Christianity could be a higher order way of organizing lives

[boost]

Any government funding for PP means that some of it is probably going to abortion even if the line of sight isn't direct. This is because all spending decisions are marginal and come from the same pool of possible spending decisions. The pool of resources to cover the possible spending decisions are allocated first to the spending with the greatest marginal benefit, second to those with the second greatest marginal benefit, etc..

If PP has a budget of $10, where funding consists of $2 from government and $8 elsewhere, without restrictions, the two funding sources are essentially merged and put to pay for the $10 of services. If the budget is deconstructed to pap smears ($5) and abortions ($5) and the law says no government funding can go to abortion, PP then pays for the pap smears with the $2 from government and $3 from elsewhere, and pays for the abortions with the remaining $5 from elsewhere. As we see, a change in the law regarding allocation didn't change the funding for abortions. If, however, the government stopped funding PP altogether, PP would have only $8 and would have to cut its spending. It would do so based on the marginal assessment characterized above. Unless abortions are valued more highly than pap smears such that PP would rather lose $2 of pap smears to keep all $5 of abortions, abortions would decline.

The only way to make it so that no taxes go to abortions is to make it so that institutions that produce abortions get $0 funding from the government. Furthermore, that means that consumers of abortions also need to get $0 funding from the government.

This is a simplistic way of understanding organizational structure and accounting. It can be true, but it is not necessarily so. There is legal precedent on this. Different parts of an organization can be financially segregated to a degree to which this is a non issue.

Absolute financial segregation is a myth. I don't just mean within a legally recognized corporate organization, I mean in the absolute sense. If abortion is legal, any funding given to any entity will eventually fund abortion. As illustration, take a strip mall that holds an abortion clinic as a tenant. The other tenants rents are being suppressed due to a decrease in vacancy.

I do appreciate that you ended with an acknowledgement of how absurd your reading of the law is. A woman that gets an abortion should not be eligible for public scholarships, her children should not be admitted to public school, she should not be allowed to ride public transit, etc. Do we get to apply this logic to similar cases? The government should not be funding religious institutions, therefore it follows that a priest should be shunned in the same way as the woman whose had an abortion.

Also, when does the ban from government funding happen? Does it last for a set period of time? Her whole life? Wouldn't it make more sense for her to owe the government for all of the assistance she's received so far in life which allowed her the financial flexibility to chose abortion?

[BananaStand]

I do appreciate that you ended with an acknowledgement of how absurd your reading of the law is

I don't think that's what he was doing. I interpreted his last sentence to mean that programs like medicaid should also not cover abortion.

Now I know what you're thinking.....if it doesn't cover abortions, then medicaid shouldn't cover birth control pills either. Stop thinking that.

It is simply erroneous to start drawing parallels between abortion, and anything else. For whatever reason, abortion is "the big one". It's completely appropriate to treat it as something radioactive that needs to be quarantined from every other issue.

The rest of your post seems to basically claim that maintaining a road where a clinic resides effectively equals government funding of abortion. Nonsense. You're discussing abortion as if there is a slippery slope that leads to all kinds of other shit. There isn't. There is no slope, slippery or otherwise, that connects abortion to other issues.

it stands alone. This isn't my opinion either. It's the consensus of decades of public discourse on the topic. Abortion is an issue that gets special treatment. You'll find it's a lot easier to find common ground with the other side (no matter which side you're on) if you just accept this reality.

[wufwugy]

I don't think that's what he was doing. I interpreted his last sentence to mean that programs like medicaid should also not cover abortion.

I was getting at the fact that if a person is on welfare and pays for an abortion, then iterating this scenario over time, across the population, and on average, means that a portion of taxes have probably gone to abortion because some abortions were likely had only on the margin that the person can fund her budget with welfare.

This point is true before going a step above like boost did, the infinite regression of causality, which is worth thinking about.

[boost]

I was getting at the fact that if a person is on welfare and pays for an abortion, then iterating this scenario over time, across the population, and on average, means that a portion of taxes have probably gone to abortion because some abortions were likely had only on the margin that the person can fund her budget with welfare.

This point is true before going a step above like boost did, the infinite regression of causality, which is worth thinking about.

Yeah man, I think this is where your ideology gets in the way of you discussing practical matters. It's fine that you think the government ultimately does not have a right to tax (if this is even your position.. it's hard to keep track of), but that's not what you were arguing. It wouldn't even make sense to argue the subsidising of abortions point if government is not subsidizing anything.

Let's shift your logic elsewhere for illustrative purposes. The second amendment is law, but it is very controversial. Therefore the government should not be subsidizing gun purchases. People who purchase guns should be barred from receiving any government assistance.

It's an absurd argument. You cannot find the thresholds of reason outside of a pragmatic argument, which results in "the government should not directly subsidize X"

Ideology has a way of blinding us to pragmatism.

