Need help understanding right wing perspective - please

This amounts, in effect, to saying that the government should treat the symptom, but leave the cause alone.

If they are homeless because of their addictions, they will become homeless as long as they are still addicted.

If you provide free shelters for addicted homeless people, you have a choice. You can forbid drug and alcohol use on the premises, and many addicted homeless people will not then avail themselves of the shelter. Or you can allow drug and alcohol use on the premises, and the shelter will become quite literally unihabitable.

Homelessness is a effect, not a cause. Most homeless people are either drunk, schizophrenic, or both. And their dependents.

This is what I meant by the cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach so dear to liberals.

The idea that there might be one person who will not be helped out enough by his neighbors means that the government must set up programs for everyone. Then the public charity drives out the private, and we suffer the loss of community that means that everybody will be more likely to need the big government program.

Regards,
Shodan

We were talking about entitlement programs. I understand the effect of regulatory bodies on the end consumer. The poor are stuck with the bill while it doesn’t hit the wealthy as hard or they simply pick up the medication in Canada or Mexico. Is your world view so twisted that you see everything as agenda versus agenda? If you want to discuss regulatory bodies we can. I thought we were talking about government assistance programs for the poor.

The stated goal of many liberal programs is to descrease the disparity between rich and poor, to protect people who need protecting, etc. But here comes that law of unintended consequences again. Specifically, the concept of regulatory capture. If you’re not familiar with it, it works like this: People pass laws to regulate an industry, to ‘protect’ them from it. Said industry has more money than the people, and more long-term desire to stay engaged in the process that regulates it. Once it comes under the umbrella of the government, it begins to lobby for changes to the law. In the meantime, once the law has been passed, the people fighting for it stop paying attention. Over time, the law shifts and mutates, and becomes a tool that corporations and rich people use to protect themselves against the forces of the marketplace. Drug companies use the law to make it hard for new companies to enter the market. Unions use regulatory capture to change labor laws from a way to protect the worker to a way to ensure to alternative to union labor. Today, the entertainment industry is using the government to pass laws that benefit rich industry executives, at the expense of young students and struggling artists. **
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At least you acknowledge they do sometimes help. Could we elaborate on this point?

For the record, I grew up in the rural south of the USA. My grandmother raised four children, beat cancer twice, lost a kidney and lived to a ripe old happy age thanks to food stamps and welfare. I commend you and your families efforts to not take these things from the government. None of my family has recieved public assistance since my Grandmother but it is nice to know my government had a helping hand when my family was in need. I might not be here otherwise.

Well, this is where the two-sided field of political views in America pops up. Somehow conservatives believes that minimum help/government money shall replace or be equal to what unfortunate people otherwise enjoys of help from their communities, when the truth is that such minimum help would be a step further down the ladder.

The second point is that because people move around a lot more than before due to our industralized society, especially city folks, people are strangers to eachother in a way they never were before, so many do not have someone they can turn to when things get rough. Not like in the old days.

Shodan: replied to me: *And, until you produce a reasonably unbiased cite (by which I do not include any of Mitch Snyder’s fantasies) I will assume that your figure of a million chemical-free homeless is a wild exaggeration. *

?? What do you mean, “wild exaggeration”? (And who is Mitch Snyder?) My estimate of a “million or so” homeless non-addicts follows directly from the numbers and links I gave in my previous post.

To wit, if there are 0.5–3 million homeless adults, and about half that number of homeless children, and 65–85% of the adults have a drug addiction, alcohol addiction, mental illness, or some combination of the three:

Low-end estimate: Assume there are only 0.5 million homeless adults and a full 85% (the upper bound of the above range) of them have an addiction problem. Assume there are only 0.25 million homeless children and (though I believe in fact substance abuse rates among children are generally far, far lower than among adults) a full half of them are on something. Then we have 75,000 homeless adults, and 125,000 homeless children, who are not substance abusers. Total: 200,000 chemical-free homeless.

High-end estimate: Assume there are as many as 3 million homeless adults and only 65% (the lower bound) of them have an addiction problem. Assume there are as many as 1.5 million homeless children and only, say, a quarter of them have an addiction problem. Then we have 1,050,000 homeless adults, and 1,125,000 homeless children, who are not substance abusers. Total: 2,175,000 chemical-free homeless.

Given those bracketing values of one-fifth of a million and over two million, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me to guess that there might be, as I said, approximately a million homeless people who are not substance abusers.

Now then, what part of that calculation or the assumptions it’s based on are you objecting to, and why?

