every interest group, no matter how small, can now have a say, and an incontestable say, in how tax dollars are spent. Only .01% of the population might want to spend money on Urban Giraffe Attack Wargames, but if they check that box on their Pragmatarian tax forms, ain't nothin' nobody can do to stop 'em. The giraffes are going to be coming to a street near you.
Can we make any predictions as to what kind of "purchases" people will make, given that:
The transaction is a given, as is its size -- A has no choice but to spend the money.
With the greatest of ease, A can choose to spend it on whatever he wants.
Pragmatarianism doubtless puts some sort of restraints on what type of things can be purchased. I do not know what specific rules and constraints any given implementation of Pragmatarianism will have. But I can predict that one of the major behaviors these rules will seek to prevent is that of somehow earmarking the money back to oneself. If everyone is earmarking what their tax bill is going towards, they will, naturally, earmark those things which will benefit themselves the most. If permitted to, they will earmark money for upgrading the road in front of their home, but none for the road across town. Within the education division, we can expect to see (proportionally) more continuing adult education and less children's education, as the extremely numerous childless adult households earmark the funds in a self-interested way. One man will earmark money for a water-slide in the state pool he frequents, another for the library he loves. This brings up the question of the granularity of the earmarking system -- will A be able to earmark funds for particular books, or only for a particular library, or only for the library system in general? This is a question which I have never seen a pragmatarian address, but then again it is a mere question of implementation. There are many such questions, many potentially problematic, but my focus in this essay has been to focus on the economic effects of Pragmatarianism, assuming it could be implemented somehow. In that context, we can only draw the conclusion that A's earmarking will be such that -- limited by whatever rules exist -- it comes as close as he can possibly get to simply writing a check back to himself.
Anyway, as I say, this has gone on long enough. I don't know that it's really worth my time to think about Pragmatarianism, much less argue against it, but Rothbard condescended to address Georgism, and am I better than he? So let's at last look closer at Pragmatarianism.
Pragmatarianism: A Closer Look
At least one element has been notably missing in the Pragmatarian's discussions of his proposal, and that is rigor. Careful, rigorous, line-upon-line thought, designed to get at the definite truth of things. That element which he has scorned I will undertake to embrace.
Our buddy Bastiat, has given us a key. He says the bad economist looks only at the obvious -- that which can be perceived immediately. Looks only at the first effects, ignores all further consequences.
Pragmatarianism is the proposal that taxpayers earmark their taxes to go to certain purposes. The taxpayer still must pay the same amount of taxes; that does not change. But he directs what programs the money is spent on (probably by filling out some sort of form) and his directions must be obeyed.
In this case, what is the obvious? Choice > non-choice. Inject choice into a situation and that will be better than the situation without choice. And that's as deep as the Pragmatarian ever cares to dig. Choice is good; choice is freedom. Non-choice is bad; non-choice is central-planning. Choice lets everyone take their own perspectives into account and weigh their opportunity costs and exercise consumer sovereignty and leverage decentralized knowledge and in short bring every economic buzzword the Pragmatarian knows of into action to create the most optimal and efficient outcome possible.
Are there any less obvious things to consider? Any secondary or tertiary effects? Any other considerations?
Let's go back and consider why choice is economically beneficial at all. What happens in a transaction on a free market? Party A meets with Party B and together they agree to swap goods because A values B's goods more than his own goods which he gives up for them, and B vice versa. We know that they are both better off, because if they were not they would not have made the swap in the first place, since the transaction is voluntary. Because both A and B have been left free to make whatever transactions they like, we know that whatever transactions take place are ones which improve the well-being of all involved. No one would intentionally and voluntarily choose to make a transaction which is detrimental to their interests, any more than they would choose to engage in any action detrimental to them. Thus, giving free choice free reign leads inevitably to economic benefit.
What is happening in a Pragmatarian transaction? We can immediately see several stark differences between a Pragmatarian transaction and a free market transaction as described above. In a free market transaction, the terms are guaranteed to be favorable to both parties, because the terms are completely open-ended -- they need not be anything in particular, because ultimately, the transaction need not even take place! If the transaction does take place, we know that it was favorable to both parties, for both parties have complete control over what they agree to, and a final unappealable veto over the whole business. Every factor is open to negotiation: the type of goods purchased, the number of goods, from whom one is purchasing them, the price paid for them, the reversibility and other terms of the exchange, etc. The Pragmatarian transaction is very different indeed.
In a Pragmatarian transaction, Party A is the taxpayer, Party B is the state.
