How to Defeat a Liberal in a Debate

You told me that the 20,000 posts you produced here are not public goods. Yet, you didn't answer me when I asked you if they were public bads. Why don't you answer that question? You sacrificed countless hours of your life composing 20,000 posts which you freely shared with countless people...yet you're unable to label your contribution to society. If it's not a public good...and it's not a public bad...then what is it? Did you sacrifice so much of your life to produce a public neutral?

 

They're neither (and that's bleedin obvious). Is a private good a public bad because it isn't a public good? Golly gosh!

Again, you don't understand what a public good is and that means your whole argument is just drivel

 

You're really not making much of an effort to help me understand what a public good is. Before you said that public goods exhibit non-excludability and non-rivalry characteristics. Yet...your 20,000 posts here are neither rivalrous nor excludable. But when I asked you if your 20,000 posts are public goods...you clearly answered that they are not. Why aren't your 20,000 posts public goods? They obviously fit your definition of a public good. So...would you like to change your definition? Would you like to submit a new definition of a public good? Or would you just like to admit that you didn't ask congress whether it was ok to spend so much of your time contributing a public good to society?

 

There you go! Leading to free riding, underprovision and a failure to maximise well-being

Of course they are. It would be easy to ban you and deny access. However, that's all irrelevant. My posts aren't a product. There is no price, no market, no consumption and no underprovision. You're merely continuing typing nonsense (and no, that isn't a public bad either; its just annoying and therefore a possible disutility)

 

Your posts aren't a product? If they aren't a product then what are they? Are they are service? Are you performing a service for humanity? Is your service valuable or worthless?

 

Nope. Bit obvious really. You could attempt to corrupt basic analysis such as Becker's household production (where time and money are combined), but that would be an exercise into futility (and again bog all to do with public goods). This is merely leisure.

 

You can't produce something in your leisure time? That doesn't make sense. Obviously just because you produced a quilt during your leisure time does not change the fact that you produced something. Just because you wrote 20,000 posts on economics during your leisure time does not change the fact that you produced something. If you had written 20,000 entries on economics in your private journal then you would have produced a private good. But the fact is that you produced 20,000 entries on economics in a public forum. Therefore, you produced a public good.

 

I merely derive utility. There is no 'sold' output, no market and certainly no public good. You continue to type argument based on nothing but drivel

Again you just make nonsensical comment based on not understanding a basic economic concept. "Its good public in the name so it must be a public good" is vacuous to the extreme

 

Obviously you derive utility from posting so why are you answering a question that nobody is asking? Just because you're not selling your posts does not mean that they are not the products of your time and effort. Whether there's a market for your posts or not has absolutely no bearing on the question of whether your posts are the products of your time and effort. Just because I don't think that your 20,000 posts are valuable does not mean that they are not a public good. Freedom is all about tolerance. That's why you should have the freedom to give your taxes to the public goods that you value and I should have the freedom to give my taxes to the public goods that I value.

 

I'm deriving a little bit of sense from an argument that clearly is nonsensical. A public debate forum isn't a public good (Hint: including the word public doesn't mean you have something compatible!). Where on earth did you derive your argument from?

I'm sorry but your argument is one based (im)purely on misapplying simple concept in order to peddle a one dimensional non-economic humph. We see that a lot on here (e.g. the Georgist fellow that says "its land you fibber" a lot; the one that thinks unemployment compensation can bring about a Star Trek-esque nirvana etc.)

 

Why should you have the freedom to sacrifice so many countless hours of your life writing 20,000 forum posts here?

 

You're asking nonsensical questions again. I simply have leisure time. Nothing to do with a public good. Its merely an exchange away from personal consumption (through additional labour supply)

 

How is it nonsensical? If you can't explain the economic value of allowing people to try and maximize their utility in the private sector...then how can you argue against allowing taxpayers to try and maximize their utility in the public sector?

 

Its not difficult. You've shown a knowledge deficiency over what a public good is. Rather than correcting that deficiency you've asked naive questions in order to try and deflect.

This is merely repetition of your previous error (when you treated a public good as a 'private good produced by the public sector' and assumed a nonsensical aggregation of individual decision-making achieved the desired result). You've just dressed it up in a rather monotonous question

 

I gave an example before that might help illustrate the problem.

