Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!lll-crg!nike!ucbcad!ucbvax!ametek.UUCP!walton From: walton@ametek.UUCP Newsgroups: mod.politics Subject: Welfare, gun control, and philosophy (long) Message-ID: <12228707627.51.MCGREW@RED.RUTGERS.EDU> Date: Wed, 6-Aug-86 15:37:16 EDT Article-I.D.: RED.12228707627.51.MCGREW Posted: Wed Aug 6 15:37:16 1986 Date-Received: Fri, 8-Aug-86 05:42:48 EDT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: ametek!walton@csvax.caltech.edu Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 346 Approved: poli-sci@red.rutgers.edu Keith Lynch writes: Sorry, I didn't watch that (or any) TV program. Could you please use books and magazines as references [for welfare history]? Sure, but I'm not sure its any more accessible to you. There was a multi-part series in the Los Angeles Times within the last year on the poor, who they are, what they're like, and so on. (You have a habit of arguing with anecdotes.) Real life is made up of millions of anecdotes. YOU have a habit of arguing from TV shows. Is that where you get all your information? Let us refrain from personal insults here. As I mentioned previously, I do not at present own a TV set either. The Bill Moyers documentary (which is the only TV show I've mentioned in this dialogue) was that rare thing--a network program with real information in it. You argued against welfare on the basis of people you knew who were collecting welfare and not working (at one point--you have other arguments). I might as well argue for gun control because I know of people who were shot to death by the owners of legal handguns. I don't. Anecdotes are a poor basis for public policy. For every time a gun is used by a private citizen to prevent a crime, there are 4 suicides and 10 murders committed with guns by the owner of that gun. I have seen this before, and I thought it had been given a decent burial. It seems bogus statistics always come back to haunt us. Do you claim that it is not a fact? If you don't, then it is not a bogus statistic. If you do, please cite another study which shows more privately owned handguns are used to stop crimes than are used to commit murder. 1) A person who was considering a life of crime decides otherwise when he realizes how many people are armed. If he would have committed a burglary per week for 50 years, that is over 2,500 crimes prevented with guns. And how many of those do you count? Zero. Talk about bogus statistics! If you're going to count hypothetical crimes not committed as the result of private gun ownership, you also have to count hypothetical murders not committed as a result of the ban of said ownership. [Note that I did not say, and do not say now, that I favor a ban on all gun ownership.] Many of the murders and all of the suicides could have been committed without guns. Yes, but a handgun (1) can kill at a distance and (2) is easily concealed. How do you feel about private ownership of mortar shells? Hand grenades? Land mines? Atomic weapons? In Switzerland, every adult owns a gun. The murder rate is very low there, much lower that in the US. There are few burglaries and few other crimes. And the Nazis didn't even THINK of invading Switzerland, despite having invaded or being allied with every bordering country. This is a fine myth for the gun nuts, which I am happy to now explode. The guns in Switzerland are owned by the government, and are placed in a sealed case in your home which is inspected every year. You are heavily fined if the seal is broken except as a result of your annual training in the militia or to defend yourself from another gun wielder. I would actually favor such a system here. As for the Nazis: they did consider invading Switzerland, but decided that the strategic gains of possessing Switzerland were not outweighed by the its value as a neutral country and the fact that they would not have to fortify their border with it. The Alps are a great barrier as well. Are you willing to force gun owners to support families whose breadwinner is killed by their gun, or to pay for day care for children whose mother is murdered? If THE OWNER shot the breadwinner, certainly! If the breadwinner was shot with a stolen gun, of course not. The person who pulled the trigger is responsible. At last we reach an agreement. This raises a general point, which I will get to below. If someone steals your car and runs over someone, are you responsible? A lot more people are killed by cars than by guns! True, but cars are not DESIGNED to kill people. Handguns are. Seriously, I consider it a grave insult to be told that I cannot be trusted with firearms. Not seriously, I consider it a grave insult to be told that I cannot be trusted with 5 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium. The only logical response to drunk driving is severe penalties. That is also the only logical response to drugged driving. Should it be illegal to drive drugged at all? Or should you only be penalized if you actually injure people or property while doing so? See also below. I don't understand; you responded to my comment about having a lot of people in prison by saying that we should have even MORE people in prison, and for longer times. No, I was giving examples to show how completely random the justice system is. I stand corrected. Uniform sentences would require the federal government to pass laws which would supersede the states'. I don't favor mandatory sentence laws. Room must be left for the judgement of the judge and the jury. What we need is more common sense on the part of judges and juries. We agree here. How