If the income tax were abolished, there would be no taxes to dodge & the stimulus effect would far surpass any rebate from the government. It would also be equitable since the wealthy can hire the accountants, lawyers, lobbyists, as well as make laws themselves to game the current system to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. If we remove this bloat, then it's one less thing for the 99% to worry about.
Governments needs income to provide services like electricity, healthcare, military, roads, infrastructure in general etc etc... and that simply requires taxation. How would you go about gather all that dough? Or are you saying everything should be privatized? Or corporate taxation only? That sounds like a ludicrously idea to me given how easy it is to avoid corporate taxes altogether.
Organized crime syndicates needs income as well. They even printed services such as feeding the poor, building roads, & martial defense from time to time. Better yet, they also believe in Democracy.
Point being, the government can earn its money just like the rest of us; by providing services in the open market which we have the option to purchase or not purchase. If the government provides useful services, people will voluntarily purchase those services. If not, the government will need to provide more valuable services, reduce costs, or go bankrupt. Either way, the citizenry should not be liable for the irresponsible mismanagement, grifting, & mass violence that is made possible by compulsory income tax.
I think this assessment falls prey to the usual issues libertarianism has as it tries to move from the theoretical to the practical. It relies on a couple assumptions to ensure that good decisions can be made by the citizenry: 1) that information is symmetric and acquiring this information is relatively frictionless and 2) that humans make rational decisions, particularly as it pertains to risk uncertainty.
There's quite a bit of research that undermines each assumption, especially in behavior economics.
Your assessment falls prey to classic self-serving statist blunders in logic, such as the state has the ultimate monopoly on ethics & it's enforcement.
Even if information is asymmetric & humans don't always make rational decisions, you are running under the assumption that human government officials are somehow immune from these asymmetries, irrational decisions, & bouts of dishonesty. With government having the ultimate monopoly of power & acting "for the greater good", it's not surprising that government officials will always act in their own interests at the expense of the citizenry. Every system is ultimately gamed over time. Even if the government official is 100% benevolent, maintains 100% benevolence over the entire career, & gains sufficient power to make decisions (probably impossible), that official lacks the ability to model every citizen's unique set of preferences & optimizations better than that individual citizen's ability to make their own choices.
>you are running under the assumption that human government officials are somehow immune from these asymmetries
I may need you to elaborate a bit on this for me to really understand your point. Am I claiming that politicians are magically immune from cognitive biases? Absolutely not; I'm actually claiming the opposite: nobody is immune from them. That is exactly why laws and regulations exist to provide the guardrails for better decisions. There's certainly a point where overreach happens, but I don't think you've yet made a very concrete argument about how the extreme of no government somehow is an improvement over some government.
Or are you claiming government can't alleviate the asymmetries of information (the actual 'asymmetry' in my OP)? I do think the government is better at this via regulations. See the Sarbanes-Oxley Act about disclosing accurate financial information passed in the wake of Enron as a concrete example.
>official lacks the ability to model every citizen's unique set of preferences & optimizations better than that individual citizen's ability to make their own choices.
Except it's not a case of a lone official. It tends to be a case of groups of officials and experts. And yes, each has their own biases, but with a diverse group there's a lesser chance that a single bias will overrule the decision (unlike at the individual level). With modern society as complicated as it is, do you think an individual has the bandwidth to properly gauge risk in terms of items like public health, transportation, engineering, etc.? The mechanism chosen by citizenry in most Western countries is to choose the constituent politicians and policies via a voting mechanism rather than shoulder the burden of making all those decisions individually.
The utopian ideal you espouse seems better suited to fun though experiments than a large society that must also factor in pragmatism. It's a bit of a privileged indulgence in that sense. I suspect that's why it hasn't ever been implemented in a large, diverse, and complicated society facing tough problems. I understand the seductive allure of libertarianism; it feels like a straightforward and simple way to maximize freedom. Unfortunately, most people in society want to optimize across more domains than just freedom. They want security as well as other objectives that may be in conflict with absolute freedom. You can see this play out in countries that are borderline failed states. Unfortunately, I think the framework you advocate to maximize freedom almost naively over-simplifies the model of the human condition.
