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Clarity comments on Open thread, Nov. 09 - Nov. 15, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: MrMind 09 November 2015 08:07AM

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Comment author: Clarity 17 November 2015 06:58:59AM *  -1 points [-]

Facts are facts

Corporate tax is bad, land tax is better. Workers get the worst deal from inefficient (bad) taxes.

-Australian Treasury

Ahem.

The wicked problems, and focus of ideological debates in most Western liberal democracies like Australia boils down to persuasion around the trade-offs in efficiency vs equity. There are pros and cons to each of those, independently of one another, let alone in trade-off. Though, political debates are frequently black and white (or 'blue and green', if you're a sucker for over-ellaborations of what could have otherwise been a list of cognitive distortions. Not that being of a sucker for that is a bad thing. Persuasive devices of different kinds are used to persuading different audiences. Though, the audience here has evolved over several purges and I reckon the way it will fortuitiously head is towards intense information density, and standardisation (other than the more predictable trends that have been already identified and/or cultivated by others).