Type of Goods Purchased
Party A determines what type of goods he is going to acquire (by earmarking his tax dollars to go to certain programs), and Party B has no say in the matter. Also, through legal tender laws requiring taxes to be paid in legal tender, Party B determines what type of goods he is going to acquire, and Party A has no say in that matter. This is in contrast to the free market transaction, wherein both parties mutually decide what type of goods will change hands. In a Pragmatarian transaction, both decide unilaterally what type of goods they want, and force the other party to provide it to them, whether they like it or not.
Number of Goods Purchased
While Party A, the taxpayer, determines via earmarking what type of goods he will purchase, he does not determine the quantity of those goods he will receive. That is determined unilaterally by Party B; Party A has no say in it. That is, "A" may say: I wish to put $1,000 of my taxes towards building a new road, but he cannot determine just how much road he is going to get for $1,000 -- that will be up to the State. He is not purchasing "twenty feet of road" as he would purchase twenty gallons of milk or 20 square feet of factory space; he is purchasing "as much road as $1,000 will get me," and just how much that is is left wholly up to the discretion of Party B. This is quite important, since the quantity of goods is usually a major factor in the decision-making processes of economic actors. While twenty pounds of butter for $5 may be a good deal, a teaspoon of butter for $5 may not be such an attractive offer, and the actor may choose to forgo the latter exchange while they would have jumped at the former. Removing quantities from consideration makes it a very different situation for calculation. Instead of "20 lbs. butter" or "1 tsp. butter," all that is available to the consumer is "butter," just "butter" -- take it or leave it. Pure, platonic butter, as a concept, not as finite units.
From Whom Goods are Purchased
In a Pragmatarian transaction Party A has no choice as to who will be his trading partner. In a free market transaction, even if one party seems to have a stronger bargaining position, to have the upper hand, so to speak, his power is mitigated by the fact that others can provide the good he is offering, and most often they are providing it at that very time. A is not bound to trade with B and only B, he can go to C instead. This introduces the factor of competition, a factor which famously plays a very large role in the market. Few would call a system without free competition a free market system.
So, in a Pragmatarian transaction, there is one vendor: the state. A will be making his purchase from B. That is the end of the story. That is how it will be. There is no C. Thus, B occupies an overwhelmingly and disproportionately strong position in the transaction. There are no alternative vendors, neither extant nor which could theoretically arise, to mitigate his power in the least. B has a coercively-maintained monopoly over the market. This transaction's lopsided power disparity means that its terms will likely not be very favorable to A, and will be very favorable to B. The powerful monopolist, B, is likely to benefit quite a bit from such a transaction, while the hamstrung and weak A is not likely to benefit very much, if at all.
Also because of this lack of choice in trading partners, the forces of free competition will be non-existent, forces which are so successful in driving forward innovation, efficiency, and progress of all kinds. The Pragmatarian will contest this, claiming that competition does exist, between the various agencies or divisions of the state. The road division will compete with the police division, each attempting to gain the consumer dollar. This is a contrived and very partial form of competition, though, and one without the power of true, full, and free competition. Free competition means first and foremost: free entry. In the artificial quasi-competition of Pragmatarianism, each division of the state is a monopoly kingdom, with absolute hegemony over its domain. No one else can come in and start offering to provide roads or police services. Such a new upstart would be bopped on the head and his venture razed to the ground. No, this is a kind of mercantilism, each division with a clearly defined and static domain, and that is its "turf," which it owns forever and no one can come in and compete with it on its "turf." This is a stagnant and artificial "market," and very much in contrast to the dynamic, open, ever-changing market of free entry and thus free competition.
Total Size of the Transaction
In the free market, the total size of transaction is up to the parties involved. One might choose to buy a single Quarter Pounder, or a five-pound roll of ground beef, or to go to the farmer and buy the whole cow. In a Pragmatarian transaction, on the other hand, the size of the transaction is a given. The price A will pay is fixed. That price is his tax bill, and what that total comes to is a completely separate issue from Pragmatarianism, not coming under its loving purview.
So what does this mean? For one thing, it eliminates the opportunity cost of the transaction from consideration entirely. No longer will Mr. A weigh the benefits of spending one additional dollar on beef vs. the foregone joy of spending one additional dollar on funny hats. Now any alternative joys are already foregone; he has no choice about it. It's a done deal. No need to weigh anything. His tax bill is what it is and there's nothing he can do about it. He's giving $10,000 to the beef man this year and that's it.