> extreme of no government somehow is an improvement over some government
I'm giving the argument to remove the income tax, not to remove government completely. I'm aware that power vacuums will be filled one way or another. However, the government has grow unchecked due to self-interested officials (bureaucrats, politicians, contractors, etc.) & lobbyists.
> Or are you claiming government can't alleviate the asymmetries of information (the actual 'asymmetry' in my OP)? I do think the government is better at this via regulations. See the Sarbanes-Oxley Act about disclosing accurate financial information passed in the wake of Enron as a concrete example.
As stated in my other post, you statists are very predictable. Sarbanes-Oxley is simply the same interests that perpetrated the centralization & speculation that led to the stock market crash to be the industry regulators. The same revolving door is in EVERY SINGLE regulatory body. The revolving door between regulator and industry effectively allows the large industry players to regulate the industry, thereby adding undue stress to competitors.
> It tends to be a case of groups of officials and experts. And yes, each has their own biases
That the "officials and experts" have common interests that are at odds with those who they are regulating. The word "political class" means something. Do some research on the implications of the "political class" & it's numerous examples of circling the wagons against any grass-roots citizen oversight.
> The utopian ideal you espouse seems better suited to fun though experiments than a large society that must also factor in pragmatism. It's a bit of a privileged indulgence in that sense. I suspect that's why it hasn't ever been implemented in a large, diverse, and complicated society facing tough problems.
If you study history, the Income tax was introduced to raise money for a war that ultimately killed about 100 Million people. Before the income tax & before the FED, the world had unmatched growth. We are the beneficiaries of this innovation, that occurred BEFORE THE INCOME TAX & BEFORE THE FED. The surplus created by the innovation of the population, not the government, created the "privileged indulgence" of the government to siphon money away from the population to support the income of self-interested parties.
You statists are also predictable, in that you forget who pays the bills of the state. So you justify your theft of the population by claiming that the population is somehow spoiled or privileged. You statists have contempt for the people who support you, which is why the state has a terrible history of perpetrating mass genocide against it's own population many times in history.
Your naively over-simplistic historically revisionist ideal that the state is somehow the source of innovation, ingenuity, & human progress is simply incorrect. People make things happen.
The state is an expense & will almost always do tasks in a more expensive, more bloated, less effective way. Why? Because there is no feedback loop to incentivize good behavior while disincentivizing bad behavior of government officials & processes. Let's be real, the state, despite it's high minded rhetoric, always devolves into an organized criminal enterprise & conquerors siphoning the energy away from the people who do the real work in making the world a better place.
> I'm giving the argument to remove the income tax, not to remove government completely.
Then maybe you shouldn't be calling other people "statists". Especially you shouldn't be using it as a put-down or a condescending dismissal.
> Before the income tax & before the FED, the world had unmatched growth.
It also had unmatched financial crises every decade or so. (Yeah, I know, we had the Great Depression with the Fed existing. We also had the mess in 2008. That's one and a half in a hundred years. That's a far cry from where we were without the Fed.) So maybe don't trumpet how wonderful everything was pre-1913, because it had a downside that destroyed a lot of people.
> Then maybe you shouldn't be calling other people "statists". Especially you shouldn't be using it as a put-down or a condescending dismissal.
He started it by trying to put me down as being a Libertarian. Statist is an accurate term. It's only a put-down because when you look at it, it's a self-serving & ultimately abusive position. I don't need to try very hard b/c it's obvious that the statist position is ultimately about a tranfer of wealth from the people who do the real work of making the world better to the people who want to control others.
> It also had unmatched financial crises every decade or so
There was a feedback loop, often based on speculation & financialization.
> That's one and a half in a hundred years
You forgot the S&L crash in 1986, the dot com bust, the housing bust, the neverending & accelerating QE (money printing), etc.
