Re:DARPA Wants Millions to Design an Unmanned 'Flying Gun' U...
by AnthonyMouse on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @10:01AM
(#22365993)
> The emphasis should be on the last sentence. Do you really think nobody thought of something as simple as "pay them to do something useful"?
The issue is that it's claiming to be a reductio ad absurdum -- paying people to do useless things is an improvement, therefore paying them to do something is useful is even better than that.
But the first claim only holds under conditions of high unemployment, and if it doesn't hold then it doesn't prove the second one. Paying people to do "something useful" is better than having them not get paid and not do anything useful, but that doesn't prove that it's better than what they would be doing in the alternative, which could be getting paid the same to do something even better.
Proving that your something is better than nothing doesn't get you out of proving that it's better than the status quo, unless the status quo is people doing nothing. And even then it's only if people are actually doing nothing, not just not having a job and using them time to learn a new skill or start a business that doesn't produce revenue yet or do volunteer work etc.
> The reality is that politically there are only two acceptable ways to spend money. Either you spend the money with an expectation of profit (Investing) or you spend it with the expectation of losing it entirely (Welfare).
The only thing governments should spend money on is in the category of welfare. Having roads or subways paid for with taxes and not fares is "welfare" because it's not profitable. But "welfare" can increase efficiency because the existence of transportation benefits everyone (even indirect users), and the expense is dominated by fixed costs which makes charging usage fees inefficiently discourage use of a resource that has been paid for regardless, and fare collection itself is a major cost center that can be eliminated when they're funded through taxes.
If something is profitable then you don't need the government to do it because private companies will do it anyway. The only way out of that is to start classifying welfare as investment when its positive externalities exceed its costs. But by that point the only categories you're left with is "profit" and "waste", because welfare programs that cost more than the benefits they produce shouldn't exist either.
> Once the government uses that money to subsidize a money losing state owned company, private interests will raise their voice and heavily criticize the unfair competition and use it as an excuse for layoffs or pay cuts.
If your town wanted to install municipal fiber, Comcast would whinge about it so hard you could hear it from space, which is the primary reason it hasn't already happened in most places. But just because hiring people to build a fiber network would be productive and we can't do that as a result of lobbying, doesn't prove that hiring people to do some less useful thing would also be productive.
The issue is that it's claiming to be a reductio ad absurdum -- paying people to do useless things is an improvement, therefore paying them to do something is useful is even better than that.
But the first claim only holds under conditions of high unemployment, and if it doesn't hold then it doesn't prove the second one. Paying people to do "something useful" is better than having them not get paid and not do anything useful, but that doesn't prove that it's better than what they would be doing in the alternative, which could be getting paid the same to do something even better.
Proving that your something is better than nothing doesn't get you out of proving that it's better than the status quo, unless the status quo is people doing nothing. And even then it's only if people are actually doing nothing, not just not having a job and using them time to learn a new skill or start a business that doesn't produce revenue yet or do volunteer work etc.
> The reality is that politically there are only two acceptable ways to spend money. Either you spend the money with an expectation of profit (Investing) or you spend it with the expectation of losing it entirely (Welfare).
The only thing governments should spend money on is in the category of welfare. Having roads or subways paid for with taxes and not fares is "welfare" because it's not profitable. But "welfare" can increase efficiency because the existence of transportation benefits everyone (even indirect users), and the expense is dominated by fixed costs which makes charging usage fees inefficiently discourage use of a resource that has been paid for regardless, and fare collection itself is a major cost center that can be eliminated when they're funded through taxes.
If something is profitable then you don't need the government to do it because private companies will do it anyway. The only way out of that is to start classifying welfare as investment when its positive externalities exceed its costs. But by that point the only categories you're left with is "profit" and "waste", because welfare programs that cost more than the benefits they produce shouldn't exist either.
> Once the government uses that money to subsidize a money losing state owned company, private interests will raise their voice and heavily criticize the unfair competition and use it as an excuse for layoffs or pay cuts.
If your town wanted to install municipal fiber, Comcast would whinge about it so hard you could hear it from space, which is the primary reason it hasn't already happened in most places. But just because hiring people to build a fiber network would be productive and we can't do that as a result of lobbying, doesn't prove that hiring people to do some less useful thing would also be productive.