I'd assume that arguments suggesting medical spending doesn't help would apply to covering a stranger's medical expenses: e.g. increasing prices, encouraging continuing unhealthy behaviour, whatever.
And people don't often declare they're not giving to charity, so your second point is hard to test. But people often use the fact that aid isn't always effective as a reason to oppose or believe in reduction in government spending on aid (last week's Question Time in the UK is a case in point). It's used to muddy and close off a line of thought, just like 'well we probably can't stop global warming anyway', 'loads of diets don't work', whatever. While they may not state it, I think it's VERY common for people to give up on an objective because of a lack of a clear path to it, and furthermore to seek such lack of clarity as an excuse for abandoning the objective.
Today's post, "Can't say no" Spending was originally published on 18 October 2007. I decided to include it based on feedback in the open thread. It is a very short entry so there is no real need for a summary:
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Superexponential Conceptspace, and Simple Words, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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