The current fiat petrol-dollar paradigm, that directly perpetuated neverending wars, is crashing around us as we speak.
> So maybe don't trumpet how wonderful everything was pre-1913, because it had a downside that destroyed a lot of people.
I fail to see how the invention & propagation of electricity & sanitation leading to the rapid increase in life expectancy and unprecedented increase in real (as opposed to fiat, which is another blunder of statists) wealth, "destroyed a lot of people".
You have an argument that certain aspects of industralization & centralization had negative effects on the human. However, the positive aspects of our growth & transcendence of previous poverty was due to the spirit of human ingenuity & the collective energy of the population to improve their lives & the lives around them. Governments only (with few exceptions) got in the way of this progress.
The S&L crisis is not remotely comparable to the Crash of 1893, say - to the point that trying to use the S&L crisis as a counterargument to my point is laughable. And why didn't it turn into something like 1893? Because of the Fed and the FDIC.
Sure, we've had "crises" pretty regularly. Those crises are on average much less severe than crises were before the Fed.
1929 occurred on the FED's watch. So did 1971, 2008, & these https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_economic_crises. So will the next series of crises currently in motion for at least the next couple of years & probably for a decade or more...
@bumpy, it's amusing that you, being the statist, are tag-teaming to downvote my comments like it even matters. It's just pathetic passive-aggressive behavior on your part...
One more time: 1929 was comparable to previous crises. 2008 came very close to being huge, but did far less damage than a real crash. 1971 was nothing like the pre-Fed crashes, and neither was anything else on your list.
You're being downvoted because you're wrong, and because you're being gratuitously abrasive. And you want to use that as evidence that you're right? As Jane Austen said, "You tell yourself that, if it gives you comfort."
You snipe at me then criticize me for matching your level of in-graciousness.
Growth was unprecedented before the FED, even with the short-lived ramifications of the crashes. 1929 & the 1930's lasted longer than previous downturns. 1971 was a complete failure of Bretton Woods & we were only bailed out by Oil & wars. It was pretty big failure in monetary policy. 2008 was bad. The 2020's are not looking good as well. Record & increasing amounts of money are being printed. Income disparity is increasing. Life expectancy is going down. I'm amazed that the plates have been kept spinning this long...
> You're being downvoted because you're wrong, and because you're being gratuitously abrasive
I've learned a long time ago to not care about silly karma points (distilling karma to a number is a complete misrepresentation of karma anyways) & these sort of passive-aggressive games. I'm not the only one being "gratuitously abrasive" in this conversation. I see myself from your perspective. I also see how I have been treated as well. If you want to call me a troll, then so be it, I'm a troll.
> As Jane Austen said, "You tell yourself that, if it gives you comfort."
I bet you felt all sorts of self-righteous endorphins when your wrote that. Too bad it was not in good faith. You have to dig deeper into your own actions to see the bigger picture here.
And the longest period of economic contraction in the US happened before the Fed (which isn’t an acronym, so all-capsing it just makes you look like a kook), in the Long Depression.
> And the longest period of economic contraction in the US happened before the Fed
Even with the contraction, the overall expansion between the Civil War & the creating of the Fed was still unprecedented & has not been matched since. Good thing the Fed was created just in time to finance the World War 1 resulting in over 20 million deaths. Interesting coincidence...
> (which isn’t an acronym, so all-capsing it just makes you look like a kook)
Wow, I look like a "kook" for all-capsing FED? Hah, I'm obviously not fitting in with this crowd. Perhaps you could have picked up on a different detail...
>He started it by trying to put me down as being a Libertarian.
Besides the "he started it" being a weak argument, I never claimed you were a Libertarian. There is a world of difference in saying, "the ideas you're talking about fall in line with libertarianism" and saying "you are a Libertarian". The latter treads closely to ad hominem fallacy.
>the housing bust
Is this distinct from the sub-prime crisis they already alluded to in their post?