Several years back, I was involved in a relief effort for the Katrina hurricane. We were collecting goods for displaced humans and animals. Now there's a few ways to look at this situation:

1. On the one side, there's the type and quantity of goods needed for relief effort.
2. On the other side, there's the type and quantity of goods we received for the relief effort.

In terms of quantity, the amount received only scratched the surface of what was needed. Of course, we were not the only effort around the country, so I can't really comment about whether we obtained an appropriate portion towards the total contributions needed. But in terms of types of items, what we received was way off. We received mountains of food goods, and little else... when in reality it was other types of items that we needed more than anything... blankets, cadges, hygiene goods, medicine, batteries, lights, cooking utensils, etc.

And herein lies the problem... When you are deciding what to do with your own time and money for your own benefit, generally speaking, you are the expert. This is why you choose to spend your time on these forums, or spend your own money in the stores, because when it comes to consumption of goods, services and leisure for your own self-interested benefit, you are the expert. But being an expert for your own self-interests does not make you an expert for the community interests. Your theory says that the aggregate of contributions towards the cause defines the correct allocation, which is to say the aggregate decided that food relief efforts were by far the most important. In reality, the aggregate just didn't know what was needed. Even those people who were acting altruistically by donating to our cause were hopelessly unable to properly allocate goods for our single cause, let alone allocate it appropriately for a multitude of public causes.

When attempting to fund things that have little direct impact on people's own personal life, the concepts of rational self-interest that drive supply and demand in the private market market break down. There's no reason to believe that 150 million people in aggregate can allocate appropriately for for complex public and common goods, no more so than a group of congressmen.

That all said, there's no doubt that much public spending goes to waste, and that efforts should be made to fix this. One common mechanism is to publicly fund, but privately execute... i.e. private entities bid for for public funding to executing a given public task. Market forces encourage the efficient use of the public funding so that they can maintain the best bid. Another common style is a prize, where different private entities compete with each other to win hefty prize from the government to perform a given task. There are a variety of quasi-market based solutions that can be employed that encourage efficiency. The answer has a lot more to do with a mix of solutions, rather than any particular one - and self-allocation of a portion of your tax dollars towards certain public projects might even be one of the solutions towards some of the problems.



On a side note, there's a few other issues I have with the theory of allocating your own tax dollars:

1. I'm curious a system such as yours decides how much to tax in the first place? The idea that we set a tax rate in order to produce funding for public works rests on the idea that we already have a centralized plan for what we need funded. If this plan is no longer centralized, and instead the decision on what we want to fund is derived from the aggregate of a tax-payer allocation, under what basis do we decide how much to tax in the first place?

2. If the aggregation of demand of all tax payers was enough to properly fund all public needs, there would be little need for government in the first place. However, I assume you do not believe this because you frequently say how, in your system, everyone has to pay their taxes; the only question is where they allocate the funding. In other words, you believe it takes an element of force towards funding public works in order to achieve the best result that would not be achieved strictly through an aggregate of market demands. So, if the market alone would be unable to properly allocate funding for various public works, what makes you think that forcing them to allocate a specific dollar amount towards the causes of their choice would yield any better of a result? If they don't know how to value public works before hand, there's no reason to believe that they will know how to value them when forced to contribute specific dollar amounts.

3. The cost of someone damaging something you own or are entitled to should rest on the person/entity doing the damage, not on those who are having their property damaged. i.e. the pollution example... in theory, each of us are entitled to clean air/water/etc. If some entity wishes to make a profit by polluting those resources, the burden should not be on those effected to pay the person/entity causing the pollution to minimize their damage... rather the burden of minimizing that damage and/or compensating those effected by that damage rests on that entity. In other words, I dislike the idea of agencies like the EPA being funded by those who care for the environment, rather than by those who profit from destroying it.

4. I don't believe your plan really addresses the free-rider problem. Just because people have to contribute their tax dollars regardless, that does not mean that people will stop benefitting from some public works while at the same time only funding other public works.

 

JeffLV, consider these passages while I compose a more specific response...

In a pragmatarian system...if a government organization was was not delivering value...then taxpayers would not give it their taxes.

In a pragmatarian system....government organizations would either perform or lose taxpayers.

In a pragmatarian system...government organizations would be forced to fight for funding from countless individual taxpayers.

In a pragmatarian system...it would be as easy for taxpayers to hold government organizations accountable as it is for donors to hold charitable organizations accountable.

