[kevingadd]

The pain you're listening for here is dead veterans, dead trans kids, dead disabled people, starving seniors, people dying from preventable viruses because of vaccine program cuts. The pain you're listening for here is toxic water and food-borne illnesses.

We know we need most of these programs and services! You can make them more efficient, you can identify and cut waste. You don't do that by just making blanket, massive cuts to staff and services and then trying to cobble the pieces back together over the next few years. It doesn't make sense. No sensible person would run a business that way.

[sho_hn]

These people genuinely believe that some amount of human death is acceptable collateral.

[jdietrich]

Not everyone believes that some amount of human death is acceptable collateral, but essentially everyone behaves as if that were true.

We could save ~47,000 deaths in the next year if we banned cars. Do you think that the deaths of innocent children is an acceptable trade-off for your right to drive? You might not like to think of it that way, but it's just objectively true that this is the trade-off we choose.

If we really care about human lives, why isn't the entire federal budget redirected towards healthcare and medical research? Do you think it's OK to watch children die of cancer just to fund national parks and space probes? If we care about all lives, why don't we spend the entire federal budget on humanitarian aid? What kind of heartless monster would watch children in Africa starve to death just to make their kid's school slightly nicer? If we care about all future lives, why are we squandering resources on consumption now, when compounding returns over centuries could allow those resources to provide vastly greater utility in future?

Everything has an opportunity cost and everything is a tradeoff. We pretend that the status quo has no ugly tradeoffs to protect our sanity, but that's obviously untrue. People die every day because of things we take completely for granted. They die for reasons that are often directly contradictory - I die for want of a regulation that would have prevented a medical accident, you die because of regulatory burdens that hinder the development or dissemination of new medical technology.

Musk might be a mindless vandal or a maverick genius; I am absolutely not intelligent enough to argue that point either way. What I do know is that it would be a miraculous coincidence if the federal government's priorities circa 2024 were so close to perfect that any radical change is prima facie wrong. I have to at least entertain the possibility that we have been stuck in a local maximum and have been squandering massive amounts of potential. A handful of deaths is, in the context of the US economy, actually a very cheap price to pay if you genuinely believe that you can find a fraction of a percentage point of GDP growth.

[hobs]

All this to say "yeah murder more people its good because I can't tell what is good or bad", an absolutely crazy take.

[imperfect_blue]

They're doing this because the expected value on lives saved is positive, not negative.

It's the exact same thing as "defund the police" except applied to the entire government. If policing is net negative, reducing it will save lives. If this government program is inefficient / worthless / net negative, cutting it or disrupting it will save lives.

[hobs]

When you just make stuff up its easy to prove your point, I agree. There's no reason to assume lives get saved because of deregulation, there's no evidence to that, and plenty to its opposition.

[imperfect_blue]

I'm not American and haven't done the calculus here. I'm just pointing out that from an outside perspective, what the American right is doing here is +EV in terms of American lives from their point of view, so it's perfectly rational.

If nothing else, the opportunity cost of a few hundred billion saved eventually, even if it's just a small fraction of US total government spending, can be used to save or improve many many many lives.

Hyperbole like "yeah murder more people its good because I can't tell what is good or bad" doesn't help.

[beej71]

This is absolutely true, and I think something that a lot of bleeding heart liberals don't fully understand.

You might be against the death penalty, for example, because you can't bear the thought that the government would put innocent people to death. But some people believe that these are acceptable losses for the gain.

Likewise, you might think that a program that helps prevent violence against a certain minority group would be beneficial. But some people feel that this is a waste of money since it doesn't actually benefit the most people. If you spend money, after all, wouldn't you want to positively affect the most people you could? Everybody else--they are acceptable losses.

[exceptione]

If you observed that your argument needs to rest on a false binary choice in an us-vs-others (identity "I am not a liberal") you should take time to step up to meta-thinking. Maybe we have been to long in the culture war?

Some people want us to ridicule compassion. But Why? For Who? For What?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1NJwz5SCl4

(edited, maybe you personally already understood)

[benmmurphy]

Liberals also support the death penalty but in scenarios where it is less likely to happen. For example if someone doesn’t pay their parking fine it’s possible the situation escalates to a point where an armed government official will kill the person refusing to pay for resisting their lawful commands. This situation might be more unlikely than death penalty for murder or the ‘victim’ might be more responsible for the situation but I think having a hard block against the death penalty because it involves death or is irreversible is hard to defend. I think if you have a sovereign you ultimately have to be comfortable with killing people who oppose the sovereign.

[CivBase]

These are some extremely serious claims that I'm going to need to see sources to believe. I'm by no means here to defend DOGE, but what have they done to put the lives of trans kids at serious risk?