>neverending & accelerating QE (money printing)
Again, this is almost always phrased in terms of inflation and to reiterate it has not yet happened despite people claiming for the last decade that it was just around the corner. Inflation may still happen but what I'm trying to get at is: if inflation turns out to not be the problem do you have another case against fiat currency?
>propagation of electricity
The early days of this were quite literally a mess which is why the government began instituting regulated monopolies.
>transcendence of previous poverty was due to the spirit of human ingenuity & the collective energy of the population to improve their lives & the lives around them. Governments only (with few exceptions) got in the way of this progress.
Citation rather than glossy overtures are strongly needed here
> Is this distinct from the sub-prime crisis they already alluded to in their post?
Perhaps. There have been more than one...
> Inflation may still happen but what I'm trying to get at is: if inflation turns out to not be the problem do you have another case against fiat currency?
Inflation is already here. Cost of living, rent, gas, food, lumber, taxes, etc. are rising today. Coupled with the government mandated shutdown, particularly of select "non-essential" (aka small) business, we saw a large contraction in the economy. The government's official numbers are self-serving & moving goal-posts. http://www.shadowstats.com/ measures the economic numbers according to benchmarks consistent with the past. Inflation is here & has been here for a while.
> The early days of this were quite literally a mess which is why the government began instituting regulated monopolies.
It was even more of a mess before the invention of electricity. The regulation of utilities could be considered a success. At least the government did one thing right. Problem is despite the Trillions going into taxes over the years, we have a grid that is vulnerable to long term blackouts. With the Grand Solar Minimum being here & a geomagnetic excursion occurring, we can expect space weather to create more issues (e.g. Carrington Event). We are also vulnerable to CME attacks caused by foreign governments. Not good.
> Citation rather than glossy overtures are strongly needed here
My citation is the amount of time that people have to spend working to pay taxes & their unhappiness in doing so.
Who makes things happen in everyday life? The citizenry/people, not bureaucrats.
> You understand there are targets for inflation, right? Meaning the goal is not 0%. The problem with the last decade is that inflation has been lower than expected and the strengthening dollar has caused its own problems.
Except John Williams is showing real inflation to be around "9.0% in Aggregate, 16.0% in Goods and 5.6% in Services". Is 9% the target?
> Your citation is that proper don’t like spending their money? Really? That’s exactly my original point about the issue with cognitive biases.
Not sure what you are trying to convey here. It's not like you used any citations. I'm not asking for one anyways. I was hoping to be able to discuss simple logic & simple observations without the need to invoke the "experts" with their narrow fields of expertise. You obviously have cognitive biases as well. I hope you don't think you are some arbiter of truth because you are way off the mark.
>People don’t want to pay and simultaneously don’t want to give up government programs. That is not a rational stance
Government programs are expensive & ultimately don't work. I'd rather have a free(ish) market create solutions. There are few true free markets, since almost every market is regulated (except the "black market"). There are more solutions than the electric grid as it currently stands.
The best solution is for people to be educated on how our climate systems work, our solar cycles, our movement through the cosmos, & the impact of electricity & magnetism on our planetary systems. Not this APGW nonsense that has wasted so much money & time.
>It's not like you used any citations. I'm not asking for one anyways.
You cite biased sources that fit your predetermined worldview. I’ve already conceded inflation has happened, but it tends to be transitory type. Or did you miss that part of the discussion? Even if your source was reliable, it doesn’t display the type of evidence I think you assume it does. It’s fairly clear you start with a conclusion and work backwards, disregarding anything that’s inconvenient from the conversation.
I’ve given you citations elsewhere. But the larger point your statement portrays is that there literally no evidence that can be provided to change your mind. That’s not a productive person to try and maintain a dialogue with.
What do you feel is the appropriate role for government?
I’d implore you to also not jump to conclusions about what my beliefs are by extrapolating to positions I haven’t explicitly defended. Your posts are coming across like you are actually having an argument with someone else. You seem more inclined to tell me what I think rather than ask
A good clue is to look into the systems (i.e. cybernetic) interpretation of the word "governor" or "government". Within a system, the "governor" is meant to ensure that the timing & operation of the other components is in order for the system to operate as designed. The "governor" should minimize intrusion into other components, or it will tax (a pun naturally formed here) the efficiency of the overall system.
