eschevarria's comments

Economic growth caused these things to go up; the governments (which also existed in past periods of human existence) caused growth to be much slower than it could have been.

Don’t confuse government causing a increase in government spending on something with causing an increase in the actual supply of that thing. When governments restrict the supply of healthcare and housing (which they do, through professional licensing and zoning regulations), they can spend more on them without increasing supply.

> There is no doubt about that

Yes there is. Look up dominant assurance contracts.

Why is it that people don't even think there could be doubt that the fundamental idea of copyright is sound? Why do they not look up if there have been arguments the opposite way? People are been given handwavey arguments for why the free market can't do this, why the free market can't do that, why this requires government intervention. And then they buy the reasoning that if not for copyright, there would be no incentive to provide intellectual goods. And then they immediately buy the conclusion that we ought to have copyright lengths of 70 years, that we ought to apply copyright automatically to all created goods. Soon they tell you that actually copyright was a natural right all along!

The whole thing is diseased. At least have some doubt.

> A lot of people don't have a choice otherwise, except homelessness and poverty. Not exactly a 'free' system.

Right. The system we are in is not a free system and those are indeed problems with this system.

> Runaway free market Capitalism creates this problem as it sends money to the very top leaving the rest to fight for a small portion of the pie.

Crony capitalism creates this problem, not free market capitalism. Crony capitalism is an opposite of a free market.

> Working is not voluntary in USA unless you already have plenty of money, or are supported by someone with money.

It is voluntary. It is unfortunately necessary too, in many cases, but again, the United States are only weakly capitalist.

> There's no such thing as scarcity of pretty much anything in USA.

The United States’ GDP per capita is $59,501. That’s scarcity.

> We have 18.9 million vacant homes, with 3.5 million homeless [1].

I just mentioned rent controls. I agree that this is bad, but it’s got nothing to do with capitalism.

> None of this would happen under a sane system with checks and balances.

Agreed. We might disagree about which system this is though.

> What you're seeing right now is _raw capitalism_ at work.

Either we’re not using the same definition of capitalism or it isn’t. I am anarcho-capitalist. Raw capitalism looks like not having a state, or at the very least having only a minimal state. What I’m seeing is Donald Trump imposing tariffs on solar panels, washing machines, and imports of steel and aluminum. Raw capitalism this is anything but.

The states you mention are not socialist. They all rank high on the Economic Freedom of the World Index and on the Index of Economic Freedom. It is not even clear that they can be called social democracies.

Capitalism gives people the full fruits of their labor except when they voluntarily decide to give the fruits of their labor to someone else, possibly in exchange for something. Why would anyone do this? Specialization and trade. Maybe they are more productive if they can work with other people. Maybe they need access to capital. Maybe they prefer having something liquid, like money, instead of fruits that they cannot do much with. Maybe they prefer to have a stable income in the short term instead of having an income that depends on their productivity and the desirability of their fruits for other people in the current market conditions. But in any case it has to be voluntary—otherwise, it is not capitalism.

I agree that the prisons are bad, but the system that puts people in prisons is the state, not capitalism. Be sure to blame the right ideology. Same for the homelessness and poverty—to some extent it is impossible to prevent them because of scarcity, but to a great extent they are due to rent controls, zoning laws, restrictions on trade, deadweight loss from taxes. Again, be sure to blame the right ideology.

Capitalism is not compatible with forced labor. It may be compatible with slavery if you define slavery in a way that includes consensual labor. Systems that are partly capitalist may be compatible with forced labor, but in this case the part that allows the forced labor is not the capitalist part of the system and the blame should rest on the system not being capitalist enough.

For example, Resolution No. 9855 in Venezuela allows the government to force workers to move from their current jobs to work in farm fields or elsewhere in the agricultural sector for periods of 60 days. That is forced labor. But it is not to be blamed on capitalism; in fact, it would have been prevented by capitalism.

> Specifically that the only manner in which lowering taxes is proven as a cause of economic growth is when economic growth is defined as growing individual bank accounts of an increasingly smaller proportion of the population?

You say it is proven, but actually the study linked to by the article you mentioned from The Atlantic does not claim that. In the summary, it says: "The evidence does not suggest necessarily a relationship between tax policy with regard to the top tax rates and the size of the economic pie, but there may be a relationship to how the economic pie is sliced." And indeed the study's data does not prove any of this, so it is correct in not making that claim.

> If you do, on what sensible grounds can you criticize the government for paying up? The government is obeying the rules of this capitalist system.

The government also decided that the system would be this particular not very capitalist system, where it pays contractors for anything at all. That is what it ought to be criticized for.

