Since World War II, our economy has evolved in ways that reinforce the
financial differences between strong families and weak families.
There are more good sentences here. You’ll find some bad sentences here, which summarizes the economic plans of the Democrats to address inequality.
What about social policies??????
Destruction of the black nuclear family?
Can we define what are strong and weak families?
One of the programs mentioned is the EITC and from your past statements I thought you would highlight this as a very good sentence. If you feel that so many of the programs are so bad why don’t you fight harder for the program that is so good?
Ragerz: what if the indispensable route to better government is less government?
I certainly consider myself libertarian for pragmatic reasons, Ragerz.
Wasn’t there a study 30 years ago, which was reaffirmed either earlier this year or last that there are 3 simple steps to stay out of poverty – and this is where the gov’t can get involved, it’s a no-brainer – it’s cheap, just keep repeating it, it’ll sink in in a couple of generations:
1. Finish high school – get the diploma
2. Do NOT get married until after the age of 20
3. Do NOT have kids until after you are married (insert personal here – at least 9 months after!).
ragerz: “A strong family is one that makes a lot of money. A weak family is one that doesn’t.”
Sorry, but I cannot agree. I’ve known too many poor but strong families. I was raised in one.
ragerz: “As if it is impossible to structure government such that government employees have similar incentives to private sector employees”
I think it is near-impossible.
I have met exceptional and motivated government employees. But even the best employees cannot usually overcome the ineffectiveness of government bureaucracy. Companies subject to free market pressures must satisfy customers or they’ll cease to exist. Government monopolies can provide poor service for decades and still survive.
josh,
No libertarian is a pragmatist. Sorry. But faith in an ideology is incompatible with pragmatism, which, first and foremost, leads us to recognize the limits of our own knowledge and be skeptical of the sorts of religious generalizations that libertarians and other ideologues embrace.
You may have pragmatic tendencies in certain areas of your life where ideology has not caused brain death, but to the extent that you have a libertarian faith, you are not a pragmatist.
Pragmatism is not incompatible with an acknowledgment of the benefits of markets in many situations, or skepticism of government action in others. For an example of a pragmatist with free market tendencies, check out Judge Posner’s blog or any of his books.
The bottom line. Saying, that you are a libertarian for pragmatic reasons is like saying that the only tool you have in your toolbox is a hammer for pragmatic reasons.
To say, “I fail to see any situation in which a screwdriver is more appropriate than a hammer!” is not pragmatic.
Sandy P –
So, none of those people working of mcdonald’s or walmart finished high school?
Ragerz,
If you think government is efficient as a rule, you have seen a different government than I have. Where do you live?
On some blogs you can get away with your blind faith in government efficiency. On this site it is incumbent on you to show why your faith in the unseeable (I haven’t seen it anyway) is warranted.
As a general rule, a minimal government structure that allows people the freedom to pursue wealth creation is radically better than the opposite. This isn’t mere libertarian faith, it is empirical evidence.
Also, I’d put government programs into two categories: 1) Those designed to give a handout. 2) Those designed to give a hand up.
The ones designed to give a handout I blame for taking the black marriage rate of 50% before “The Great Society” to about 1% today. How is that efficient or helpful?
The ones designed to give a hand up I could support if government managed to seperate the financing and the managing, since despite your faith in government competence, I believe that only an organization that ceases to exist upon failure can be counted upon to be at least somewhat effective in the long run. If it isn’t effective, it will be replaced by an organization that is more efficient. One such example is government financing of K-12 education, on the condition that the money be attached to students while the actually businesses that run the school are non-government run and allowed to be replaced when they fail.
happyjuggler0 — the empirical evidence you presented actually makes the exact opposite conclusion then you apparently believe.
If you did a regression of the standard of living vs governemnt it would demonstate strongly that high income is associated with large govenment not withstanding the two extreme examples or outliers of Hong Kong and North Korea.
Spencer,
I guess we read the data differently. I believe the link I provided does indeed show a link between the economic freedom I advocate with higher per capita GDP (PPP adjusted, unlike the site’s numbers which inexplicably don’t adjust).
The irony though is that this wealth created by private actors in a relatively free system also supports the ability to have bigger government, and thus allow what some people call “government compassion”, although you can’t prove that compassion by me, looking at what it has done to black people in the US and France for example. My own theory is that the smaller a population is in absolute terms (i.e. not population density), the more they have to trade internationally, and thus the more they have to work to make their govermnent programs a success or the alternative is falling standards of living. Big countries like the US, France, Germany, Italy have the illusion that they can handicap the local businesses and still succeed due to the size of their market.