do you reach this desirable goal? Why do you automatically assume that such a law would have to be a federal law rather than a state law? Because if certain states had more lenient penalties than others, people would move to those states to commit crimes. I suppose the alternative is to have the states voluntarily band together and enact uniform penalties (subject to the common-sense criterion above), but this probably isn't possible--look at the huge state to state variation in the penalties for marijuana possession, for example. Do you think it should be illegal for a group of workers to voluntarily band together and go to their employer and say, "None of us are going to come to work unless you give us all a raise?" No. Do you think it should be illegal for the employer to say "get back to work right now or you are all fired"? As happened with the air traffic controllers strike? No The [social security] system is currently projected to have a 10 trillion dollar surplus by 2010, ... This is bogus accounting. They don't have a surplus unless it is possible to end the social security tax and to continue to give social security benefits to everyone who ever contributed, equal to at least the amount (plus inflation) that they contributed. That's like saying that IBM is one billion dollars in the red (or whatever), because they could not meet that much of their outstanding obligations if they stopped selling any computers. What they mean by surplus is if everyone continues to pay taxes (to be increased as necessary) everyone retired will continue to get benefits. No, they actually mean surplus. The SS taxes now being paid are more than the retirees of the next 30 years will require; the amount of the excess is projected to be 10 trillion (yes, a 1 with 12 zeroes after it) by 2010. The article I read this in was in the NY Times in August 1985. (I only read the NYT when I visit my parents in NJ, hence my precision about the date.) Please do not assume I am a Scrooge just becuase I think that a person should have control over their wealth... Just as Scrooge freely chose to voluntarily donate some of his wealth near the end of the book. Which doesn't change the fact that the plight of the poor in Dickens's London was not improved much by voluntary charity. Other responsibilites, primarily work and family, prevent me from continuing this dialogue further. I am sorry to hear that. Perhaps if you use a really good text editor and practice rapid typing, a few hours each weekend would suffice to continue the discussion? Typing isn't the problem; the time to compose them is. I decided to respond to your message on my lunch hour, but I must painfully admit to not being very enlightened by it. [Books you recommended:] Anything by Ayn Rand. _The_Moon_is_a_Harsh_Mistress_ by Robert Heinlein. Anything by L. Neil Smith. I was hoping for non-fiction. I have read "The Moon is..." and "Atlas Shrugged." The former was not set in the US of today; it is doubtful that the latter was, and it did not in any event set forth a way of moving the US to a libertarian society without extreme chaos. I might just as well recommend Dickens's books, or The Grapes of Wrath, as justification for socialism. They at least have the advantage of being based on real people's real experiences. SOME THOUGHTS ON LIBERTARIANISM (At the risk of being pretentious.) I. Public and private good I just had an interesting discussion with someone here at work who considers himself a libertarian by philosophy, though he admits that he sees no practical way to move the US to a libertarian society at present. He reminded me of something that we had both learned in an introductory economics course at Caltech, though I had forgotten it, and that is the distinction between a private and a public good. A private good is an action (or inaction) whose benefits only go to the person or persons taking that action (or inaction). A public good is a course of action from which everyone, or at least most people, benefit, even if only one or a few people take that action. It is public goods, I maintain, which are the proper domain of the government to provide, funded by mandatory taxes. The classic example of a public good is national defense. Everyone who lives in the US benefits from its existence, even if they contribute nothing to it. Thus, every individual would decide to contribute nothing to national defense, because he gets its benefits whether he does or not. Result: no defense. Moreover, in the current age of atomic weapons, it is clearly unreasonable to expect a completely voluntary military (which I believe libertarians favor) to defend the nation. (Some argue that welfare is a public good; I'm not so sure.) Do libertarians deny the existence of public goods? If yes, they had better have some damn good ideas about how to defend us from Soviet ICBM's in the absence of mandatory taxes for national defense. II. Property rights, or "Whattaya mean I can't build my A-Bomb?" Another thought from Econ 101: what one can or can't do with one's property depends on how one defines property rights, and property right conflicts can always be adjudicated by contract--a bribe, is what my professor called it. For example, if property rights are defined in such a way that you are allowed to build a factory on any property you own, your neighbors should be willing to pay you not to pollute. If, on the other hand, they are defined so that your property right includes clean air above your property, then the factory builder should be willing to pay you to allow him to pollute or, equivalently, pay for