Shodan: If you provide free shelters for addicted homeless people, you have a choice. You can forbid drug and alcohol use on the premises, and many addicted homeless people will not then avail themselves of the shelter.

However, many other addicted homeless people do in fact avail themselves of substance-free shelters. Nobody is claiming that such assistance is going to benefit everybody, much less fix the root cause of everybody’s problem—just that it does in fact provide a substantial benefit to a substantial number of people.

This is what I meant by the cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach so dear to liberals. The idea that there might be one person who will not be helped out enough by his neighbors means that the government must set up programs for everyone.

Silly hyperbole. Nobody is seriously advocating that any programs be set up just in case “there might be one person” who would otherwise be in trouble. But if there are in fact many people who are in trouble without such a program, that’s a powerful argument in favor of establishing one.

That’s why, for example, the movement for universal health care coverage has grown stronger as the number of uninsured Americans has ballooned. Believe me, if it were really only one person who couldn’t afford health insurance in the current system, there wouldn’t be a movement.

Well, I’m sorry if I was not clear. I wrote “physical” suffering because I didn’t want to get into a debate about emotional suffering (per the example I gave). Maybe that just confused the issue, so let’s just say “suffering” and go from there.

Can you give some examples of suffering that exists that you would not want to the gov’t to try to alleviate? (Remember you said that you and your friends would laugh at my suggestion that liberals wanted the gov’t to try to alleviate all forms of suffering.)

As a side note, let me clarify why I have put quotes around the term homeless. Yes, there are people who are destitute and struggling and can’t seem to find shelter. Perhaps they have no relatives they can stay with and are truely down on their luck. I do not want to disparage those folks. Then there are the majority of “homeless” who you see in every city and town-- drug and/or alcohol addicted individuals walking around in a constant stupor, unable even to attend to their personal hygene. Their homelessness is a secondary consequence of their addiction and although they may be physically capable of working, they are so out of it mentally (due to their addiction) that they have made it impossible for them to work. Frankly, to lump both types of people into the term “homeless” is an insult to those in the first category.

You’ll probably chastise me again for making generallizations about liberals, but it appears to me that many liberals try to sanitize a social problem by giving it a sympathy arosing name.
Drug addicted bums become “homeless”. Illegal aliens become “undocumented immigrants”.

If I understand your post, I think we are actually in agreement.

What Sam Stone pointed out (and I agree) is that people tend to withdraw private charitable efforts when a government program exists to achieve the same things. This is why mimimum government help is a step downwards - because government relief programs are seen as a replacement for private charity, rather than a supplement to it.

This isn’t exactly what conservatives think should happen, but what we have observed happening. Thus charitable giving in the US during the 1980s went up. As the tax burden was reduced (with its concurrent stimulant effect on the economy), and the perceived role of the federal government in charitable relief was reduced (notice I said perceived), people were less likely to say, “Oh, let Uncle Sam do it”.

If I misunderstood your point, I apologize.

Actually, that is exactly what I thought the argument was. Sam Stone quoted the example of the farmer who received charitable relief from his neighbors. The immediate counter-example was, “Well, what about the person who doesn’t have any neighbors?”

Mitch Snyder is (actually was - he committed suicide in 1990) a homeless advocate who is the source of “three million homeless in America” figure. When challenged on the figure, he stated that he had made the figure up “to get your attention”.

Most unbiased counts put the number of homeless in America at roughly half a million. Therefore, if three quarters of them are chemically dependent and/or schizoid, there would be around a hundred thousand homeless who are not chemically dependent - not even the same order of magnitude as a million.

Exaggeration of the number of homeless, and distress when the exaggerations cannot be confirmed, is common. Some homeless advocates recommended that shelter providers refuse to release data to the US Census Bureau in 1990. They were (IMO) getting an excuse ready when it became clear that their estimates of the number of homeless in America were, in my phrase, a wild exaggeration.

Regards,
Shodan

Hank Fescue said:

I gave you plenty of examples of the bad things entitlement programs do. Did you not read the story of the Canadian fishermen vs the Americans? Would you call Canada’s social safety net for fishermen a success? Do you think those people are better off in the long run with the assistance?

Here are another couple of universal truths that Conservatives feel Liberals don’t pay enough attention to:

  1. If you subsidize something, you get more of it. Subsidize fishing, and you’ll get overfishing. Subsidize poverty, and more people will stay in poverty. When the U.S. made it harder to collect welfare (thanks to welfare reform under Bill Clinton - to his credit), fewer people stayed in lifestyles that required welfare to support it. In every country you go to, you can measure the size of the welfare population by how much money welfare provides. Canada has a very generous welfare system - and we have almost twice as many people below the poverty line as in the U.S. Something like 17% or 18% vs 10% or 11%.