 

See my passages I just shared on charitable organizations versus government organizations.

Check out this blog entry...Libertarian Pudding Tastes Good! There's just no way that 538 congresspeople can guess the true values of 150 million taxpayers. Therefore, there's going to be a disparity between the callocation (current allocation) and the pallocation (pragmatarian allocation) of public goods. Once we figure out the actual scope of government then congress will adjust the tax rate accordingly.

I don't know if taxes are necessary. I've debated anarcho-capitalists long enough where I'm open to the possibility that forced taxation/government is not necessary. How can we tell if something is necessary or not? If people willingly contribute their money to it. In a pragmatarian system taxpayers would be able to withhold their taxes from every single government organization...except for one. If 150 million taxpayers boycott ever single government organization one by one out of existence...then so be it. Conversely, if they clamor for more options to spend their taxes on...and the result is pragma-socialism...then so be it as well.

What I trust is the process. People don't slave away at their jobs for most of their lives just to have government waste their taxes. If we implemented a pragmatarian system then they would try and get the most bang for their buck. That's the process that I trust.

You're saying that it's a self-evident truth that we are all entitled to clear air/water/etc and I interpret that to mean that we all benefit from environmental protection. Great, so let's give people the freedom to put their taxes where their benefits are. If you disagreed with how they were spending their taxes then it would be your responsibility to share your knowledge with them in order to encourage them to change their priorities.

Imagine you and I are soldiers trekking through some jungle that's full of people that want to kill us. Would it make sense for both of us to look in exactly the same direction? No, it would be safer for you to scan your sector and for me to scan my sector. This is the division of labor concept. Would it make me a free-rider if I benefited from you scanning your sector? Would it make you a free-rider if you benefited from me scanning my sector?

How many different things can benefit/harm our country? At least a gazillion. Our strength and value as a nation is our people. By preventing taxpayers from directly allocating their taxes...we're wasting our most valuable resource. Just because a taxpayer focused on the one sector that most concerned/interested him wouldn't make him a free-rider anymore than it would make you a free-rider to focus on the one sector that most concerns/interests you. In economic terms we all have our own comparative advantage. For more information on this see my post...A Taxpayer Division of Labor.

 

You assume government programs are expendable if tax payers decide that they are not being done efficiently enough. You also presume that the withholding of funding is the only mechanism that can be employed to encourage efficiency. There are other market-based strategies as well, such as those I mentioned in my prior post.

In other words, you just defeated your own argument.

If the aggregate demand by the free market is not enough to properly fund various public works, and instead we have to force a certain amount of taxes to be paid by everyone, this implies that people are not able to properly value public works. The idea that people should be forced to pay a certain amount of their taxes is contradictory with the idea that they should be able to allocate their own taxes, stating that they can and can't properly value public works at the same time... So which is it? If they can't properly value public works, and instead have to be forced to contribute certain amounts, then we have no further reason to believe that they can also allocate effectively. So you either end up with a situation where there should be no taxation at all, or where the population alone can't be trusted to allocate correctly.

So why even bother with this whole self-defeating "pragmatarianism" thing? Let's just get down to what you are really saying you want: anarcho-capitalism.

That's one way, but not necessarily the only way... and in many cases, not the best way.

Which assumes that the market for public goods works like that of private goods. You assume, by definition, that the demand of individuals public works is expressed in the ability and willingness to fund. Others may not agree that simply funding is the expression of the total demand for public goods.

I'm saying that it's a self-evident truth that if you want to damage my property, it's your responsibility to pay for it. I assume we can agree on that much, yes? If you are throwing trash into my back yard, it's your responsibility to compensate me for trashing my back yard, not my responsibility to pay for you to stop trashing my back yard. Unless you own all of the air and water, it's not your right to trash it at my cost. It should be up to the people/entities that trash these resources to pay for it, not for myself, the general population, or those particular individuals impacted by localized environmental damage to pay for it. Yes, it is a public good that we all benefit from, but that doesn't mean it is anyone's responsibility to pay for damage to the environment than the ones who cause the damage.