Which begs the question, what is this system, that we call civilization or society, designed for? If it's for the well-being & growth of all people, then it's the government's role to minimize intrusion into peoples' lives & to be be non-permanent; meaning the government should shrink after it grows to respond to a crisis. This is why early government did not have "professional" politicians or bureaucrats. Once it becomes somebody's livelihood to govern others, the teleology will always be a relationship of ever-increasing extraction until collapse. This is also why early government did not have "professional" armies. The "governor" (or political class) becomes the monarchy/aristocracy in a neo-feudalism state. One can see the state of American politics with it's two-tiered justice system as a proto-aristocracy which will eventually lead to a monarchy. Perhaps we should think twice before our celebration of giving James Bond a "license to kill".
If there is a crisis of some type, the government may be useful in theory, though in practicality it's function is restricted by the autopoetic traits of people that run the government not being able to avoid being self-interested and self-selecting to form cartels. See the Stanford Prison Experiment & Milgram Obedience Experiment as references.
Persistently high taxes are a good indicator of the breakdown of feedback loops re: the performance/utility/effectiveness vs the cost of the government.
>A good clue is to look into the systems (i.e. cybernetic) interpretation of the word "governor"
A small pedantic nit but I think the word "governor" in systems engineering predates cybernetic systems. I think the centrifugal ball governor on steam systems was one of the first implementations. As a literal pressure regulating valve, the term "governor" can be derived from literally regulating a system for a desired outcome.
>meant to ensure that the timing & operation
So from this vantage point, the primary role of government is to facilitate coordination between constituent parts of society? I.e., you don't feel they have a role in terms of a service component? Can you give more concrete examples of exactly how this facilitation would be employed? (e.g., it reads to me that creating and maintaining a coherent monetary policy would fit this definition, but your previous comments lead me to believe you may be against that idea). Going way back to my original post, I'm trying to get an understanding of how this view moves from the theoretical to the practical.
>This is also why early government did not have "professional" armies.
Can you elaborate on which governments you are specifically referencing? Because my understanding of many "early" governments is that they were predicated on standing armies, particularly those governments that used them to protect commerce and/or expand their territory.
>If it's for the well-being & growth of all people
This is probably the biggest area where we diverge in opinion. I don't think the overall utility function is increased by getting rid of programs like Medicaid/Medicare, SNAP, etc. and other quality-of-life programs that are largely funded by the income tax you want to abolish. Is your aim to return back to resorting to charity to solve these problems? If everyone acted ethically, I agree that may work better than the current paradigm but I think we've already agreed we can't count upon everyone to act rationally or morally (leaving out the mental bandwidth necessary to understand the problem effectively to best allocate resources). It would be more useful if you could speak in pragmatic terms; this is the point where I (non-derisively) tried to avoid the "hand-wavy" free-market arguments about how the market will solve it.
One area you haven't touched upon that I would be curious about your opinion is the role of government in fostering the growth of nascent industries, particularly those that have such a high-risk/low-reward that the market's individual players generally aren't willing to fund although the potential to benefit society as a whole is large (I'm thinking of industries like early aircraft or, more recently, the space industry). Do you think the government has a role in tragedy of the commons scenarios? (E.g., is it the governments role to price in externalities, to fund research in problems that are a large societal risk but small individual risk etc.?)
I do agree that a real problem in government is the "self-licking ice cream cone" phenomenon. Although, I think my preference is that citizens correct this at the voting booth. How do you think about the ability of people to make rational decisions in that regard? (I.e., if government isn't working to the people's liking and they have the power to change it, why isn't either a) the change happening or b) the citizenry leaving? c) are we failing because of our individual cognitive biases?)
> A small pedantic nit but I think the word "governor" in systems engineering predates cybernetic systems.
Cybernetics & systems design is the distillation of patterns common across various engineering & science domains. It still applies as an apt description.
