The human body is subject to a number of reductionist approximations which allow us to work with it predicatively. These approximations and models are extremely well supported experimentally. So far, the only such approximations that apply to the economy are the Keynesian ideas, and those produce results that are intuitively nonsense, and have no experimental backing. Modifying the economy without causing more harm than good is much, much harder than it is in medicine right now. We are not surgeons here. We are plague doctors with masks, and leeches.
And yet we've gotten past leeches, and developed medicines that work. Don't you think we should try some economic models to see if they work? Who cares if Keynesian ideas don't make intuitive sense? You just explained why that the economy is too complicated to understand intuitively. The evidence isn't very good (for or against), because it's never been properly tested.
property rights are fairly straightforward.
No they aren't. How do people come to own property in the first place? (are the descendants of native Americans due reparations? Who has the land rights to Israel / Palestine?) How much do polluters have to pay for the damage they're doing to everyone else's property? Do I have the right to sell myself into slavery? What ideas can be patented (copyrighted) and when do those patents (copyrights) expire? Unfortunately, to try to sort out who owns what, is to mire yourself in as twisted and complicated a political issue as any.
Additionally, the government is fantastically bad at spending money. Orders of magnitude worst than essentially any private organization. I've seen the way they buy chairs. It's terrifying. In general, putting them in charge of any significant sum of money is an excellent way to ensure that much of it will wind up being expended as economic waste heat.
Be specific. How does the government buy chairs?
Also, overpaying for something doesn't make the extra money simply disappear as "economic waste heat." The people who sold those chairs can spend the extra money again. The actual cost is bad information being fed to the market, which can result in workers making too much of one thing, when everyone would have been better off if they'd made something else. And it's not as if private consumers always spend their money perfectly in accordance with their values either. If anything qualifies as "economic waste heat", it's the tobacco industry.
Or is the convention against discussing politics here silly?
I propose a test. I'm going to try to lay down some rules on voting on comments for the test here (not that I can force anybody to abide by them):
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments (or ridicule me and/or this test); responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) Try not to downvote particular comments excessively, if they're legitimate lines of argument. A faulty line of argument provides opportunity for rebuttal, and so for our test has value even then; that is, I want some faulty lines of argument here. If you disagree, please downvote me, instead of the faulty comments, because this post is what you want less of, not those comments. This necessarily implies, for balance, that we not excessively upvote comments. I'd suggest fairly arbitrary limits of 3/-3?
Edit: 4.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate. (My apologies about missing this, folks.)
I'm going to try really hard not to get personally involved, except to lay down a leading comment posing an argument against abortion, a position I don't hold, for the record. The core of the argument isn't disingenuous, and I hold that this argument is true, it just doesn't lead to my opposing abortion. I do not hold the moral axiom by which I extend the basic argument to argue against abortion, however; I'm playing the devil's advocate to try to help me from getting sucked into the argument while providing an initial point of discussion.
Which leads me to the next point: If you see a hole in an argument, even if it's an argument for a perspective you agree with, poke through it. The goal is to see whether we can have a constructive political argument here.
The fact that this is a test, and known to be a test, means this isn't a blind study. Uh, try to act as if you're not being tested?
After it's gone on a little while, if this post hasn't been hopelessly downvoted and ridiculed (and thus the premise and test discarded as undesirable to begin with), we can put up a poll to see whether people found the political debates helpful, not helpful, and so on.