We often praise and criticize people for the things they do. And while we have many kinds of praise, one very common type (which I focus on in this post) seems to send the message “what you did was good, and it would be good if more of that sort of thing were done.” (Substitute “bad” for “good” to get the matching critical message.)
I hypothesize that when people are giving that sort of praise, what they are actually praising is the outcome, not the act.
E.g., I praise Bill Gates for donating money towards education. What I'm actually praising is the result, that education got more money. But I didn't want to think about how Bill got that money in the first place.
The subsidies to charitable giving are already so huge that we have already passed the point where more would be justified. It's just silly to argue that we should do more to subsidize everything which is "good."
The discovery that one has the sign wrong in an equation should not imply that one should increase the magnitude of the coefficient. So a change to the nature of the penalty would be in order.
Because I don't have your exacting standards of political correctness, such that I must mention certain bete noirs.
[Would it not be obvious to someone who wasn't "completely incompetent" that if I favor subsidizing voting to achieve universal participation, then I'm against creating obstacles too?]
Choosing the "best" policies is only part of democracy. Another, often overlooked, part is measuring the preferences of the population on issues where there is not a single right answer (it's not inherently better to spend more subsidies on music than on painters, but if you know a much larger part of the population is more interested in music than in paintings you have your answer, similar situations are abundant in healthcare and economic policy). So you do want to hear as many voices as possible.
Subsidies for voting, I think we agree, are only a point on a continuum of incentives/disincentives. Why don't you favor a tax on voting? You'd get voters with even greater education and income.
One argument for subsidizing voting simply takes to its logical conclusion the argument for democracy, that is, against oligarchy. It's not a slam dunk argument, but aristocracies haven't proven enlightened.
Bryan Caplan has documented thoroughly that that lower income and education voters are less able than average. Currently they also vote less often. Why would we want to encourage more voting, this is likely to even out the percentage of voters in different socio-economic classes. Which would probably make politics considerably worse.
You think wrong. In fact, I doubt that even you honestly believe that is "fair" to say ... it's hard to believe that you are *that* ignorant of countervailing views.
It's amusing how free market idiotlogues go back and forth between moral and empirical claims ... none of which are valid ... to rationalize the inequalities they are remunerated to promote.
Power and its accompanying motivations is something consistently ignored by RH, who blathers about what "we" want or should do, as if there were uniformity of causal power.
Who is this "we" that you keep idiotically referring to? The people who establish subsidies are those with *political power* ... which doesn't include me or my like-minded peers.
This is rather silly. While the answer in both cases is of course "no" strictly speaking, that's not how people are interpreting it because it misses the point, which is about moral culpability. Change the question to "Did he intentionally do something that knowingly caused harm" in the first case and the correct answer is "yes". Intentionally causing harm is immoral, not withstanding the fact that he didn't intend the harm. In the second case, he doesn't get any moral credit for good things happening when he didn't intend them. The different answers are a result of this asymmetry: intentionally doing something that has harmful results is immoral regardless of whether those results were intended, whereas intentionally doing good is moral but intentionally doing things that knowingly cause good things to happen is not per se moral ... it requires intent.
How can you go on and on about this without even mentioning voter ID laws and other contrivances, so much in the news, that are aimed at *reducing* the vote (especially of identified groups who tend to vote against those favoring these devices)?
I hypothesize that when people are giving that sort of praise, what they are actually praising is the outcome, not the act.
E.g., I praise Bill Gates for donating money towards education. What I'm actually praising is the result, that education got more money. But I didn't want to think about how Bill got that money in the first place.
The subsidies to charitable giving are already so huge that we have already passed the point where more would be justified. It's just silly to argue that we should do more to subsidize everything which is "good."
The discovery that one has the sign wrong in an equation should not imply that one should increase the magnitude of the coefficient. So a change to the nature of the penalty would be in order.
Because I don't have your exacting standards of political correctness, such that I must mention certain bete noirs.
[Would it not be obvious to someone who wasn't "completely incompetent" that if I favor subsidizing voting to achieve universal participation, then I'm against creating obstacles too?]
Then, what you're saying is that what appears to be a disincentive is really an incentive. The solution would be to increase the size of the penalty.
Choosing the "best" policies is only part of democracy. Another, often overlooked, part is measuring the preferences of the population on issues where there is not a single right answer (it's not inherently better to spend more subsidies on music than on painters, but if you know a much larger part of the population is more interested in music than in paintings you have your answer, similar situations are abundant in healthcare and economic policy). So you do want to hear as many voices as possible.
Subsidies for voting, I think we agree, are only a point on a continuum of incentives/disincentives. Why don't you favor a tax on voting? You'd get voters with even greater education and income.
One argument for subsidizing voting simply takes to its logical conclusion the argument for democracy, that is, against oligarchy. It's not a slam dunk argument, but aristocracies haven't proven enlightened.
Bryan Caplan has documented thoroughly that that lower income and education voters are less able than average. Currently they also vote less often. Why would we want to encourage more voting, this is likely to even out the percentage of voters in different socio-economic classes. Which would probably make politics considerably worse.
" I think it is fair to say"
You think wrong. In fact, I doubt that even you honestly believe that is "fair" to say ... it's hard to believe that you are *that* ignorant of countervailing views.
It's amusing how free market idiotlogues go back and forth between moral and empirical claims ... none of which are valid ... to rationalize the inequalities they are remunerated to promote.
Power and its accompanying motivations is something consistently ignored by RH, who blathers about what "we" want or should do, as if there were uniformity of causal power.
Who is this "we" that you keep idiotically referring to? The people who establish subsidies are those with *political power* ... which doesn't include me or my like-minded peers.
This is rather silly. While the answer in both cases is of course "no" strictly speaking, that's not how people are interpreting it because it misses the point, which is about moral culpability. Change the question to "Did he intentionally do something that knowingly caused harm" in the first case and the correct answer is "yes". Intentionally causing harm is immoral, not withstanding the fact that he didn't intend the harm. In the second case, he doesn't get any moral credit for good things happening when he didn't intend them. The different answers are a result of this asymmetry: intentionally doing something that has harmful results is immoral regardless of whether those results were intended, whereas intentionally doing good is moral but intentionally doing things that knowingly cause good things to happen is not per se moral ... it requires intent.
Who is "they"? Do you always conflate different parties with different aims? (My reading of you is that you do,)
How can you go on and on about this without even mentioning voter ID laws and other contrivances, so much in the news, that are aimed at *reducing* the vote (especially of identified groups who tend to vote against those favoring these devices)?
" we also see large opposing political coalitions who disagree with our assessment"If by "large" you mean "powerful".Sheesh.
I would rather it be an uncool thing people give little thought to than a cool underground thing you're not allowed to do.