[snapplebobapple]

>The lesson which Swiss social insurance administrators have learned from the insurance business generally is that client behavior usually changes in response to administrative actions--and that benefit levels should be structured to account for these changes.

This isn't what I am talking about as a problem with the socialism/communism/etc, it's a basic feature of repeated models with intelligent agents (of which life is a passable example of) If you keep a system the same people will maximize their own benefit over time within it. I think it's a big part of why systems with lots of checks and balances work so well over strong hierarchies. They are inherently unstable (and in the best case unstable in a way that destroys socially sub optimal behaviour like market power abuse). The dynamism prevents the worst of the power concentration that happens in hierarchies.

I personally don't think you can convince many of the crap-artists from believing their crap because it has a bunch of religious qualities to it so is very hard to deprogram. It would be nice if we stopped letting these people anywhere near children with this crap so as to avoid the worst of the brain cancer spreading but that's probably the extent of what we can do. The idea that there is some bad rich guy causing all your personal problems and all one has to do to fix your problems is steal more from that rich guy is alluring because the alternative of fixing yourself is hard and people seem to have a myriad of mechanisms to other problems to be able to endure them.