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wilkox comments on 9/11 as mindkiller - Less Wrong
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Can you explain why? This seems like a perfectly normal and reasonable sort of argument about dividing a limited pool of resources wisely.
In politics, the argument is perfectly normal and unreasonable. It means (borrowing the idea from novalis' link):
"This program was the worst waste of money in the budget, because it was against my political views. It was only funded because of people abusing the process to advance political views different from mine. If it was not for this program, so many other programs could have been funded which agree with my political views and were only blocked for political reasons."
You assume that the government would divide the pool wisely. (Not that it necessarily wouldn't, but not that it necessarily would either.)
I'm not sure if this is really the way upvotes are supposed to be used, but I voted you up from -1 because I don't think "Can you explain why?" is a question that should be censured.
I appreciate this. I genuinely didn't (still don't ) understand what lessdazed was trying to say, and it would be a really bad thing if downvoting ignorance became common practice.
I will try again.
Counterfactually, if the US budget hadn't included (pick expenditure), (unrelated expenditure that was't made) probably would not have been made, and (unrelated cut that was made) probably would have been made anyway.
As the US engages in deficit spending, whatever program you think most important that wasn't funded, if Congress collectively agreed with you, it would have been funded regardless of other spending. An argument for a program is only weakly an argument against all other programs. If a program is actually bad, it is suspicious that the worst that can be said about it is that it isn't as worthy an expenditure of the most valuable unfunded thing - that's like arguing that someone is sickly because they can't lift more weight than the strongest weightlifter in their city. If someone is truly sickly, there really should be a better argument showing that than that particular measure of their strength.
The way I understood it was that "the-worst-waste-of-money" (and possibly "the-most-worthy-unfunded-program" as well) is a label applied in retrospect. To fund the most worthy unfunded program, you'd need to unfund one of 100 programs. It's likely that of the 100 programs, one will turn out to be an abject failure, but it's hard to predict which one it will be ahead of time. Conversely, just because the unfunded program seems most worthy now, doesn't mean that earlier one could have predicted the need for it.