China is universally acknowledged to becomig more and more economically free since 1978, and the result is a boom. Viet Nam is becoming more economically free starting about 20 years ago, and increasingly so, with similar results, especially recently. If you click on the India link, you’ll see their “sudden, inexplicable” boom coincides with a large increase in economic freedom at the turn of the century. If they became more free, they could deepen and widen the boom. If not, they may face their own version of last year’s French rioting due to unequal opportunity to advance. Ireland and Portugal both had simliarper capita GDP’sw not too long ago and both received large transfers from the EU. Ireland became more economically free and boomed. portugal retained the statist status quo for the most part, and has gone relatively sideways.
It is universally acknowledged by those who haven’t been paying close attention that Africa is a basket case, excepting the country of South Africa. But Botswana bucked the universal trend of its peers upon independence. They instead chose to be more economically free, and have radically boomed in the past 40 years. I’m not sure what their per capita GDP was back then in inflation adjusted dollars, but it was astonishingly low. Today only two countries in Latin America have higher per capita GDP’s, and not by all that much either.
It is universally acknowledged that besides whatever horrible things Chile’s government has done since the socialists got booted in the 70′s, Chile radically moved towards more economic freedom, again totally bucking the trend in Latin America. Today only Argentina has a higher per capita GDP.
Take a look at which Eastern European governments were the most libertarian at various stages since 1991. The Czechs were tops for a while, now Estonia is. The results? You guessed it, they boomed more than virtually everyone else, excepting Slovenia. I am not sure what is up with Slovenia, I guess exceptions to the rule exist everywhere. But they do have an enviable geographic location, and I believe they historically had high human capital values. There is a clear strong connection as well amongst the rest of eastern Europe as well with regards to economic freedom over the past 15 years and their per capita GDP’s.
Personally I find the conclusion inescapable as well a eminently logical. Only people can create wealth, and by allowing people to create wealth they actually create more wealth than when government stands in their way. As far as taxation and overall government spending is concerned, I’d say investment taxes are the least efficient, followed distantly by income taxes, with consumption taxes being the most efficient. Following that logic, I have no trouble seeing how a country like Sweden or Denmark, have managed to do as well as they have. Not all government spending is created equal, despite some rhetoric that makes it seem that way. For example, education spending that is efficient does wonders when leveraged by private sector wealth creation mechanisms. Paying people on the condition that they do nothing on the other hand has obvious problems and is a dubious method of helping someone.
Joan,
You might have a point if the sample of single earners then and now are both random. I think what is probably the case is that more of those single earners come from the lower end of the job spectrum than they used to. And by the way, they still mae twice as much as the single income earners two generations ago!
Why use Heritage numbers when Fraser’s are much better?
http://freetheworld.org/
josh,
Thank you for illustrating my point about libertarians. You write the government is like a “giant riveting gun.” I take this to mean that you think that government can be structured in only one way. That is cannot vary its form. That it can’t sometimes be a screwdriver and sometimes be a hammer, or sometimes be something else. That view simply is not intelligent. (Which isn’t to say that you are not an intelligent person overall, only that your ideology has lead you to adopt an unintelligent position on this issue.)
I am glad to hear that you think that some libertarian positions are not best. Of course, it should be noted at the outset that libertarianism, like other ideologies, is heterogeneous. Thus, by definition, it is impossible for any one libertarian to agree with every idea that might be said to be libertarian, because libertarian positions contradict each other to some degree. Thus, that you reject some positions that might be said to be libertarian does not make you any different than any other libertarian ideologue.
happyjuggler01:
Like Spencer said, maybe you should respond to what I actually said. I am a pragmatist. I do not advocate any particular approach to all problems. Sometimes I think a free market hammer works better than a government screw driver. Sometimes vice versa. Sometimes I would think about modifying a free market hammer or government screw driver, if a different or new tool is most appropriate for a particular problem.
I am not an ideologue, I am a pragmatist.
“So, none of those people working of mcdonald’s or walmart finished high school?”
Well, many I’m sure didn’t finish high school. But finishing high school wasn’t the only requirement. The requirements were:
“1. Finish high school – get the diploma
2. Do NOT get married until after the age of 20
3. Do NOT have kids until after you are married (insert personal here – at least 9 months after!).”
There are few, say, 25 year-olds who were born in this country and who followed all of these requirements and now work at places like Wal-Mart and McDonalds.
joan,
That’s an incredibly biased graph. If you plotted the rise in divorce rates and the rise in single motherhood alongside the single earners, I’m sure the spike in both graphs would correlate to the stagnation of single family incomes.