> So from this vantage point, the primary role of government is to facilitate coordination between constituent parts of society? I.e., you don't feel they have a role in terms of a service component?
The government has become insanely bloated, full of grifters & opportunists, pseudoscience, revolving door lobbyists, misinformation, & other self-serving interests that have had a detrimental effect on society. Any "service" or "cure" that the government provides is caused by the government in the first place.
> Can you give more concrete examples of exactly how this facilitation would be employed?
Yes, let humans coordinate their own activities without the income tax & reduce intervention and watch many societal ill including poverty, violence, drug use, & disease decrease.
> Because my understanding of many "early" governments is that they were predicated on standing armies, particularly those governments that used them to protect commerce and/or expand their territory.
The USA did not have a professional army. Most governments, before conscription & the draft, had a small, if any, professional army.
> Medicaid/Medicare, SNAP, etc. and other quality-of-life programs
If these programs worked, why are there so many people who depend on these programs in poor health? Why are unhealthy practices, such as the food pyramid, foisted on the public, encouraging obesity? No, large government programs completely miss the mark & merely act as vehicles to create profit for large pharmaceutical, insurance, & tech companies, at the expense to the public. Just because somebody is insured does not mean they are following an optimal lifestyle of health. There are many doctors who dislike the paperwork caused by Obamacare, because paperwork distracts from caring for their patient.
The "voting booth", or now mail in voting without ids, is probably the sickest joke. The notion of Democracy, where 51% have tyranny over the losing 49% does not represent most people in the county, as most people do not even vote & the choices are between bad & worse.
The only way to escape the madness of this growing government intrusion is to escape to less governed states & nations (currently occurring) & watch the bloated governments collapse under their own weight & greed, while creating systems that work for us, not the top-heavy self-serving technocracy/bureaucracy. The government is going down it's typical autopoetic path & will have a major collapse of some type, probably within this decade. Good luck!
> You are doing the exact hand-waving I’ve specifically requested you avoid “meh... let people sort it out “ is not a sound policy unless you are an anarchist. So I can’t tell if you really don’t have any real insight or are just struggling to communicate them. Without concrete examples or evidence, most of this reads like an Ayn Rand book report.
Your problem is you have black & white thinking. Your response my claim that there are broken feedback loops, that taxes are too high, & there is an autopoetic tendency for psychopathy to set into big government systems including mass genocide is "government good", "you must be anarchist".
Your religion of statism blinds you to obvious points that I have already clearly stated. It's you who has a comprehension problem due to your religion. You do seem like you have a semblance in your intelligence, despite your sophistry. It's too bad you are blinded to certain obvious realities due to your ideology.
You still deflect and refused to answer a number of specific questions. You also continuously err into assuming you know my position. I’m asking questions to try and get clarity into your ideas rather than making those assumptions. Yet, you refuse to answer them and seem more interested in getting on a soap box rather than having an actual dialog. I’ll try to give an actual example so you can see what I mean.
You bring up the inability to improve health outcomes with specific government programs. I ask you how you would propose to fix that and your answer is “shrink the government and let people choose.” That’s a superficial sound bite and not a real answer. I was hoping for something like
1) Reduce price controls by reducing Medicare and Medicaid
2) To avoid those left out who would previously have been covered, create a health savings program for each individual
3) Expand the HSA benefits to those gainfully employed to reduce tax burdens
4) Create clear quality metrics to objectively measure various health insurance providers and clear, standardized, transparent guidelines to measure health providers to be eligible
This would reduce government to a role of oversight while reducing tax burdens on income. It would also allow individuals to make their own decisions about providers while allow the free market to innovate. It would alleviate some of the information transparency issues.
Instead, all you can advocate is:
Get rid of government + { hand wave + magic } = better outcomes
The latter comes across as a sophomoric understanding of the actual problem. Not unlike your overly simplified model of what you seem to think you can assume about my personal position. You’ve probably had some success in the past your word salad veiling approach without showing much concrete understanding but it’s failed to convince me
>stimulus effect would far surpass any rebate from the government.