[wufwugy]

Yeah man, I think this is where your ideology gets in the way of you discussing practical matters. It's fine that you think the government ultimately does not have a right to tax (if this is even your position.. it's hard to keep track of), but that's not what you were arguing. It wouldn't even make sense to argue the subsidising of abortions point if government is not subsidizing anything.

My ideology is what it is due to what is practical. I'm into what works.

I don't believe the government doesn't have the right to tax. I don't even know what a right is. Though I do know how the Constitution defines rights, as things that exist because of prohibition of government intervention.

Let's shift your logic elsewhere for illustrative purposes. The second amendment is law, but it is very controversial. Therefore the government should not be subsidizing gun purchases. People who purchase guns should be barred from receiving any government assistance.

It's an absurd argument.

What makes that absurd? That's what the people who wrote the 2nd Amendment intended in the first place. The concept of government assistance is new and was not something the United States Constitution included. That whole thing was about prohibition of government power. Welfarism came later and its origins are mostly outside of the US.

And yeah, gun owners shouldn't be allowed to receive welfare for the reason you described. And the same logic should be applied to everybody, which illustrates a reason why welfarism is a contradiction to constitutional principles. Though it isn't a contradiction to the socialist idea of rights. Which raises the question, which one of those actually successfully provides rights?

[boost]

My ideology is what it is due to what is practical. I'm into what works.

I don't believe the government doesn't have the right to tax. I don't even know what a right is. Though I do know how the Constitution defines rights, as things that exist because of prohibition of government intervention.



What makes that absurd? That's what the people who wrote the 2nd Amendment intended in the first place. The concept of government assistance is new and was not something the United States Constitution included. That whole thing was about prohibition of government power. Welfarism came later and its origins are mostly outside of the US.

And yeah, gun owners shouldn't be allowed to receive welfare for the reason you described. And the same logic should be applied to everybody, which illustrates a reason why welfarism is a contradiction to constitutional principles. Though it isn't a contradiction to the socialist idea of rights. Which raises the question, which one of those actually successfully provides rights?

It's absurd because it's not the discussion we're having. We are talking about reality, and then suddenly you start talking about libertopia without informing your fellow participants in the conversation. Making the point about abortion in isolation is misleading and impossible to map onto reality as it stands.

WRT Originalism. It's nonsense. The signer's intended a framework that would be a robust starting place. The fact that they included paths to amendment are testament to the fact that they not only suspected it would be changed but in many cases likely hoped it would be.

Which one provides rights? Individual rights? I don't really care, that's your ideological axiom, not mine.

[wufwugy]

It's absurd because it's not the discussion we're having. We are talking about reality, and then suddenly you start talking about libertopia without informing your fellow participants in the conversation. Making the point about abortion in isolation is misleading and impossible to map onto reality as it stands.

I was discussing a budget constraint model that includes the concept that if somebody is not legally allowed to spend on a part of the budget from a certain revenue source, the person gets past this by reorganizing which revenue sources they spend on which portions of their budget. This makes the type of law that MMM referred to toothless. This applies to both producers and consumers. That was the entirety of my point.

You expanded beyond this with the infinite regression of causality point. It's a good point. I responded to that in kind.

WRT Originalism. It's nonsense. The signer's intended a framework that would be a robust starting place. The fact that they included paths to amendment are testament to the fact that they not only suspected it would be changed but in many cases likely hoped it would be.

I'm not one to say I know what was intended. I know what it says and what they said. It can be the case that the framers intended government to not do welfare and also that that could be changed by others in the future.

Which one provides rights? Individual rights? I don't really care, that's your ideological axiom, not mine.

You said you think I might have a particular belief about rights. I clarified that is not my belief. I went on to describe the concept of rights within the framework of the Constitution, and I added what is as far as I can tell the concept of rights from the majority counter perspective. I finished with a question regarding which concept is more successful at doing what it claims.

[wufwugy]

This is a simplistic way of understanding organizational structure and accounting. It can be true, but it is not necessarily so. There is legal precedent on this. Different parts of an organization can be financially segregated to a degree to which this is a non issue.

Absolute financial segregation is a myth. I don't just mean within a legally recognized corporate organization, I mean in the absolute sense. If abortion is legal, any funding given to any entity will eventually fund abortion. As illustration, take a strip mall that holds an abortion clinic as a tenant. The other tenants rents are being suppressed due to a decrease in vacancy.

I'm happy to see that you're thinking in conceptual terms that need to be thought in. I don't have much input on this because finding an answer is unbelievably hard. In fact I don't think there is an answer.

Where do we draw the line? I don't know, probably where people want to draw the line. The concept I laid out regarding budgeting is pretty well modeled in economics, so I think it is reasonable to say that a law that says certain fund sources can't be used for certain things doesn't change much of the funding of those certain things since moving funds around to keep things the way they have been is pretty common. Economists have tried to study this a bit with food stamps, where the models say that making it illegal for this form of welfare to be used on alcohol and cigarettes shouldn't negatively impact consumption of such since the food stamp collectors will just move their funds around, spending less cash on food than they would otherwise since they can use stamps for food, letting them consume the same amount (sometimes more) of alcohol and cigarettes. The empirical results are mixed, as they always are in economics. I don't know any models that suggest what I described wouldn't be the case.