Single motherhood, especially teen single motherhood, dramatically reduces opportunities for one’s advancement in the workforce. Just think of how hard it would be to raise a kid by yourself, have a job and go to school at night.
The graph you need to prove or disprove you inference would show the real incomes of Nuclear families with a single earner over the past decades. Considering that even with the bias of single motherhood I mentioned earlier the single earner graph has not declined, I would guess that the income nuclear households with a single households have increase, maybe even sharply increased, since the late-60s, early-70s.
“Perhaps that’s being pedantic, but you need to dismount from your pragmatic horse and consider that one can become religious and ideological about anything, including pragmatism.”
Wikipedia scolds me that: Given the diversity among thinkers and the variety among schools of thought that have adopted this term over the years, the term pragmatism has become all but meaningless in the absence of further qualification
That aside, my gut interpretation of pragmatism is that it is concerned with results, and it accepts feedback and adjustment to achieve the desired results. Therefore, pragmatism is not ever locked into a single approach … other than perhaps “problem solving” and “giving it another shot.”
I guess the flip side, for those who would put ideology ahead of pragmatism, is that the problem solving is less important than getting heads (souls?) on board. In that world, what you think is more important than what you acheive.
ragerz,
I think you need to lose this analogy, it’s completely clouding your thinking. The government and the free market are not equivalent “tools”. If the government is sometimes a hammer, sometimes a screwdriver, etc. The free market is nearly always all of these things simultaneously being yielded by a bunch of different carpenters, and maybe even a few McGuyver’s.
David Andersen writes:
“I’d expect a pragmatist to be open to the possibility that some particular ideological point of view may – after considering the evidence – be the most pragmatic!”
Sure. Pragmatism as a method should be up to question. The essence of pragmatism is to look at evidence. Being ideological is religious, evidence is not really needed, and typically ideologues are subject to confirmation bias, whereby they give high weight to evidence that supports their ideology, and low weight or no weight to evidence that casts doubt on it.
We would only reject pragmatism in a particular case if it turned out that looking at the evidence turned out to be harmful for long-term decision making. As it turns out, looking at the evidence is very rarely (never?) harmful for long-term decision making.
Your suggestion that it might make sense to adopt an ideology after looking at some evidence is wrong. Because this would leave us much less open to subsequent evidence. Any commitment to an ideology would shape how we see subsequent evidence and prevent us from intelligently revising our approaches to problems.
matthew:
There has been little change in the percent of childern living with a single mothers since 1985. The effect of baby boomers and women, with or without childern, entering the work force in larger numbers undoubtbly had an effect in the 1970′s but can hardly account for the last 20 years. See for details
http://www.cbpp.org/6-15-01wel.htm
One thing you can clearly see on the original graph is the increase in womens wages as a second earner. Since some of the single worker households are headed by women, the implication is that those headed by men is decreasing for the average to be constant.
josh,
Once again, you illustrate why you are not a pragmatist.
You write:
“For pragmatic reasons, I would hope there wouldn’t be any standards. In fact, I’d prefer to just give cash.”
This is a conclusion that a pragmatist could arrive at (but would be unlikely to do so). But they would only do so after a careful analysis examining many alternatives with an open-mind. You have not examined many alternative permutations with an open mind and considered the consequences of each. Rather, your libertarian philosophy has led you to pick what seems to be the least restrictive alternative. This is exactly what I find problematic about ideology; it leads individuals to gravitate to a particular approach without a careful assessment. You have illustrated my point very well.
I don’t think many people would think that cash was a good idea. What is to stop irresponsible parents from blowing that money on drugs or alcohol or hedonism? Should students be deprived of education due to this sort of behavior by parents?
My problem is, where is this mythical ‘free market’ that people talk about. It certainly isnt in the U.S.A. For example, how much does our current ‘free market’ depend on the Federal and State Highway system, which was primarily laid down with lots of cheap labor from New Deal programs during the 40s, 50s, and 60s? Thank you Mr. Roosevelt for figuring out how to gain political capital for a generation of Democrat Politicians, and create the foundations for an entirely new automobile industry at the same time. How much does our current food economy depend on subsidized corn, wheat, soy, etc? Just ask Archer Daniels Midland Co. what they think of these big government subsidies. Big Government may be bad, but it is better than no Government at all.
toshiba satellite m55 battery
Comments on this entry are closed.