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by Kisil
5708 days ago
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(Waring: US-centric answer) I agree that capitalism relies on government-supported stability and infrastructure, but I don't think Carmack was arguing the opposite point:
>>This is not to say that it doesn’t provide many valuable and even critical services ... The argument concerns dollars spent at the margin. Should the amount of government we have increase, or should it decrease? At the margin, I agree with Carmack that there are many places where we would be better served with less interference, and that we should be cautious about adding new government programs. Clearly there is some fuzzy line between "the justice system" and "corn subsidies". I wouldn't argue that the government has all the program it needs, but neither would I argue that the government needs all the programs it has. At the risk of flame baiting: I wish I could vote for fiscal conservatism without also voting for hateful and intrusive social conservatism. I also have low confidence in either major party reducing the government in the areas of real excess (see farming), as opposed to e.g. creating new pork-flavored subsidies in the guise of tax relief. Suggestions for concrete ways to battle Parkinson's Law are welcome. |
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That said, I'd be grateful for backup/citations that corn subsidies are bad for the U.S. in economic terms. Two common complaints about corn subsidies -- that the U.S. is cheating on NAFTA, or that overconsumption of corn products lead to health problems -- seem legitimate, but they don't seem to have inflicted any economic damage to the U.S. Further, although there's both redistribution and waste associated with the tax revenues that pay for the subsidies, corn is an infrastructural element of U.S. food production, and presumably corn's cheapness and relative consistency of supply lead to many multiples of downstream ROI.
I do, by the way, think economic harm is the right standard here, as it seems to be the main consideration in Carmack's essay. (Carmack and many commenters here do make reference to more abstract ideas of fairness and legitimacy, but that analysis seems irretrievably subjective and unproductive.)