Anonymous #1 3w

You should read Hayek

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Anonymous #2 3w

Condescension is not an argument.

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Anonymous OP 3w

true! but I'm not here to argue.

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Anonymous bongo_fury 3w

Similarly you could have the federal government establish free clinics and free housing and then give them over to a third party. A block of public housing can be administered by a union of its tenants, or by a board of supervisors elected by the people of the municipality. It’s democratic because it’s governed by a democratic process. What matters is the degree to which the system functions in a democratic way, not whether the system is privately owned or publicly owned.

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Anonymous #4 3w

If you have total control over someone’s economic livelihood, you indirectly control their speech, and can effectively control elections. This isn’t just a hypothetical, we see this time and time again under marxist regimes. Theres a reason economic freedom and political freedom correlate so strongly. Economic liberty is a prerequisite for freedom of speech, and therefore for democracy.

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Anonymous OP 3w

Isn’t this a critique of dependence, rather than of social programs? Firstly as I’ve explained below, social programs don’t necessarily create dependence, but secondly, can’t the criticism of government apply equally to owners of property? If a state agency owning a man’s house gives the state an unacceptable amount of power over him, shouldn’t it be equally unacceptable for one man to own another man’s house?

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Anonymous bongo_fury 3w

It doesn’t matter who handles day to day operations. If the government controls the funding, it controls the service. Public schools get most of their money locally, but we’ve still seen the federal government use even small funding shares to pressure them. The only reason that power’s limited is because politicians don’t control our whole economy. People can still speak freely and vote, which keeps elected officials in check if they go too far.

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Anonymous OP 3w

There’s several ways around this; like you mentioned yourself, it could be possible to find the programs locally in the same way that public schools are funded.

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Anonymous OP 3w

You could have the administrators of the program calculate the precise amount of funding the program needs, and have a constitutional process by which funding is allocated automatically without political oversight, thereby removing politician’s ability to control access to funding. You could cover the program’s administrative costs by charging people to access it, although in fairness if the rate you charge is at/higher than the market rate, that would defeat the purpose of having the program.

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Anonymous bongo_fury 3w

Dependence is the inevitable outcome when the state becomes the main provider. Competition limits private power. If a landlord kicks you out, you can find one of the other 9.72 million American landlords to rent from. Under the Stalinist regime you didn’t have that option. People who spoke out were evicted from their homes and demoted to undesirable jobs, if they were lucky enough to avoid the gulag.

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Anonymous bongo_fury 3w

You should read “the road to serfdom”. It will answer all your questions in more depth than I can.

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Anonymous OP 3w

I’ve explained already why I don’t necessarily think that’s the case, so I won’t retread here. What reason is there to think the state will become the main provider? Having public housing doesn’t necessarily mean that there won’t be any private housing market, the two could coexist. To my mind, the kind of situation you’re describing is the result of the state creating a monopoly by creating public housing while abolishing private housing.

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Anonymous bongo_fury 3w

Local funding doesn’t fix the issue. If the government has complete control of your livelihood you have no real freedom of speech or fair elections. No matter if that is the president or local city council.

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Anonymous OP 3w

Lastly I could point out that competition limits, but does not cancel out, private power. Consumer choice promotes positive traits in a landlord which some landlords already have, and which others don’t; if there are no landlords doing something, then people can’t vote with their feet to get more landlords to do that thing. Likewise, if every landlord is doing the same thing, voting with your feet is not going to stop any landlord from doing that thing.

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Anonymous OP 3w

What about the other possibilities I described? And in lots of systems of municipal government people have a reasonable level of control over their local officials; they can force them to institute policy through ballot measures, they can unseat them, they can run themselves and replace them. The barrier to entrance into local politics isn’t all that high

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Anonymous bongo_fury 3w

Even if we imagine a system that politicians could never change (which has never existed), it would still be political in how it was first designed and would almost certainly cause major shortages because of the economic calculation problem. In reality, politicians would just change the constitution and take control again.

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Anonymous bongo_fury 3w

Ballot measures and elections do not work if the voting public is scared that their incomes and housing will be taken from them for trying to replace local officials.

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Anonymous OP 3w

Of course the system would erode over time and it would need to be actively maintained. But all systems work this way; the capitalist system that you’re advocating for, it also works this way. I think it’s more important for a system to work than for it to work as intended. If a system works, then it can be made to work as intended.

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Anonymous bongo_fury 3w

A socialist state is one where the government is the main provider, which is what I oppose. Limited public housing for the poor does not create the same problem, even if it’s an inefficient form of welfare. But if the state starts supplying housing for the general public, it often runs heavy losses to keep prices low, undercutting private landlords. That pushes them out and can quickly create a de facto government monopoly which leads to all the problems in my initial post.

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Anonymous OP 3w

What if government bought up housing and then turned it over to a third party, like a non-profit tenant’s cooperative? The tenants would set the rents at the lowest possible rate to cover building administration, maintenance and utilities, so would still undercut the private market, while the state would have no say in the administration or the funding of the project.

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Anonymous OP 3w

Now, my belief is that a government that isn’t specifically tasked with suppressing the private market is not going to go out of its way to do this by systematically undercutting the prices of every private producer. The private market would shrink as it engages in unfair competition with the government, but I don’t think it would disappear entirely and I think it could still act as a check on the power of the state as long as it exists.

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