pollution control devices out of his own pocket. The practical difficulty arises when one person's use of her property causes harm to others who are either very distant, or causes harm far in excess of her ability to compensate for such harm. Acid rain is a good example. It is generated by Midwest coal-burning power plants and mills. It harms a wide area, including killing of fish and damage to potentially harvestable timber. If the power plant owners have to pay for this damage, who do they pay, and how is it divided up? What if they cannot possibly raise enough money to pay for all the damage done? And if you can make the utilities pay, they will pass the cost on to their customers--who aren't being hurt by the acid rain, but are paying the cost of getting rid of it. Governments have responded to these practical difficulties with a host of laws, which are restrictions on personal decisions--you must own a car with a muffler, and whose pollutant output is less than some standard; your factory cannot put into the air less than a certain amount of sulfur dioxide, and so on. Robert Oliver, an economics professor at Caltech, has proposed another possible solution, which uses the free market--selling licenses to pollute. The government would issue certificates, each of which was good for the right to put a certain amount of sulfur dioxide in the air. A free market would be allowed in these certificates after their initial sale by the government. Oliver addresses the practical implementation of this scheme in his article in Caltech's "Engineering and Science" magazine. But he warns that it only works in the LA Basin, where the effects of the pollution are restricted by geography to a limited area. How does a libertarian address these problems? Do you have an alternative to pollution-control laws? III. Capitalism, or "Dr. Peptide's Liver Pills" A functioning capitalist system is the most efficient possible allocation of goods and services. That said, capitalism can only function in a given market if all of the following conditions hold: (1) Free (as in no-cost) entry and exit from the market. (2) Multiple competitors (3) The market price of a good accurately reflects its cost. (4) Buyers have all the information they need to assess the value of a good. All of these assumptions break down in the real world. Wheat farming costs a lot to get into, and a lot to get out of. There exist natural monopolies, such as electric power, where the largest producer is always the most efficient and can thus drive all competitors out of business. Prices of goods do not reflect "hidden costs" such as the damage done to faraway trout streams by the excessive use of chemical fertilizers. And manufacturers have a vested interest in hiding harmful side-effects of products they sell. Government intervenes when these conditions are not met, via such things as labeling and truth-in-advertising laws, the Food and Drug Administration, anti-trust laws, and government regulation of such unavoidable monopolies as electric power and (until recently) the phone company. Government also intervenes with such things as product testing, to ensure that buyers know that a manufacturer's claims are correct; such claims are often difficult to verify without access to a large, well-equipped laboratory. Do libertarians have a solution to these very real problems? IV. Individual liberty, or "Bang, you're dead!" Here is where I mostly sympathize with the libertarian ideal: that you should be able to take any action which demonstrably does not harm anyone else. The practical problem, again, is that there are certain activities which are inherently very dangerous and have such a large potential for really catastrophic damage to others. In these cases (drunk driving, making home-made A bombs), the government feels justified in banning these activities, even if a given instance of said activity does not actually result in any harm to others. Advocates of handgun control make a similar argument in their own favor. On the other side of the political fence, those who favor bans of certain drugs judge that legal alcohol and tobacco cause such harm to those who do not engage in their use that it justifies continuance of the ban on other illegal drugs (although attempting to reinstate a ban on something after it is once legal is a practical impossibility). I assume libertarians are against such bans on personal activities, even those with large amounts of potential harm to others. What alternative do you offer to protect those who are killed by handgun owners or drunk drivers? If capital punishment, then how does your abhorrence of government square with giving government the most dangerous power of all--the power to deprive citizens of their lives? V. Conclusion I hope this hasn't been too long or boring! A final few points: assuming that you can answer the above questions in a manner which will satisfy a majority of your fellow citizens, can you lay out a plan for the conversion of the United States into a libertarian society? To borrow only one point from Lynn Gazis (sp?), how would you compenstate those who are already committed by decisions made due to past government actions? For example, many people moved to the suburbs in the last 40 years because of roads which were paid for out of general taxes, so they may not be able to afford their share of the entire upkeep cost of those roads in the absence of general taxes or afford the cost of moving someplace closer to where they work. Stephen Walton, Ametek Computer Research Division ARPA: ametek!walton@csvax.caltech.edu -------