forestjar fables

@JimesTooper @jdcmedlock If people are spending their time and money trying to give me and my community a destructive addiction, I feel like that's at least a little bit my business.

@jdcmedlock not a gambler myself but i fail to see why its any of your business how other people spend their money and time

She's absolutely right. I love a good bet on hyperinflation, but turning every phone into a 24/7 casino has been terrible for society.

@CreativeDeduct @cntgsly_curious Who do you think suffers more consequences, a lazy person who inherits a large stock portfolio or a lazy person who inherits nothing Inequality divorces actions from consequences.

@cntgsly_curious They want to divorce actions from consequences. Not a recipe that encourages better actions.

Free people make different choices. Different choices lead to different outcomes. Therefore free people can’t be equal.

@CNLiberalism The CEO works for him.

Do people not realize that Jeff Bezos is not the CEO of Amazon anymore and hasn’t been for nearly half a decade.

@neo__futurist @AdamSinger It's not zero sum over time, but at any given time we produce a certain amount, and there'd be less poverty if we distributed that amount more evenly.

@AdamSinger The fundamental problem with leftist’s economic understanding is that they view wealth as zero-sum. They cannot conceive of a way to make the poor better off without just taking from the rich.

Anyone proposing taxing of *unrealized gains* - and it doesn't matter on whom - is profoundly stupid. One of the worst ideas we've seen in modern times. Vote against anyone considering this, and if you have to leave the state before it's too late. Economically illiterate clowns

@cjtheancap It's super unpopular, if you don't enforce it on everyone not many will play along, if you do enforce it on everyone, you're acting like a state.

daily reminder that Anarcho-Capitalism has never been successfully debunked

@TimePreference_ That's just retirement. Current workers produce stuff that is consumed by retirees with the promise that future workers will produce stuff for them to consume. When demographics shift this arrangement becomes more difficult, whatever system you have in place to facilitate it.

social security is a ponzi scheme by design current workers fund current retirees with the promise that future workers will fund them when demographic ratios shift, the system becomes mathematically unsustainable

@RockChartrand Obviously producing more could reduce poverty, but so could a more egalitarian distribution of the stuff we already produce. The rich countries with lowest poverty rates tend to have strong welfare states.

“If money is infinite, why is there poverty?” Because money isn’t wealth. It’s a claim on wealth. You can print claims. You can’t print the goods and services those claims are supposed to buy. Give everyone $10 billion and nothing gets richer. Prices just explode until that “wealth” buys nothing. Poverty isn’t a shortage of paper. It’s a shortage of production. Printing money doesn’t solve that. It hides it for a moment, then makes it worse.

@TechnoPulp @SRamirez68083 I'm pretty sure he'd consider management and decision making doing things.

@forestjarfables @SRamirez68083 So I've seen Matt on here a bunch, I guess what I'm trying to suss out it is: is his position that "doing" only consists of things like manual labor or concrete things like Accounting? Vs more abstract things like "Management" and decision-making?

The fact that you can be a big policy and economics commentator, post like this, and for the most part not hurt your career or credibility is dire.

@JohnRuf6 The argument you've laid out here is a utilitarian one, we provide the capitalist a return because it incentivises him to use his money in productive ways. Matt's goal is to separate this argument out from the idea that capitalists deserve that return.

Also note: the fact that what is going on is *useful* is divorced from the question of *exploitation.* A baker giving a starving man a loaf of bread in exchange for something is objectively *useful*. However, if the payment is man's first born child, then it's *exploitative.*

This is just entirely confused. The cost in dollar value of a millionaire delaying $10,000 of consumption for a year is the same as mine. The cost in utility is different, sure, but compensation is about how much machinery that $10K buys in the real world not psychic pain.

@TechnoPulp @SRamirez68083 He's arguing that they don't deserve it because of things they do. There are for sure other arguments about why they might deserve it which aren't addressed by the coma/blind trust example.