For another thing: the Pragmatarian likes to take each individual earmark that A makes ($20 to French diplomacy, $200 for zero-gravity toiletries) as a separate transaction. This fiction makes his construct appear superficially slightly more like a market. However it is fiction. In reality, the entire tax payment is one transaction. The transaction is not divisible and separable. One cannot itemize the separate items on the tax bill and treat them as separate transactions. One can often do exactly this in a world of market transactions, because in that case each separate line-item could have, in theory, not taken place, had the purchaser decided not to purchase it. Thus the main cable service, the movie channels, and the extra WWF channel, could all be considered either one big purchase or as separate purchases, because each is separable and terminable. If the consumer had chosen to forgo the joy of world wrestling, his bill would have been $20 less, so he did in a sense pay $20 for the wrestling. That is not true for the line-items in a Pragmatarian transaction. In that case, the price is set. Mr. A may cancel the wrestling, but he's not going to get his $20 back; he merely gets to redirect it towards some other good that B offers. The tax payment must be considered as one lump transaction, even if the taxpayer directs it to be spent in 500 separate divisions.
Consequences
What results can we expect to come about due to the nature of a Pragmatarian transaction and its differences from a free market transaction? Some have been mentioned as we went along: lack of the forces of free competition, disproportionate power for B and weakness for A, lack of ability to take into consideration opportunity cost external to the transaction, etc.
Another interesting dilemma is that Party A is no longer able to ordinally rank discrete units of goods in terms of their value to him. This means that the forces of the diamond/water paradox will be in full swing. What is the diamond/water paradox? If given the choice between water or diamonds in an absolute sense, everyone would choose water. Water is fundamentally essential to life; diamonds are mere frippery. Yet diamonds are very expensive, water is virtually free, indicating that diamonds' value is high, while water's value is low. Why? Only considering goods in term of units can this be solved. You may prefer all the water in the world to all the diamonds in the world, sure, but we never make that choice. We choose between units, between this particular gallon of water and this particular diamond ring. And in that case, since we already have 10,000 gallons of water a month, it might indeed be more valuable to us to have a diamond ring rather than another 500,000 gallons of water. But what happens if we are artificially flung into a bizarre system wherein we must choose between diamonds and water as pure concepts, with no units? If everyone knows that water is more important, will anyone ever choose diamonds?
The perverse incentive problems of the state are still in full swing as well. A good way for a division to get more funding will be to fail horribly at its given task. Then people, wanting the service, will have no choice but to earmark more taxes to that division. This perverse incentive for failure and incompetence will be stronger the more indispensable the the division's services are (or are perceived to be).
The Pragmatarian system lowers the transaction cost of participating in the auction of government largess. It essentially is a program which makes it easy and effortless to "be a lobbyist from the comfort of your own home." I will draw a parallel between it and the negative income tax. The negative income tax (or guaranteed minimum income) is the idea that people with incomes less than such-and-such just receive a check, automatically. No bureaucracy, no hassles, no case workers, no filling out applications and getting approved. You just get money. Seems like it would be an improvement over our current convoluted welfare system, right? I do not think so. I think the bureaucracy and the hassles of the current system is its only saving grace preventing it from destroying the poor even more rapidly and thoroughly than it already is. The red tape and the hoops you've got to go through and the whole demeaning process is a barrier to entry which prevents many people from going on welfare. The hassle is a transaction cost. Remove all that and yes, the system would be more efficient, but when the system is destructive, is efficiency really what you want? Likewise the Pragmatarian trumpets his system's "efficiency." It may be more efficient, but more efficient at what? It will be more efficient at allowing extremely large numbers of people to have control over the disposition of state largesse. It lowers the transaction cost of participating in that great auction that is state spending. Pragmatarianism makes it easy to be a consumer of tax dollars. No longer must you be a professional lobbyist and move to Washington. No longer must you represent an interest at least large enough to support such a professional lobbyist. Every interest group, no matter how small, can now have a say, and an incontestable say, in how tax dollars are spent. Only .01% of the population might want to spend money on Urban Giraffe Attack Wargames, but if they check that box on their Pragmatarian tax forms, ain't nothin' nobody can do to stop 'em. The giraffes are going to be coming to a street near you.
Can we make any predictions as to what kind of "purchases" people will make, given that:
The transaction is a given, as is its size -- A has no choice but to spend the money.
With the greatest of ease, A can choose to spend it on whatever he wants.