  2. All major changes to the economic decisionmaking of the citizenry will have major unintended consequences. And liberals almost never consider them. All they look at is the problem, and the direct effects of the solution. All the myriad side-effects are ignored.

I will give you a perfect example of this: Universal daycare. This may not be a big issue in the U.S. right now, but in other countries where socialism has advanced farther, the front-lines of the debate include the idea that everyone should have access to free daycare. Let’s looks at some of the concepts by this:

Universality: This is a cherished principle among socialists. They don’t just want a safety net for the poorest, they want universal coverage for all. We already subsidize daycare for the poor in Canada. But to socialists, this ‘stigmatizes’ them. Better to just give it to everyone. Plus, they argue that it’s not fair that anyone should have to pay to have their kids cared for, while others don’t. In Canada, it is also illegal to seek private medical care. EVERYONE has to go through public health care. It’s universal. In the U.S., the prescription health care coverage for seniors is universal, and not means-tested.

This ridiculous yet cherished notion among socialists makes every potential social program orders of magnitude more expensive. It also causes them to fall into the category of:

Legislating wealth: The argument is that day care is very expensive, and people shouldn’t have to pay it. So who IS going to pay it? The money fairy? Same with plans to socialize health care. The argument is, “We can’t afford our health care, so the government must step in.” Somehow, invoking the magic of government is supposed to make health care affordable. Aside from the ludicrous notion that government can make things cheaper and more effective, it totally ignores the fact that we can’t afford all the health care we want, simply because health care is more expensive than we can afford. It also ignores the subsidy effect mentioned above (if you subsidize something, you get more of it). Give everyone free access to health care, and the demand for it will skyrocket. In the meantime, the supply will dwindle as fewer people choose to become doctors and work in a rigid, controlled environment. The result == shortages.

The social side-effects are ignored: Just what do you think the result would be of universal daycare? I can tell you - the result would be an explosion of kids put into daycare. Many, many families have one parent stay home to look after the children simply because the added cost of daycare makes the second paycheck somewhat irrelevant. Remove that economic restraining device, and millions of kids who would otherwise be raised by their own parents will wind up being raised in state-run institutions. Yet, whenever that is brought up in these universal daycare debates, the socialists roll their eyes and go, “Yeah, right.”

But this is just the first, most obvious side-effect. The pernicious ones are the ones harder or impossible to predict, because a complex economy operates somewhat chaotically. For instance, where are all the extra day care workers going to come from? What if there aren’t enough? You’ll have to raise salaries. But if you do that, you’re going to put pressure on the other industries that employ young women (the primary demographic group of daycare workers). Shortages appear elsewhere. And what about the tax burden? What will that do to the economy? Wouldn’t it just be MARVY if the added new burden raised unemployment rates, meaning all these now-childfree women can’t find jobs in the first place? What have we accomplished? And what are the side-effects of millions of kids undergoing fundamental changes to the way they are raised? What will this do to the juvenile crime rate? To divorce statistics? No one knows. But socialists are just fine with rolling the dice. Because they think they have a plan for everything.

I don’t oppose a safety net. My attitude is, “We are a rich society - we can afford to be magnanimous.” But don’t call it an entitlement, and make it clear that no one OWES people a home, a job, a meal. We offer it because we wish to help. There SHOULD be a social stigma attached to being on perpetual social assistance. People should want to work their asses off to get off the dole.

All social programs should be means-tested. Is there a problem with poor people having access to health care? Fine. Provide basic health care for the poorest. But universal health care is a disaster, and unnecessary. Do old people on fixed incomes have a hard time affording their new drugs? Fine. Prove to the state that your drugs are bankrupting you, and we’ll lend a hand. But universal prescription drug benefits? Ridiculous. When Bill Gates turns 65, he can buy his own damned drugs.

Government assistance should operate on the margins. It shouldn’t be the main organizing force of society. And if that’s the case, we’ve already gone FAR past the point at which new programs are necessary, and should be in a phase now where we are going through the programs that currently exist, looking to see how we can trim them and make them more efficient, and also how to install incentives that cause people to want to leave the programs. That’s what welfare reform was all about, and it worked spectacularly.

Yes, Shodan, you understood me correctly. I’m not sure if we’re actually in agreement since I suspect that you feel that a) tax money shouldn’t go to welfare, and b) out of fear that if “minimum rights” were established they would soon be “big minium rights”. That’s fair enough, hopefully we can agree that [if there are] needy who don’t enjoy private charity they should not be left entirely out in the cold.