This may need some qualifiers. There are definitely people who are net beneficiaries under the current tax code that i doubt would get nearly as much from the stated stimulus effect
If there were no income taxes, there would be no net drain on the citizenry, thus more stimulus. The whole concept of stimulus is a bait & switch as the government takes away more money to presumably give a partial refund back to the public by printing more fiat, thereby devaluing the existing holdings.
If you are anti-war, how will the government pay for its Neverending wars without taxes?
Do you agree that not everyone receives a net negative amount from the government? E.g., for those ~47% who pay an effective 0% federal income tax rate but get services (stimulus, roads, Medicare, SNAP benefits, Social Security etc.), I don't think they will be better off. If the stance is that the free market will magically make things better for them, that's a little too hand-wavy for me and I'm not sure history backs this up.
I know the bogeyman for fiat currency is inflation, but we heard people screaming about that over the bailouts of the financial crisis and yet we arguably suffered from a lack of inflation in the ensuing decade. Only now are we starting to see some inflation in commodities; it's yet to be seen if this is short-lived (as commodity inflation can be) or if we see real inflation hit metrics like wages.
The problem with your assertion that the way to be "anti-war" is to shut the door on taxes is that it also shuts the door on everything else. I do believe there are some things the government does well, and potentially better than the private sector.
History does back it up. When America had a 0% income tax & did not have the FED, America had unprecedented growth in population, quality of life innovation, & prosperity. Note that America has risen to prominence due to a number of factors, included a history of relatively limited government, despite recent increases in government size, scope, & power. America is riding the wave of prosperity created by it's citizens over 200+ years, not the expansion government, in fact, despite the expansion of government.
You fail to mention that those ~47% are still trapped in poverty & w/ disparities in health despite the government services. If the government services were so good, why are they suffering? Why do families that enter welfare & assisted housing have an abysmal rate of improving their livelihood? Why are there many stories of people escaping poverty before any form of government assistance due to their own ability to create prosperity, free from regulations which only inhibit their growth?
You may mention the 1930's stock market crash, caused by insiders gaming the market combined with financialization created by centralization (enforced by the government). Note that the some of same people responsible for the crash later oversaw the market by creating the SEC & other related entities.
You may have an argument that courts are useful, especially in enforcing contract law, though. Though the increase in the amount of laws has created a top-heavy system where everybody is out of compliance in some way & the choice of what to enforce when is a way to tip the scales of justice, allowing the government officials to have a large influence on who & what activities succeed and who & what does not.
I'd be interested from where you are drawing this conclusion. I was interested but the data I looked up seems to tell the opposite story.
Looking at GDP growth, the average from 1800-1913 (when the Fed was created) the average year-over-year GDP growth was 1.48%. From 1913 onward, the average GDP growth was 2.13%. Moreover, if you plot the 10 year moving average, you see that the post-Fed era tends to be much more stable with less boom/bust cycling. The exception is the Great Depression (trough) and the post-WW2 boom (huge peak).
Likewise, life expectancy increase has pretty much been on the same trajectory (except for WW1) regardless of period[2].
Similarly, innovation measured by the 10-year moving average of patent application year-over-year growth rate shows the levels are similar from 1870s-present[3]. There's a marked dip after the Great Depression but the bounds of the growth rate is between 0-7% cycles, being a little higher during the tech boom of the late 1990s.
>Why do families that enter welfare & assisted housing have an abysmal rate of improving their livelihood?
At least from my experience, most would say what the government is providing does provide a huge improvement in their quality of life. Again, I'm asking what is your alternative? How does getting rid of these programs going to benefit those same people? (Please speak in specifics if possible).
>You may mention the 1930's stock market crash, caused by insiders gaming the market
Not my position. Just like 2008 it was due to excessive leverage and speculation.
Maybe my cursory look is taking the wrong conclusions, but your claims (without supporting evidence) come across as claims "that aren't facts, I just know they're true".