> Even if it always was required to choose the cheapest bid, one could still allege that is waste. At which point, your ideology is blaming the government for “wasting” resources when there are no other options, and—with no evidence provided—concludes the answer is to starve the government of resources to use for the public good.

There is at least one other option: not having the government choose any bid at all, cheapest or not. And there is an even better option: not having a government in the first place.

> Is there proof that raising taxes causes economic growth? No. That claim is not made.

It has been made by dnomad: "There is very convincing evidence that higher taxes and greater government spending do lead to long term economic growth."

> What is shown is that cutting taxes does not spur economic growth, as those who advocate for that idea claim.

The study does not claim that it shows this, and if it did it would be wrong as it presents no evidence that this is the case.

> Do you have any evidence for these simplistic Econ101 theories?

Yes, deductive logic. Way better than empirical studies, if that's what you were looking for. You only need the assumption that demand curves in the labor market slope downward to deduce that taxes in that market cause deadweight losses, and the evidence that demand curves nearly always slope downward, not just in the labor market, is every transaction you have ever made and every transaction you have ever heard anyone talk about. There are empirical studies that confirm this, but they are irrelevant because you have access to much better evidence, and you should just dismiss the empirical studies that say otherwise. If controlled experiments showed this wrong, you should assume that the researchers are lying about their results, because that would genuinely be a more likely explanation than demand curves not actually sloping downward.

By the way, simple theories are more likely to be true, not less.

> Economic growth is probably only a matter of distribution.

There are exactly two reasons there can be an increase in economic growth and they are intensive and extensive growth. Either you make more efficient use of inputs or you have more inputs. Deadweight losses mean you make less efficient use of inputs.

In principle, the inefficiency caused by the taxes could be offset by the way they are spent if they were used to correct a market failure, which could increase economic efficiency or even increase the inputs. But market failures do not exist so in practice this does not happen and taxes always harm economic growth.

That the distribution of the benefits is done according to supply and demand has most certainly not been debunked either. Wages are decided by the labor market equilibrium, not individually by employers. And economic growth is not a matter of distribution and certainly related to deadweight losses.

Deadweight losses from taxes have most certainly not been debunked.

That people who complain about taxes get some utility from the government activities funded by these taxes does not imply that they are better off with the combination of the services and the taxes than without. If this argument is meant to show that people should not complain about taxes, then it is invalid.

The New York Magazine is not research. Want to know what the actual research says?

Look at figure 10.1 on page 690 of the IPCC’s AR5 WG II report. As it shows, most of the studies on the total impact of climate change for increases between 2.6 and 4.8 °C, which is the range for the IPCC’s highest emissions scenario during the 21st century, result in estimates of the impact on welfare equivalent to a change between 0% and −3% in GNP. Positive effects are included in the estimates, so 0% and two positive values appear outside the range. This is not about the economic impact but about the total impact on welfare, so it really is what is relevant. The factors considered by the studies include variation in agricultural yield, water availability, changes in tourism flow, energy demand, impact on human health, labor productivity.

How bad do you think −3% is during the 21st century? That’s less than 0.035% less economic growth starting in 2014 when the Fifth Assessment Report was published. Even a policy that was completely effective at entirely preventing any global warming could only be justified if its cost was otherwise less than 0.035%. The policies we could implement would not be completely effective and would certainly cost more than 0.035%. Therefore the expected value of doing nothing about global warming is higher than the expected value of doing something.

“In February 2009, a Twitter user called @popelizbet issued an apparently historic challenge to someone called Colin: she asked if he could ‘mansplain’ a concept to her. History has not recorded if he did, indeed, proceed to mansplain. But the lexicographer Bernadette Paton, who excavated this exchange last summer, believed it was the first time anyone had used the word in recorded form. ‘It’s been deleted since, but we caught it,’ Paton told me, with quiet satisfaction.

[…]

A few days ago, I emailed to see if ‘mansplain’ had finally reached the OED. It had, but there was a snag – further research had pushed the word back a crucial six months, from February 2009 to August 2008. Then, no sooner had Paton’s entry gone live in January than someone emailed to point out that even this was inaccurate: they had spotted ‘mansplain’ on a May 2008 blog post, just a month after the writer Rebecca Solnit had published her influential essay Men Explain Things to Me. The updated definition, Proffitt assured me, will be available as soon as possible.”

One Wiktionary contributor did a better job[1] in 2012 by immediately finding the use[2] from May 2008. The OED is more Prestigious and Respectable and Authoritative, but the Wiktionary is more comprehensive, informative, reliable, convenient, useful, also cheaper.

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Citations:manspl...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130518221612/http://www.journa...