Board Moderates and Liberals,

[landpoke]

Originally Posted by Archaea

a question as to policy.

I'm more interested in the political philosophies underlying your choices.

As for me, there is no question I have an immensely deep distrust of government, which when boiled down to the basics is the threat of the majority at the point of the gun to enforce its will against the minority. In non-democratic societies and in reality in democratic societies it's actually the threat of the minority to enforce its will against the majority under the point of a gun.

So given that government at its deepest core is one of force and violence, I find it easy to distrust, and must be kept in check no matter what. Chaos is almost better than the controlled, but latent violence of government. Only the concept of enabling constraints makes the latent violent intent of government makes it worth the risk.

And perhaps many or most moderates or liberals inherently trust government, believing it to be benign not malevolent. We could refer to the Founding Fathers and the Federalist Papers but that's old hat by now, and much of it may no longer be true.

The question is, why do you trust government to do a better job of controlling situations, relationships and conditions better than other forces?

In terms of helping the poor, the solution never seems to be market driven, but rather the violent forceful method of taxation, creating some phony social system which never works and is usually every expensive to administer.

Why would you trust government to be able to administer the delivery of health care?

I admit government has a role to play in regulation of systems, but it should be a minimalist role.

Is anybody bothered that the largest employer is the federal government?

The federal government produces nothing, not one iota of food, not one piece of hardware, no production facilities, and really is destructive to the overall market system except insofar as it enables the system to propel forward. Trade schooling and road systems, regulating air traffic and those items make sense.

Why so much trust in such a violent entity?

How has it earned your trust?

It almost seems you have made this nebulous concept of government, bureaucracy, taxation and power as a God which can no wrong and can solve everything.

Whereas my first instinct is that, "how can something that does not produce be useful as a primary resort?"

As a sort of moderate it's not so much that I trust the government but, rather, that I distrust the individual. People are stupid, they need an equally stupid check to keep chaos at bay.

[il Padrino Ute]

When it comes to matters concerning my family, I don't trust the government; I don't trust others; I only trust myself. I am the only one who will act in my and my family's best interest.

The older I get, the more to the right I move. There are 10 two letter words that make up the only real axiom in life:

If it is to be, it is up to me.

The government really only gets in the way when it works outside of what it is supposed to do.

[ChinoCoug]

Originally Posted by jay santos

At BYU in Economics, I was trained with a very conservative world view on politics and economics. You prove models with mathematics and optimization and use them to look at various economic and political issues.

In the aggregate and assuming certain facts about behavior of individuals and entities, extreme conservative view of the world is an accurate one.

But individuals and entities don't ALWAYS behave the way you would assume they do, and even if they did, the aggregate positive picture doesn't always outweigh the harm you do on certain individuals.

As I get older and observe the world, I become more liberal/moderate. I see the effect on certain individuals and groups and see that they will get chewed up and destroyed by the unchecked capitalist system. A good government system can provide for a capitalist society but help alleviate where things can be unfair. I think we have about as good a system as you can hope for in the US of A, but we're always facing new issues.

We didn't study much empirics as undergrads. Those general equilibrium models are all based on false assumptions. Don't know how long ago you were there, but in 110 we did spend a significant amount of time discussing market failures like asymmetric information, principal-agent problem, externalities, game-theoretic situations that produce sub-optimal outcomes, and the like.

But even in my upper-division classes there was a least one model in every class where the optimal outcome was different from the market equilibrium outcome.

[woot]

I also distrust the government, which is why I think we need to make sure a Republican doesn't succeed Bush. I don't particularly like any of the Democrats (and as I've said, will likely vote 3rd party if Hillary is nominated), but we need to break the cycle. The crop of Republican candidates, other than Paul obviously, seem bent on continuing the terror hysterics with accompanying rights infringements.

I think that a certain amount of government intervention is necessary, but feel that Bush has been intervening in all the wrong places. I don't think anyone can make an honest argument that any of the Republican candidates would interfere any less than any of the democratic candidates; it's only a matter of where you prefer the interventions to be.