Your analogy works against you... these two solders are well trained experts on survival. Two civilians would be far less likely to properly plan and execute a strategy for survival in hostile territory than these expert solders. Similarly, one could argue that well trained experts on the economy are better suited to evaluate the demand for public works vs the general civilian. Kinda like how the average civilian donated mostly food to our relief effort for katrina when in reality, we needed everything but food. The general civilian was not an expert on what we needed for the survival of people in the Katrina disaster, and I have little reason to believe that the average civilian is any better at evaluating other public works as well.

Division of labor is nice, but again, I have no reason to believe that the civilians, in aggregate, can allocate to the bagillion causes any better. Apparently you don't, either, if you are continuing to push the idea that people need to be taxed to begin with.

 

JeffLV, I really want anarcho-capitalism? LOL Can you do me a huge huge huge favor and sign up to the Ron Paul forums? Then you could start a thread in the Political Philosophy category and give it this title...."Xerographica Really Wants Anarcho-capitalism". Within your thread you could submit whatever evidence you have to support your claim. That would be seriously awesome if you could do that.

I really struggle to understand your perspective on environmental protection. From my perspective...an ounce of prevention is worth two of cure. As somebody who really values environmental protection I'd really prefer to spend my taxes on preventing harm to the environment...rather than somehow forcing oil companies to pay for their oil spills. I want to prevent the extinction of endangered plants and animals rather than somehow forcing companies to cough up a payment if their activities result in the extinction of endangered plants and animals.

My analogy of the two soldiers works against me? Not likely. Who exactly do you think taxpayers are? When you think about experts...do you think that they are paid for their expertise perhaps?

 

Again this is just empty opinion where you misunderstand basic concepts. Here you've failed to take into account how negative externalities are studied (and the impact for optimality). You could have rejected the standard approach (e.g. replacing neoclassical static analysis with a dynamic understanding of sustainable development), but you haven't the means to achieve that.

Liberals will unfortunately typically win the debate as they are able to use economics, with some validity

 

Xero: So...are the 20,000 posts you've produced here a public good?
Reiver: No
Xero: Are they a public bad?
Reiver: No, you don't understand the definition of a public good.
Xero: Are your posts non-rivalrous and non-excludable?
Reiver: My posts are not a product
Xero: They aren't a product? Perhaps they are a public service?
Reiver: No, they are leisure output

Heh, too funny. You make me laugh. Can you please explain again exactly why you should have the freedom to maximize your utility in the private sector?

 

I but refer to economics with validity. That's stumped you, ensuring that you need to ask vacuous questions just to deflect. Again, you need to at least blag that you understand these basic concepts.

 

But we've already established that you don't understand basic economics. Your economic theory is based on the idea that one use of your limited time is just as good as any use. Yet, clearly you derive utility from spending a good portion of your time producing 20,000 posts on economics. So you say one thing...but do another thing...and fail to understand that real economics focuses on actions rather than words. You can't escape the fact that actions speak louder than words. Which is exactly why taxpayers should have the freedom to spend their taxes in the public sector. It's not their words/votes that matter...what matters is the sacrifices they are willing to make for the public goods that they value.

What did you have to sacrifice in order produce 20,000 posts on economics? Tell me...I really want to know. Paint a picture for me so that I can clearly see every single thing that you had to forgo in order to spend your time composing 20,000 posts. Tell me about all the books that you could have read...tell me about all the movies that you could have watched...tell me which musical instrument you could have mastered...tell me about all the priceless moments that you could have created with your friends and family. If nothing else...answer this one question for me...was it worth it?

In other words...if nothing else...try and talk about real economics for once in your life. Maybe then your next 20,000 posts will be a public good that can actually do some good.

 

Sorry, but playground tactics won't help you either. Rather than dodge and deflect, go and teach yourself what public goods actually entail. Your confusion with private goods has been quite woeful.

Its based on 'bleedin obviousness'; typing to you isn't a public good. At best its a diffusion of knowledge (but that's being widely optimistic)

 

I have a tough time time believing there are 2 different economic philosophies, when liberals and conservatives both support central planning. It is fairly obvious all those at the top are in bed together, across the entire spectrum of thought to policy. There is no right or left, but in the minds of those with less. There is only top and bottom. Until nationalism is eradicated and the world is one, or the global regime is eradicated and nations of the west get sovereignty and true representation back, the subject of right vs left is moot. Whether you are talking economics or social legislation. Nationalism vs globalism is the battle at hand. Globalists are the minority, quit letting the "liberal vs conservative" argument divide the nationalist front.