Pragmatarianism doubtless puts some sort of restraints on what type of things can be purchased. I do not know what specific rules and constraints any given implementation of Pragmatarianism will have. But I can predict that one of the major behaviors these rules will seek to prevent is that of somehow earmarking the money back to oneself. If everyone is earmarking what their tax bill is going towards, they will, naturally, earmark those things which will benefit themselves the most. If permitted to, they will earmark money for upgrading the road in front of their home, but none for the road across town. Within the education division, we can expect to see (proportionally) more continuing adult education and less children's education, as the extremely numerous childless adult households earmark the funds in a self-interested way. One man will earmark money for a water-slide in the state pool he frequents, another for the library he loves. This brings up the question of the granularity of the earmarking system -- will A be able to earmark funds for particular books, or only for a particular library, or only for the library system in general? This is a question which I have never seen a pragmatarian address, but then again it is a mere question of implementation. There are many such questions, many potentially problematic, but my focus in this essay has been to focus on the economic effects of Pragmatarianism, assuming it could be implemented somehow. In that context, we can only draw the conclusion that A's earmarking will be such that -- limited by whatever rules exist -- it comes as close as he can possibly get to simply writing a check back to himself.
Last edited:
Xerographica
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helmuth_hubener, thanks for the in depth critique. It would be great if you could start a blog and then copy and paste your critique into it. This forum category isn't accessible to the general public so people can't read it if I link to it from my blog.
What's completely absent from your analysis is the question of whether the private sector is supplying any of the same goods/services as the public sector. If taxpayers value disaster relief, then why would they worry about funding FEMA if the Red Cross was supplying adequate levels of disaster relief?
The point of pragmatarianism is to highlight any private sector supply failures. Liberals say there are many private sector supply failures...libertarians say there are a few...and anarcho-capitalists say that there aren't any. If the private sector is supplying adequate levels of a public good then there would be absolutely no reason for taxpayers to pay the government to supply the same public good.
This has been the topic of many of my blog entries. Here are a few...
What's completely absent from your analysis is the question of whether the private sector is supplying any of the same goods/services as the public sector. If taxpayers value disaster relief, then why would they worry about funding FEMA if the Red Cross was supplying adequate levels of disaster relief?
The point of pragmatarianism is to highlight any private sector supply failures. Liberals say there are many private sector supply failures...libertarians say there are a few...and anarcho-capitalists say that there aren't any. If the private sector is supplying adequate levels of a public good then there would be absolutely no reason for taxpayers to pay the government to supply the same public good.
This has been the topic of many of my blog entries. Here are a few...
helmuth_hubener
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And there's your rejoinder. Well, consider me refuted. I mean, what can I say to that? The Red Cross... FEMA... you've totally demolished me.
helmuth_hubener
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I suppose I should answer your question, despite being so thoroughly humiliated and destroyed.
Party A actually has potentially very good reasons for funding FEMA, even if he thought the Red Cross could do the same thing even better. Party A has this mandatory transaction with Party B. That transaction is going to take place. He must transfer this certain lump sum of money to Party B. He cannot avoid that; he can, however, exercise some amount of control over what to spend the lump sum on. What will A spend it on? Some very rudimentary thinking about human nature will demonstrate that of course he will try to come as close as possible (within the confines of whatever rules exist) to the ideal of simply earmarking the money to the "Fund for the Preservation and Subsidization of Party A." Presumably it will be against the rules to literally do that, since otherwise everyone will. So instead everyone will come as close to that as possible.
That means that Party A will be earmarking things he values. He has no choice about the Pragmatarian transaction occurring, so he will be making the best of it and will be using this transaction to eliminate the need for as many other transactions throughout the year as possible. Whether or not he thinks a given service can be provided well by the private sector does not weigh in to his primary incentives and thus to his main economic reasoning. What does weigh in is: "Can earmarking dollars towards this use eliminate my need to spend dollars on additional non-Pragmatarian transactions, thus saving me money?".
For example: Party A may believe wholeheartedly that a free market restaurant industry works better than a state-run one, and that there is no need at all for a state-run one. However, he has this $10,000 payment he must make every year and he must make the most of that. If he can use that $10,000 to pay for all his food for the year, he will do so. So he earmarks $10,000 to the local food pantry and free meal serving place (or some lesser amount if he has similar ideas covering other expenses). Now he does not need to spend anything on food and groceries. His eating out is at the soup kitchen, and his shelves are stocked from the food pantry. Party A does this not because he has any ideological commitment to socializing the food distribution industry, but because it is in his own interest.
Likewise, let's say A would usually make it a habit to donate $200 to the Red Cross each year. Unless he is religiously or otherwise very strongly attached to the idea of giving to the Red Cross particularly, he now can instead earmark $200 of his tax money towards some Red Cross substitute, such as FEMA, and cross that item off his list of annual expenses.
