One more political observation, which I hope won't piss anyone off this time

[maradydd]

As most of you have probably picked up on, I'm among that minority of computer scientists who actually writes code, and often prefers it to writing papers (much to the chagrin of my advisors and colleagues). I enjoy my theoretical work, but if I spend too much time on theory alone, the joy turns hollow; I want to build things that people can use.

Comments

[amberite]

Where HAS all the rum gone?

...I sympathize. And this is a really clean, succinct analysis of what makes politics tick. The frustration of large-scale systems is, in general, the fact that any fix is a matter of percentages: there's no scrapping an entire system and re-building it from the ground up, but there are patches -- and a patch might make the code a great deal more functional for a large percentage of the user base, but might also as a side effect break it for some small percentage who are busily trying to use a bug as a feature.

[maradydd]

but might also as a side effect break it for some small percentage who are busily trying to use a bug as a feature

Or might also break it for the percentage who aren't trying to exploit the system, but who rely on some aspect of it working the way it does. With respect to health care, one example is folks like whswhs -- independent artists, writers, musicians, consultants, entrepreneurs, &c who are in a position where they can afford what they need now, but if forced to shell out an extra 12% of their income would be put at a serious disadvantage. Back when whswhs was independently insured, he wasn't able to see a dentist or an optometrist because he couldn't afford the co-pays. Uninsured, he pays cash on the barrelhead and gets the care he needs -- and under the proposals I've seen most recently, in order to keep doing that, he'll be forced to pay a fine. It's a lose-lose situation. My inner Mathematician and my inner Engineer both balk at that

[amberite]

I didn't mean that necessarily as a malicious exploit, and totally agree that some of us rely on bugs as features because that's what's there. I actually meant more that if the present system is a piece of software, it's worse than Windows Vista -- and as such, I just don't think there's any bugfix that can be MacGyvered in without breaking the system for someone, and that is one of the things which deeply sucks about it. Situation Normal is All Fucked Up.

(If I can see any one thing that needs to be fixed in the situation of independent artists, btw, it's that the flat 15% self-employment tax should be taken out and shot, picked up and checked for signs of life and then shot again. At least insofar as it affects people whose income is close to or below the poverty line.)

[maradydd]

Vista's actually a remarkably good analogy. Windows has been hamstrung for a long time by its (perceived?) need to support legacy hardware, and Vista was the first Windows in a long time to say "no, guys, we're just not going to support some of this stuff any more." But the one-size-fits-all solution ... still doesn't fit a lot of people all that well. Linux, on the other hand, manages to avoid this problem for the most part by not assuming a one-size-fits-all solution; the 2.4 kernel is still under development for users who for whatever reason find it better-suited to their needs, the rest of us have moved on to 2.6. (And for those of us with really special needs, compiling a custom kernel or adding new kernel modules isn't especially difficult.)

You might have noticed I take a rather Linuxy attitude to politics. ;)

And, yeah, that flat tax has screwed me pretty hard in the past too.

[amberite]

I just wish politics had a Linuxy attitude back. :-)

[whswhs]

The self-employment tax is not a thing in itself, though. It's the Social Security tax, with the self-employed person paying both the employee's share and the employer's share. It's regressive because Social Security is regressive: You pay it on the first $90,000 of earned income, and nothing on the excess, so once you're making more than $90,000 your effective tax rate drops. The same logic that applies to destroying self-employment tax applies to destroying Social Security.

[amberite]

The fund that social security pays into is, at present, absolutely necessary (it could be replaced by some other, less broken program) and the taxation methods that it uses are ridiculous, as is any taxation method that penalizes poorer folks.

[whswhs]

The argument I was making was actually neutral as to whether Social Security should be destroyed or not. You could read it either as "Social Security is unjust, just as self-employment tax is unjust, and therefore both should be destroyed," or as "if you don't accept that Social Security should be destroyed, then you shouldn't accept that self-employment tax should be destroyed, as the argument for destroying self-employment tax also supports destroying Social Security." It's sort of analogous to a proof by contradiction, if you read it the second way. [It's not formally a proof by contradiction, because it doesn't show that a given argument leads to a logical inconsistency, but it does show that that argument leads to a conclusion that the arguer might find unacceptable

[amberite]

. But I don't think of that as an immediate goal; we would have to have many other legal and institutional changes before it could make sense. And I think that fighting taxes has worked out very badly for attaining a free economy, because it has not led to government also cutting its expenditures, but only to their being funded through unbalanced budgets, which seem to do greater economic harm in a way that's harder to make visible.

