Interesting point, but maybe you answered the question in that we are forced to pay taxes. Appreciate your pov and I think your presentation style lends to better discussion around here.
When I invest in a business startup, that's a transfer of wealth too. I'm transferring some of my wealth to another entity in hopes that they will grow that wealth. No guarantee that they will though. And if the government investment goes on to create more wealth it's not a zero sum game whether it be private investment or public investment. When the government invested in the interstate highway system, that was not a zero sum game. And when the government invests in your education at the University of Florida, I would hope that's not a zero sum game as either.
You put a lot of value in the government so I know how badly you’ll stretch and parse words to meet your expectation on this subject. It won’t change the fact that your bureaucrat buddies can’t directly create wealth. And the worst part….they’re so bad at making investments, nobody even seems to care any more. It’s baked into the govt cake…We’re so far in the red with these guys taking our taxes and it’s disgusting. They don’t generate wealth, they put us all at risk with mountains of debt. We should all come together and figure out how to take their far and deep reach away from our wallets.
The central question is what results in gains in wealth vs transfers in wealth? How is wealth created? The answers here vary a bit among experts, but two central ideas are 1) increases in productivity and 2) specialization and trade. So let’s think about a simple welfare model, where someone takes a dollar from richer you to give to poorer me. When this happens, no wealth is created (ignoring a marginal utility function). What was to be one dollar spent by you is now one dollar spent by me. From the population perspective, this is no different. Neither productivity nor specialization has been increased. For your roads example, I think a utility was derived by government action, as most view common roads as a tragedy of the commons problem requiring collective action. This is the same argument for elementary school, as it is often believed that an educated populace is required for a functional democracy. The case for state college is a bit more subtle though. It probably makes no sense for the state subsidize me becoming a private corporate lawyer, as that person provides no public gains (and lots of private ones). Lastly, let’s tackle private enterprise. Private businesses commonly fail, that’s true. And so do public ventures. Here, let’s call it a draw. The problem is that public rent-seeking competitions add a second layer of failure to process: selection of winning bids. So let’s imagine 9/10 of all businesses fail and that 9/10 of all government bids are rejected. A private business now has 1/10 chance of succeeding after some investment, while a public venture will have a 1/100 chance (1/10 chance of winning bid X 1/10 chance of being successful on the market). All the investments that go into those losing bids are truly lost, while investments in failed businesses brought at least a chance of return. In the end, I (and I believe even bluke) recognize that governments have essential roles in wealth creation. However, we should not view exchanges that occur due to government usurpation of an activity that could have been well executed by the private sector as created wealth. What we need is evidence that the government is providing a resource that other citizens could not. Subsidizing road construction seems like such an activity, while subsidizing sugar production or corporate legal representation is almost certainly not.
Agreed, and I have said repeatedly that the private sector is better than the public sector at innovation (thus creating wealth). But there are things the free market is not good at as well. And the original claim wasn't that that government wasn't as good at creating wealth as the private sector is, it was that government can't create wealth. It can and does. There are areas where if the government doesn't do it, no one will, because there isn't any direct profit in it. For example, there is no profit in educating poor children who can't afford to pay for an education. If there were, we wouldn't need public education. But there isn't, so we as a society decided that education was important enough that we should publicly subsidize it. And without having done that we would be a much poorer country.
But you continue to miss the point that it does so with our tax dollars. The GOV just redirects our money man. That’s not directly creating wealth.
Now I think I shall have to appear to switch sides. I think dang is making a legitimate point as well, even if it may not be that of “direct” wealth creation. Let’s consider a police department. These institutions we realized likely must be publicly funded to fulfill their proper role of protecting he whole of the public. Certainly this provides indirect wealth, as your and my property is slightly better protected from theft. Without a police, we citizens might even collectively invest more in private security than we all pay in taxes to support our public safety force. Does this count as direct wealth creation, I don’t know, but it results in an increase in standard of living, I suspect. I am getting us no closer to answering the challenge of this thread, which is a bit removed from the current discourse, but I do think the topic of wealth creation is fascinating.
I don't doubt that there is an uptick in violent crimes across America, and all cities and states are affected. But red states and cities generally don't let criminals out without bail. If I lived in a Blue State like Illinois (Chicago) I would be upset with the new laws being considered.
The question of whether a particular government activity creates wealth is separate from whether government creates wealth at all. There's no reasonable argument that we would be better off economically (or have more wealth) without our government. A priori, the government creates wealth.
I showed many pages ago how gov can create wealth. Here's 2 others 1. break up monopolies...no, this does not merely trans wealth from producers to consumers, it makes the pie bigger 2. price externalities correctly....this can actually be done with no money coming or going to the gov. Simply, require the price to reflect the externality. Here's an ex. for a positive externality. deadweight loss w/o subsidy increase in wealth (sum of producer & consumer surplus) with subsidy.
Life expectancy: Liberal policies linked to lower working age deaths Researchers looked at policies relating to criminal justice, marijuana, the environment, gun safety, health and welfare, private labor, economic taxes, and tobacco taxes, and scored them on a 0-to-1 continuum, where the maximum conservative score is zero and the maximum liberal score is one. They merged that information with mortality data spanning from 1999 to 2019, and found liberal policies were associated with lower deaths among people aged 25 to 64, according to the study published Wednesday in PLOS ONE. The analysis revealed changing state policies to fully liberal could have saved more than 171,000 lives in 2019, while changing them to fully conservative may have cost over 217,000 lives. “As an academic who does scientific research, I studiously avoided talking about politics in my professional work. ... But the data are pointing us to that as a determinant of health,” said study co-author Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
They generated 2.4 billion in revenue, how much profit did that result in? Answer they lost 800 million on that 2.4 billion in revenue… Rail News - Amtrak posts $801 million operating loss in FY2020. For Railroad Career Professionals
Statistics... Lol. you can make them look any which way you want them to look like. Population demographics are key to much of his rant about Blue states versus Red states.