The situation is actually more complicated, there are other things to consider which ultimately change all this greatly, but since you will refute all this with two or three sentences anyway, I am going to end here.
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Xerographica
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From my perspective, the government is ripping taxpayers off. If a taxpayer has the opportunity to directly allocate his taxes then he'll be able to see for himself just how wasteful FEMA is. Maybe I'm wrong though? Maybe FEMA uses its resources as productively as the Red Cross uses its resources? Your analysis seems to indicate that this is the case.
Even if it turns out that public organizations are just as productive as private organizations...there would still be a disparity in the distribution of public funds between A) 538 congresspeople spending other people's money and B) 150 million taxpayers spending money that they sacrificed to earn. How significant would the disparity between the two distributions be?
If 538 congresspeople can accurately determine the public goods demands of 150 million taxpayers...then a command economy is a viable concept. Why aren't command economies viable concepts?
- Everybody makes mistakes (fallibilism). Allowing 538 million taxpayers to control 1/4 of a nation's resources is putting too many eggs in one basket
- Everybody has a unique insight/foresight (perspective). Allowing 538 taxpayers to control 1/4 of our nation's resources blocks the perspectives of 150 million of our most productive citizens from determining the most productive use of their resources in the public sector.
helmuth_hubener
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Analyses will sometimes seem one way when one reads them with reading comprehension, and another way when not doing so. This is a property of written analyses.
And, obviously I have wasted my time. No one will read my essay but you, and you lack either the intelligence or desire (or both) to interact with a single sentence of it.
You may keep repeating yourself, but rest assured that now there will be consequences to your trolling. You have no honesty, sir. You have no sincerity. You have no love for truth. Your ideas stand addressed, and you make no attempt at rejoinder. You merely continue typing the same phrases over and over.
You know who else does that? A poster named Roy L. Why don't you go to this thread and just read all the posts from him, specifically. What you'll notice after the first 20 or so is that if you put everything he ever wrote together in one big text file and then ran a script deleting identical or near-identical sentences, you would have a document a couple-few pages long. Thousands of posts he has, but they be mostly the same posts over and over.
You are very very similar to him. The sentences you repeat over and over don't have to do with how evil everyone is and how much they're lying, but you're just as repetitive and tiresome in your own special way. I propose that you go to the active LVT thread and converse with Roy, and only with Roy. Once you convert him or he converts you, then you can start trying to convert the rest of us, either to Prag or to LVT, as the case may be, depending on who wins. In the meantime, either address my criticisms or stop trolling our forum.
Xerographica
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The point of pragmatarianism is to determine the proper scope of government. It would give taxpayers the freedom to withhold their taxes from all but one government organization. For quite a while now I've asked you why pragmatarianism wouldn't lead to anarcho-capitalism. And guess what? Not once have you answered the question.
Pragmatarianism is a car. Taxpayers would drive the car to the destination that provides them with the most bang for their buck. Unless you disagree with that basic premise. If that's the case, then please explain why value seeking, self interested (Smith), utility maximizing (neoclassical economics), purposefully acting (Mises), psychic profit seeking (Rothbard) taxpayers would NOT drive the car to the most economically beneficial destination.
Either answer the question...or attack me some more.
Pragmatarianism is a car. Taxpayers would drive the car to the destination that provides them with the most bang for their buck. Unless you disagree with that basic premise. If that's the case, then please explain why value seeking, self interested (Smith), utility maximizing (neoclassical economics), purposefully acting (Mises), psychic profit seeking (Rothbard) taxpayers would NOT drive the car to the most economically beneficial destination.
Either answer the question...or attack me some more.
helmuth_hubener
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I answered that question. Using a lot of words. Which you did not understand.
At least I made a pretty good beginning at answering that question. I could follow some of my observations to their conclusions and wrap things up and end it all with a devastating conclusion about what destruction and suffering Pragmatarianism would cause. It would probably take at least as many words as my essay above. Double the length, but would it double my pleasure? Double my fun? Nah -- you would not comprehend it, or at least would not let on that you did, and few if any would read it.
At least I made a pretty good beginning at answering that question. I could follow some of my observations to their conclusions and wrap things up and end it all with a devastating conclusion about what destruction and suffering Pragmatarianism would cause. It would probably take at least as many words as my essay above. Double the length, but would it double my pleasure? Double my fun? Nah -- you would not comprehend it, or at least would not let on that you did, and few if any would read it.
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