I’m don’t agree entirely that people tend to withdraw private charitable efforts when a government program exists to achieve the same things though, which you and Sam Stone pointed out. While it’s correct that generous government programs do replace private charity, it’s my experience that local private charity doesn’t disappear, but shifts to bigger private charity organizations. I’ve also seen numbers concluding such a shift do in fact occur, and that private charity in Western Europe is very high.

I agree with Sam Stone here. It’s a good example of a few bad things social democrats have tried to do. I would like to further comment by mentioning that the reason for such failures is not “human degeneration”, but the attempt to save an industry sector which are no longer competitive. It’s the failure to understand that trade and industry is always in a transition because of foreign competition and new technology. Europe once had a viable ready-made clothing industry. We don’t anymore, the Asians got it. An industry sector which has become non-competitive will never turn a profit and should be allowed to die. Of course, the people should be entitled to unemployment benefits and maybe some how-to-start-new-business help, but the latter is a safety net++, it’s not an attempt to defy the forces of a global market by keeping non-competitive businesses alive.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that the gap between social democracy and sosialism is as big as the gap between social democracy and moderate conservatism.

While I agreed with you on one of your last post Same Stone about the fishermen example, I don’t agree on this one. Basically, first you say that mothers who are alone with their babies will get all that free time when they hand over they babies to daycare centers, then you claim that there will be a shortage of daycare centers worker. Don’t you think some of those mothers now would go and work at daycare centers? As I’ve already written about before, there is a string of nations who has had huge successes with Universality and Legislating wealth. You say that all social programs should be means-tested. Well, the fact is, all new social programs are. Frankly, the issue is much more complex than you expressed.

I encourage you to read this post if you haven’t.

You think of safety nets as creating money out of thin air. It’s not. Social benefits are either used to maintain a viable workforce, OR assure a minimum level of existence (and believe me, in other countries you don’t want to be on welfare any more than in the US).

Can you be more specific. Which countries have been able to “legistlate wealth”, and how has this been achieved? Certainly it is possible to legislate income redistribution, but how is any wealth actually created in that process?

You are right John, me English escapes me sometimes. I was referring to Sams post above mine where he used the expression “legislate wealth”. I wasn’t saying that you can wealth out of nothing with the help of legislation. If I understood Sam correctly he was referring to income redristribution, my point was that sometimes governmental income redistribution would result in more wealth than no redistribution, and that quite a few countries has had great success at it. I would be happe to give you some examples if you still would like so.

Conservatives are in agreement with you here.

Part of our commitment to limited government lies in the realization that, as government becomes involved in more and more industry sectors (health care, “smart growth”, corporate welfare, etc.), those industry sectors will not be allowed to fail, even if they will never turn a profit. Amtrak subsidies in the US are one example; PBS funding in some ways is another.

Regards,
Shodan

You think this is an *improvement? To take children out of their own homes and put them in large government facilities, and then take the mothers who were raising their own children and place them in charge of other people’s children? In the meantime, taxes get raised on families so they HAVE to go to work in order to survive? To me, this sounds like insanity.

The left has for a long time held up the example of social democratic Western Europe as an example of how wonderful all these programs turn out to be. But Western Europe is not the United States. It is closely packed, spends very little on defense, and the society is very different. And even so, Western Europe is in crisis. Have you seen what’s happening in France and Germany? Unions out of control, constant strikes, low economic growth, high deficits and debt… If this is your model for social democracy, you can have it.

Canada is always presented as a model of how the U.S. could run ‘better’. We have more social programs. We have universal health care. We have a higher minimum wage. But there is no money left over for a military budget, so it’s been cut to the point of collapse. Our health care system is in crisis. Nurses and doctors flee to the United States. Waiting lists for necessary surgery are long. Our mortality rates for cancer lag the U.S. by as much as 20%, no doubt due to the extra time it takes to make a diagnosis due to waiting lists. Our welfare rolls are larger, our poverty rate is higher. You guys are panicking an unemployment rate of 6%? Ours is 7.8%. And even with all that, we don’t have many of the structural problems the U.S. does. Our cities and infrastructure are newer, our population is more homogenous, and we have huge amounts of natural resources. Alberta alone kicks 9 billion dollars a year more into the federal treasury than it takes out, due to oil revenue. That’s like having a single state kick 90 billion dollars a year to the feds, over and above income taxes.

So we started with many natural advantages, and yet our economy is lagging the U.S. The Canadian dollar, which used to be worth more than the U.S. dollar, now fluctuates between .65 and .75 cents. Our citizens are taxed much more heavily.