If only there were more libertarians who thought this way -- the world would be a much better place.

One of the things I am finding very interesting in all of these discussions is how many of the people who post in maradydd's journal have similar ground-level goals, politically, but different underlying assumptions. In my personal view, one of the problems with most forms of libertarianism is that they assume a certain degree of long-range vision is commonplace in people setting out to create, sell, offer or transform something, when in my experience that kind of vision is sadly uncommon and the lack of it

[whswhs]

(1) Thank you for the compliments. I quite agree with your favorable opinion of this particular social environment! I don't really have face-to-face friends with whom I can discuss politics very much; for some of them it's an emotionally charged subject and others are simply not interested in the kind of analytical thinking I prefer. It's a relief to find people who don't react to my comments with "Oh, you evil selfish libertarian, you want poor people to die of famine and plague in the streets!" but with actual informed critique or reasoned questions that I can learn something from. maradydd's little salon is an admirably civilized environment and I count myself privileged to have gotten in the door

[amberite]

I agree that it's possible to have systems which reward people for not being good to one another, but I disagree that the US system is as you say. For more than one reason:

(1) Voluntary mutual aid, in the sense of social support from one's community, only goes so far. I've seen a fair amount of it -- saveours00j, for example -- in recent times especially. But this is where the income gulf comes into play, and where it is especially harmful: people who have plenty to spare don't, in general, hang out that much with people who are just squeaking by. The people who are most used to opening their pocketbooks for others in need are the ones who don't have very much in their pocketbooks, and can put in five bucks here, ten bucks there, at best. The Internet is making that more helpful than it used to be, but it doesn't remove the essential problem.

It's fine to say that class barriers should be breached, but that's another should that beggars could ride on if it was a tram car. And the notion that the rich will suddenly help the poor

[whswhs]

And these measures are always worth taking.

Here we are at a point of perhaps fundamental disagreement. I do not believe that those measures are always worth taking. It may be that all we can do is say, "Our ethical intuitions cannot be reconciled." But let me try to offer you, not a proof or an argument, but a where-I'm-coming-from, in the hope that you'll see better how I'm thinking even if you still think I'm wrong

[amberite]

Yes, this is a point of fundamental disagreement.

I agree with Meredith about scarcity. We are better than that. If resources are insufficient, it is our job to be smart enough to make them more than sufficient. Another feature of the nineteenth century was that nitrogen could not be synthesized into fertilizer and the deposits of saltpeter, etc, were running out: read Thomas Hager's Alchemy of Air to learn more about the Haber-Bosch process, and how most of the human life on earth depends on it today. This is not the "natural" state of things; the fixed nitrogen reserves of the planet could only have sustained less than a third the human population of the earth today, in the long run

[whswhs]

Well, I'm in favor of all the sorts of things you describe. But the thing is, they work by expanding production and pushing the frontiers of "what we can afford" outward. They make everyone better off. Redistributive measures don't do they; they change the allocation of what we have now, making some people better off at the price of making other people worse off, but not expanding our options.

Now, in the first place, I have ethical concerns about that; my ethical intuition is that any action that sacrifices one person, without their freely given consent, to benefit another person is wrong. But if you don't share that ethical intuition, I don't have a compelling argument to offer you about it.

But in the second place, adopting allocative measures has secondary effects. Because life is opportunistic, as my girlfriend chorale says. If you create a situation where individual people can become better off either by productive action that makes other people better off too, or by allocative action that redistributes resources to them (or

[amberite]

This, too, seems to be underpinned by a difference in assumptions: you are optimistic where I am cynical, and cynical where I am optimistic

[whswhs]

Well, yes, but that's partly related to my previous point about not subverting or degrading competence. When you set up a single monopolistic provider of a good or service, and give people very little opportunity to choose a different one (for example, there are private schools, but most people can't afford to both pay property taxes and pay private school tuition), and when you ensure people that they will get a minimal level of output from that system automatically, no matter what they do, you encourage them to take a passive attitude toward it, one in which they will not develop competence in judging the quality of what they receive, or whether it's worth the price, and certainly not whether some other provider might be better