Politics Discussion Thread September 2012

Multiheaded

The last thread didn't fare too badly, I think; let's make it a monthly tradition. (Me, I'm more interested in thinking about real-world policies or philosophies, actual and possible, rather than AI design or physics, and I suspect that many fine, non-mind-killed folks reading LW also are - but might be ashamed to admit it!)

Quoth OrphanWilde:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
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.
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.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.

Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.

Quoth OrphanWilde:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
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.
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.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.

Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.

The problem with being poor is you don't have money.

The telltale symptom of being poor is not having money. The problem with being poor is not being able to engage properly with the wealth-generating activities of society, and that happens for a variety of reasons.

Some of those (such as cyclical unemployment or childcare needs) are absolutely best tackled by direct wealth redistribution. Others (such as disability, substance dependency, a criminal record or a lack of marketable skills) by the provision of services, which government may be best placed to orchestrate. Others still (such as statistical discrimination) are most directly addressed by employment legislation, which only the government is in a position to carry out.

All of these interventions can be carried out badly. Since mechanisms of social welfare tend to be one of the big issues on the table for party politics, they usually are carried out badly. This is a problem with prevailing methods of governance, not with welfare programs in and of themselves. It's far from clear (although quite plausible) that no welfare is preferable to bad welfare.

No, actually the lack of money is the problem.

Give a poor person $10mil, and his poverty problem is solved.

10[anonymous]14y

Why should every member of a society be wealth generating? Let alone net wealth generating. To the first approximation people want to do something about poverty because they feel sympathy for people who can't afford various worldly goods, what they however don't realize is that above some very low level (above which starvation and death from exposure aren't factors) their sympathy for the poor is rooted in the poor not being able to afford status markers that if all the poor could afford would cease to be status markers.