The Fraser institute did a study on economic freedom in North America. They added up the cost of regulations, the level of taxation, and the amount of choice the citizens had. The list was instructive - the 50 U.S. states were on top, followed by all the Canadian provinces which came in dead last. Except for one: Alberta. We have the most conservative government in Canada, and as a result we rank 22 in North America for economic freedom. And no, we don’t have as many social programs here as the other provinces do, and our government is smaller and does less. But guess what? People from those other, more enlightened provinces are fleeing to Alberta in droves. We have jobs, a dynamic economy, good schools, and a happy population. It’s a great place to live. And it’ll stay that way as long as we keep the socialists out of the government.

Sam, either didn’t you read well enough, or you misunderstood. You got it backwards. No government creates programs because they are bored, they create programs to rectify a problem. In this case that would be women who wants to work but have to stay home because work and children is difficult to combine. In many countries, public daycare became widespread after education reforms in the 1960’s sent many women to higher education, followed by the introduction of
these women into the workforce in the 1970’s.

Secondly, I have never said the US or Canada should do anything. If most women aren’t working in the US, why should they keep their children anywhere else but home? They shouldn’t.

Just don’t say that such solutions never will work, when they in fact work very well in many countries.

I guess that depends on your definition of ‘problem’. Being able to have a job and raise children at the same time is just not a problem - it’s a fact of life. It applies to young and old, rich and poor. The ‘problem’ comes in when the person cannot survive without working, and cannot work because she has children and no father.

So really, this is just a problem of poverty. To attack it with universal free day care for every person in the country, no matter how well off they are, is ridiculous.

It’s only a problem if the woman HAS to work. If she ‘wants’ to work, she shouldn’t have had children, or she should work out an arrangement with her husband to split the work so she can maintain a career. But to create a giant government bureaucracy and a nationwide collection of daycare centers is just ridiculous. It violates my principle that the government should operate on the margins, and should not be a major organizing force for everyday life. If you make a reasonable living, can support yourself, and are in good health, you should have little to no interaction with the government whatsoever.

No, in many countries public daycare became widespread when the ‘baby boom’ reached childbearing age, and used their demographic clout to buy themselves some free bread and circuses at the expense of all those who have to pay for it. Another example of regulatory capture, this time by a demographic bubble.

When the boomers retire, I fully expect to see an explosion of government retirement benefits, too. The prescription drug benefit is the first of many to come.

Liberalism vs. Conservatism in a nutshell.

I think most conservatives and Libertarians would say that politicians DO create programs for all sorts of bad reasons, including “boredom” in the sense of wanting to “do something” about problems that are better left alone.

I agree with-left wing ideals. I vote right-wing because of the inability of the government to use tax money responsibly, and because of how often politicians lie about their plans for the revenue. I think this is the case for a lot of right-wing voters: It comes down to simply being jaded about the whole system, and preferring not to dump more money into it.

This always assumes that those politicians that self-identify as ‘conservative’ or ‘right wing’ actually attempt to lower the total level of spending in government. I have never noticed this to be the case.

This is true, but the reason is because they have realized that it is political suicide to do so. Look at Reagan: Government spending on social programs under Reagan increased, in some cases quite substantially, and yet he was still portrayed as an evil ogre who cut the heart out of the government.

There are many, many programs which should be cut, yet which are politically untouchable because of the powerful demographics they serve. It took decades of gross mismanagement and widespread stories of total failure before the political will developed to reform welfare. If you even mention cuts to seniors programs, the AARP will make damned sure you pay a heavy price for it. The left is very good at portraying even small reductions in the increase of social spending at disasters that are going to lead to people dying in the streets.

So conservatives wind up promoting tax cuts, because people tax cuts, but they seem powerless to control spending, because no one wants spending cuts.

Which is why I think the only solution is to try to slow the growth in social spending to something below the rate of economic growth, so that the country can grow itself back to economic freedom rather than cut the programs. Which makes it all the more egregious when ‘conservatives’ like George W. Bush and his Dad come along and actually increase the rate of social spending. No doubt about it - George W. Bush is a big spender. If he were a Democrat, Republicans would be screaming about his profiglate ways. But because he’s a Republican, the other 'pubbies give him a pass. And his spending increases aren’t just about security - he’s increased funding for numerous non-defense agencies, such as the Department of Education.

Bill Clinton, on the other hand, turned out to be a fairly good steward of the government. Spending stayed reasonably constrained, outstripped by economic growth.