I do appreciate that you ended with an acknowledgement of how absurd your reading of the law is.

I wouldn't say that's absurd, but more the next step in logic to be taken even though it gets into "throw your hands up in the air" territory, where solving the problem has no easy or good answers.

Cool to note about this is that this type of problem is a good reason why it is better to restrict government intervention. This is because a democratic government has a duality of responsibilities that it cannot meet. For example, you mentioned public schools. A sufficiently intervened by government education system (which we have) means that the government has the responsibility to provide that service for all citizens. Yet, it is also the case that doing that means that those who fund it (taxpayers) are coerced into paying for things they do not want. Reducing government impact into lives and increasing the freedom of choice reduces this problem because it allows people to more effectively allocate their own resources to what they believe in.

The problem never goes away in entirety though. It's sorta like one of the premises of Loki's Wager. You can't say where the neck ends and the head begins, so you can't perfectly separate them no matter what.

[wufwugy]

Where do we draw the line? I don't know, probably where people want to draw the line. The concept I laid out regarding budgeting is pretty well modeled in economics, so I think it is reasonable to say that a law that says certain fund sources can't be used for certain things doesn't change much of the funding of those certain things since moving funds around to keep things the way they have been is pretty common. Economists have tried to study this a bit with food stamps, where the models say that making it illegal for this form of welfare to be used on alcohol and cigarettes shouldn't negatively impact consumption of such since the food stamp collectors will just move their funds around, spending less cash on food than they would otherwise since they can use stamps for food, letting them consume the same amount (sometimes more) of alcohol and cigarettes. The empirical results are mixed, as they always are in economics. I don't know any models that suggest what I described wouldn't be the case.

I should correct this. The models and studies are mostly about the difference in consumption choices between using cash transfers or food stamps. The models suggest using food stamps (that can't be used on alc/cigs) instead of cash transfers (that can be used on alc/cigs) would unlikely have any impact on consumption of alc/cigs. This is because recipients of cash transfers will consume what they want evenly across their total cash, and recipients who get food stamps instead tend to move the alc/cigs consumption to their other cash and move more of their food consumption to food stamps.

[wufwugy]

I should correct this. The models and studies are mostly about the difference in consumption choices between using cash transfers or food stamps. The models suggest using food stamps (that can't be used on alc/cigs) instead of cash transfers (that can be used on alc/cigs) would unlikely have any impact on consumption of alc/cigs. This is because recipients of cash transfers will consume what they want evenly across their total cash, and recipients who get food stamps instead tend to move the alc/cigs consumption to their other cash and move more of their food consumption to food stamps.

Even as regulations get more stringent, the welfare recipients who are targeted specifically to not abuse the system tend to develop clever ways of getting around the rules. One way is trading their food stamps at a discount on the black market for alc/cigs/drugs/cash

[boost]

Even as regulations get more stringent, the welfare recipients who are targeted specifically to not abuse the system tend to develop clever ways of getting around the rules. One way is trading their food stamps at a discount on the black market for alc/cigs/drugs/cash

Not that you were accusing me of being in favor of the current welfare system, but I think intuitively it makes sense and the data is coming in in support of no strings attached welfare.

[wufwugy]

Not that you were accusing me of being in favor of the current welfare system, but I think intuitively it makes sense and the data is coming in in support of no strings attached welfare.

What data are you referring to?

Here's economist Bryan Caplan on universal basic income (UBI):

Overall, the UBI probably gives even worse incentives than the status quo. Defenders of the UBI correctly point out that it might improve incentives for people who are already on welfare. Under the status quo, earning another $1 of legal income can easily reduce your welfare by a $1, implying a marginal tax rate of 100%. But under the status quo, vast populations are ineligible for most programs. Such as? You guys! If you're an able-bodied adult, aged 18-64, who doesn't have custody of any minor children, the current system doesn't give you much. Switching to a UBI would expand the familiar perverse effects of the welfare state to the entire population - including you. And if taxes rise to pay for the UBI, the population-wide disincentives are even worse.

When it comes to explaining how it is possible that UBI could benefit the country, it would need to be explained how UBI could increase incentives to produce.

[boost]

What data are you referring to?

Here's economist Bryan Caplan on universal basic income (UBI):





When it comes to explaining how it is possible that UBI could benefit the country, it would need to be explained how UBI could increase incentives to produce.

The most recent studies are still ongoing, but there's a pretty large one underway in Kenya at the moment. My understanding is that on the whole people have not cut back on work, but instead increased spending on improvements to their standard of living, started businesses, etc.

It's nice that Caplan is offering his view based on theory, but the results, so far, aren't in support of the theory.