@forestjarfables @SRamirez68083 Ok, but I’m actually not clear on what he trying to argue…like is he trying to say that unless you have a certain amount of active involvement in generating your income you don’t “deserve” it?

@TechnoPulp @SRamirez68083 Sure you can argue that decision is worth something, but you can imagine someone being in a coma, literally incapable of doing anything, and that decision being made by someone with power of attorney. The returns still flow to the person in the coma.

@forestjarfables @SRamirez68083 Hmm…what point is he arguing against though? Blind trusts are not random: you still need to make the decision of where / who to invest the money for you. Like they do they think decision-making is not worth anything?

@xwanyex Everyone's approaching this as if the only option is for the government to step in and distribute Taylor Swift tickets, but if there was a surefire mechanism to make sure your biggest fans got tickets, at least some artists would prefer that to price.

This is true and since I talk quite a lot about how we should take into account human nature and take seriously what people like and do not like about society, I think it’s fair that I should have to account for it. The main reason to push back in this specific case is that it’s a matter of basic freedom. People need to be free to buy and sell goods and services (and their labor) in a free market. It cannot be up to other people what I am allowed to charge for my services. This is fundamental enough that we really should try to convince people of it, even if that opinion does not come naturally to everyone.

@MostlyMonkey He's criticizing a normative justification of the way markets work. Saying "that's just the way markets work" isn't really a response to that.

That's not the way market clearing prices work, you buffoon

@SRamirez68083 From there he can point out the utility increasing effect of lots of welfare state stuff. Which you then can't argue against based on desert because you've already acknowledged that's not your ultimate justification for anything.

@SRamirez68083 Eh, he's not confused about how it works, he's arguing against one specific argument people make for why capitalists deserve their income, his ultimate goal being to get everyone to admit their justification for it is based on utility rather than desert.

@littlejoeward @JohnCha60840797 @cafreiman It's not perfect but the average person would really dislike the alternative.

@forestjarfables @JohnCha60840797 @cafreiman And how well do people think public school is working?

But the average person would *really* dislike the results of what would replace a price mechanism

@xwanyex The solution is to give everyone 1000 entertainment vouchers every year and let them compete for tickets from an equal starting point. Then price works to determine who actually values something most.

The reason that lotteries are almost always worse than the price mechanism is that you really do want some way for people to signal that they want it more. I wasn’t willing to pay $400 or whatever to go see the Patriots play today, but I’d sure as hell throw my name in a giant punch bowl, if that were available. And then when my name was pulled, I’d go down there and watch the Patriots play and take the spot of somebody who is willing to save up their hard earned money and outbid me for the experience. People really want there to be some way around this, because of course not everybody has exactly the same amount of money, which means that prices are an imperfect measure of desire. There’s always some rich person who can just basically go do anything and it doesn’t really matter to them how much it costs. But prices are the only mechanism we have for figuring out who wants things more, even if that mechanism is imperfect.

@ShaooSky @JohnCha60840797 @cafreiman I'm not really arguing about concerts I'm arguing about the idea that price is always the best way of rationing things.

Public school supply is funded by the government in excess of what would be otherwise created. It is obviously fine to fund stuff with large positive externalities using public funds. The price system underproduces them. Unless you decide to publicly fund concerts (or flights and what not), you will end up with fewer concerts and people going to concerts they don’t enjoy as much as other people (I mean, I would sign up for literally every concert lottery if they were $20, and I wouldn’t really enjoy Rihanna as much as some huge Rihanna fan). That outcome is much worse than the current one for everyone.

@JohnCha60840797 @cafreiman Public school is free, it's rationed by age, not price.

@forestjarfables @cafreiman Doesn't have anything to do with pricing mechanisms. What's produced and the quantity produced is only accurately determined by pricing.

@fiddleheaded_ @mak3333 @s0ymalia @connoramulhern Yes but we're not talking about how things are funded.

@forestjarfables @mak3333 @s0ymalia @connoramulhern all of these things are massively subsidized by the state, and thus your tax dollars