[aminok]

How about you act like a decent human being instead of making ridiculous strawman arguments against me?

Regarding welfare, I was being vague, so let me clarify: social welfare spending has increased substantially over the last 40 years in the US:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-...

In Western countries in general, social welfare spending is substantially higher now, as a percentage of GDP, than it was before the 1970s. Social democracy on the scale we have today is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Regarding your claim that welfare reform has had "horrendous" consequences, it is overly narrow and simply assumes no broader and longer-term negative consequences from compulsory income redistribution.

[knucklesandwich]

> How about you act like a decent human being instead of making ridiculous strawman arguments against me?

Love the calls for civility from the person proposing that anti-discrimination laws were bad. Also "the free baby market" isn't really a leap from any of these hardcore libertarian views.

> In Western countries in general, social welfare spending is substantially higher now, as a percentage of GDP, than it was before the 1970s. Social democracy on the scale we have today is a relatively recent phenomenon.

This has absolutely nothing to do with program expansion, it has to do with an aging population. It's an increased percentage of GDP because the population is skewing older: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs...

> Regarding your claim that welfare reform has had "horrendous" consequences, it is overly narrow and simply assumes no broader and longer-term negative consequences from compulsory income redistribution.

We can debate about how absurd it is to say that the 50% of the population who can't work (and would provide basically nil extra productivity to the labor force if they were unjustly forced to rejoin it) shouldn't have income redistributed to them, but I suspect this is a point of philosophy we'll never agree on.

[aminok]

>Love the calls for civility from the person proposing that anti-discrimination laws were bad.

You say that as if saying anti-discrimination laws are wrong is uncivil. That is just whole different level of close-mindedness and intolerance to ideological unorthodoxy. I'm half-expecting you to call me a heretic.

You're completely missing the fact that I consider forcing (through threats of imprisonment) people to surrender their private property as a punishment for private discrimination to be extremely uncivil, due to its use of violence.

>Also "the free baby market" isn't really a leap from any of these hardcore libertarian views.

Deal with my arguments, not straw man arguments that you conjecture into existence.

>This has absolutely nothing to do with program expansion, it has to do with an aging population.

You clearly didn't read it.

Annual spending growth on various components of social welfare spending (1972 - 2011):

Pensions and retirement: 4.4%

Healthcare: 5.7%

Welfare: 4.1%

Annual economic growth over the time frame:

2.7%

Now that I've substantiated my claim that welfare AND social welfare spending have grown tremendously, you're trying to move the goalposts. You ridiculed me with your snarky put-down when I made the claim, and it turned out to be absolutely correct.

Your "but but" argument just shows how far your intellectual dishonesty goes.

>We can debate about how absurd it is to say that the 50% of the population who can't work (and would provide basically nil extra productivity to the labor force if they were unjustly forced to rejoin it) shouldn't have income redistributed to them,

Should we throw people in prison for not living up to your moral standards and giving to the poor?

You're ignoring this authoritarian aspect of what you're endorsing.

[knucklesandwich]

> Now that I've substantiated my claim that welfare AND social welfare spending have grown tremendously, you're trying to move the goalposts. You ridiculed me with your snarky put-down when I made the claim, and it turned out to be absolutely correct.

It's not "moving the goalposts", your claim was that welfare programs were "growing". The definition of beneficiaries and benefits hasn't grown probably since LBJ was in the white house, only the pool of retirees and disabled persons has grown. In other words, government hasn't changed anything to make the program grow.

> Should we throw people in prison for not living up to your moral standards and giving to the poor?

How many people are in jail because of tax fraud versus in jail for some form of theft of property? That's a good primo facie test to verify that this ideology even passes a simple smell test. Even if that did demonstrate a problem, this idea that there's anything nonviolent about your ideology is fucking bonkers. The non-agression principle is anything but: http://www.demos.org/blog/1/29/14/what-world-following-non-a...

[aminok]

>your claim was that welfare programs were "growing".

And I showed that they are.

>The pool of beneficiaries and benefits hasn't grown probably since LBJ was in the white house,

I have no idea if your claim is correct (probably isn't, given the massive increase in people of working age receiving disability benefits), but this is in fact "moving the goalposts".

When I said welfare programs were growing, I clearly was referring to how much was being spent on them. Your pedantic nonsense notwithstanding, my claim was absolutely correct.

>How many people are in jail because of tax fraud versus in jail for some form of theft of property?

The carrying out of the threat may be rare, but the use of the threat to deprive someone of their rights is not. It is endemic. A person has a right to their property and their privacy and income tax laws violate both.

>The non-agression principle is anything but:

Can you distill your anti-libertarian article down to its essence and post it here?

[memonkey]

I would LOVE to know what the negative consequences are of compulsory income redistribution and for whom. In fact, I wonder if there are any positives. Social democracy is OF COURSE a recent phenomenon -- I mean, what era are you comparing it to?

Furthermore, and not saying that I disagree about your comment on the New Left, but "free association" is a non-sequitur even in the society you wish to exist (which doesn't [sucks]).

[aminok]

The negative consequence of compulsory income redistribution is the perversion of incentives leading to less individual responsibility over time. This saps the will to achieve, and leads to less economic development.

These programs are also clumsy cookie cutter solutions, which with a stroke a pen, impose the same formula to tens/hundreds of millions of people, without any consideration for the unique circumstances of this vast multitude of people. On one end, the people lose out, and on the other, they win out in the short term. The only determinant of which side a person is on is the amount of currency that they report to the government that they received for that year.

This becomes increasingly better gamed over time, leading to competitive energies being diverted to economically wasteful activities like tax avoidance (which is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year now).

To boil it down to its essence: there is no way compulsory income redistribution will be as effective (in the context of increasing economic output) as the market at distributing capital, and it is increasing economic output that is responsible for almost all gains in qualify of life and poverty reduction.

Free association is a straightforward concept and entirely feasible to protect through laws.