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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

The Cato Institute calls for a 50% cut to the U.S. military: http://www.csmonitor.com/20...

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

To be clear, I didn't mean that the military recruits substantially from the less productive half of the American population, I meant that presumably it would be the lesss productive half of the US military that would be fired/attritioned out of the military in Robin's proposal.

Also, I don't think I reasonably implied that the military strongly competes with prisons and mental institutions for its recruits. Quite the contrary, I mentioned the latter two to illustrate how stark the options are for more boundedly rational citizens: folks who have trouble maintaining the economic planning and foresight necessary to maintain an apartment, save for retirement, or have a good work performance if they face penalties no more severe than fire-at-will. I suspect we'd have a consequentially better society with a stronger (but opt-outable) paternalist structure. The military currently seems to me to be the least extremely limiting/stigmatizing of the three public sets of institutions that provide relatively strong paternalism for adults that need it.

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