Not that this invalidates anything this person was saying, but for what it's worth, I thought their writing style was extremely suspicious so I ran their first reply through Pangram, and it was flagged as 100% written by AI with high confidence. Perhaps that why the dialogue appeared so productive.
I'm honestly surprised this is your first run-in with folks like this on the internet yet!
Lots of folks are using back-and-forths with AI "to think" but really it's just surfacing its own ideas in its latent space for them as their own. Chatbot sycophancy is a major hazard that labs are working on mitigating, but AI psychosis is one of the symptoms.
Once you remove the regulation that artificially inflate the cost of necessities, poverty really ceases to be much of an issue. Most of the people who would remain poor would just be extremely irresponsible, and giving them UBI is no help at all.
Does it really matter if this person was using AI? My sons are engineers and use high powered calculators and design software—Should we markdown every person who uses some form of technology?
The point is that if AI gets a person to understand the actual economics of a particular policy that’s a net positive (especially if that person is an elected official). Knowledge is power—it’s not cheating.
This is so obviously a chat with AI that I assumed this entire post as tongue in cheek, but everyone else seems to think Caplan was serious. I viewed it as sort of a joke about wishing that UBI defenders were as persuadable as chat bots.
"The libertarian case I make is that every dollar currently flowing through the welfare bureaucracy that reaches a recipient as unrestricted cash is a net increase in individual autonomy, even if the cash itself is a transfer payment. Is that coherent, or am I defining libertarianism down until it means nothing?"
No, receipt of a transfer payment doesn't increase one's autonomy; it increases one's dependency. It is important to bear in mind that one's sense of being in control of one's own life extends way beyond just having enough stuff to meet one's needs in the present; it is also depends on being in control of recollections of one's past and anticipations of one's future.
The implication of this is that personal autonomy is primarily a function of one's independent ability to think and act--independent thinking and acting are what put one in control of one's past and one's future. When the satisfaction of your innate needs is at the mercy of someone else, you are not in control of your future or your past. Rather, it is your patron who owns your life. Their promise that you are "entitled" to their patronage is always revocable on their whim.
The libertarian principle of enforcing one's exclusive control over the use and disposition of oneself and one's peacefully-acquired possessions is what optimizes one's personal autonomy; coerced transfers of possessions obviously diminish the tax-payer's ability to realize their preferred anticipations and recollections while inducing such a state of dependency on the part of the welfare recipient.
The social welfare principle of state-guaranteed sustenance boils down to a demand to regress adults to a condition of perpetual childhood. While young children can find happiness in depending upon loving parents, this is only because they lack a conscious awareness of their own past and future strongly affecting their present emotional state. As they grow up and develop such an awareness, their psychological need for being able to think and act for themselves becomes essential to their happiness. Adults need personal ownership *and* personal responsibility just as much as they need food, water, and shelter to optimize their pursuit of happiness.
This proves too much if you are dependent on an employer who can fire you for his personal reasons. Does that also violate your autonomy for that matter if the government has the power to cut law enforcement spending and therefore increase crime and threat to your property does that mean you are not really autonomous because you dependent on them for actually protecting your property and having a realistic expectation of utilising it in the future?
In a free society you are not dependent upon a single employer. You can seek employment by a rival employer, or perhaps you can go into business for yourself. The same logic applies to sellers of goods and services as well as to buyers--competition, or even just a threat of competition, incentivizes business owners and employees alike towards satisfying consumer preferences, and systematically redirects capital towards those business owners who refrain from indulging in doing things for purely personal reasons.
Some people of course don't like serving consumers; some whose hearts are filled with contempt tend to think that ordinary people are wicked and/or stupid and really need to be bossed around by their betters (i.e. themselves), while others envy their more successful competitors or are filled with bigotry against others that they would find more profitable to be cooperating with.
One might argue that a free society that doesn't indulge such feelings of contempt, envy, or bigotry for others is not respecting personal autonomy, but the point of being autonomous is to think and act on one's own judgement, not to govern other people's actions according to one's feelings. It is self-ownership and the ownership of one's peacefully-acquired possessions that gives every person the maximum scope for thinking and acting independently without coming into conflict with one another.
Well, firstly, given that unemployment does exist and the fact that the labour market is not without its frictions. It’s just obviously the case that being fired has a negative impact on you, especially since gaps on your CV, don’t look good to future employers, but in any case, single employer is doing a lot of work there. Certainly all potential employers as a whole or the market as a whole do influence your job opportunities. If tomorrow, the world went into recession, you might very well find yourself without a job. That might feel like an unfair comparison to the state, but in reality to change major policies by the government, you don’t have to convince a single individual. You have to convince large numbers of people and indeed on topics of high public salience you have to convince a majority of the public as well.
In any case your conclusion is just counterintuitive somebody else handing you resources not making you autonomous is just a weird choice of wording when nobody is forcing you to take that money. If you really don’t like it, you can just give it to somebody else or set it on fire. So this kind of argument that people freely choosing money that they can easily get rid of and spending it as they wish reduces autonomy, just strikes me as ridiculous, and something which applied consistently would forbid a lot of mutually acceptable transactions. For example, AI companies are buying chips from a market which is heavily dominated by one company. Does this suddenly mean that that company is not good for their autonomy and they be better of if there was no such market, of course not having one person, willing to give you what you want, is still better than nobody, willing to give you what you want in terms of autonomy. You can redefine autonomy to mean freedom from other people influencing you by for example, offering you things you want in exchange, but that’s a completely stupid and non-standard definition of autonomy, which if applied consistently would give ridiculous results.
Yes, it is true that there are costs to the worker associated with changing jobs, but the same thing is true from the employer's perspective--there are costs associated with having higher turnover rates and/or having to pay higher wages due to one's propensity for creating worse working conditions than competing employers do. Indeed, in all voluntary institutions (whether for-profit or not) founded on long-term personal relationships each person involved confronts tradeoffs between doing their own thing versus loyally serving the institution's goal. Having to earn the trust and good will of others and respecting their discriminatory judgement concerning you is the price you pay for respecting _their_ autonomy.
The problem of dependency arises, not from whatever money you have in hand after you cash a government check, but rather in connection with your hope of receiving a future stream of government checks. The facts are that you don't have a right to opt-out of the government's payroll taxes, you don't have a right to insist that the funds derived from your tax payments be invested for your benefit, and you don't have a right to enforce payment of the benefits originally promised by the politicians. In other words, the welfare state doesn't have to earn your good will nor has made any binding contractual obligation to you; you are simply not given any choice in the matter.
Back in the day, the Mafia ran rackets where a worker or small businessman would be forced to join a mob-controlled union or trade association and pay high fees into its pension fund, etc, which the mob then proceeded to plunder. How is that any different from how the politicians are running the Social Security and Medicare trust funds? And how is such an arrangement supposed to give us a warm fuzzy feeling that our "old age security" is in good hands?
To be clear, I’m hardly advocating that employers not be able to fire people that would be ridiculous. I’m just pointing out that your idea that the government paying you money does not enhance your autonomy and that the dependency disc creates means. It’s actually Aunty freedom is ridiculous after all. You don’t have a right to enforce future payment from your employer, even if you have in fact, Made expensive decisions regarding your future around the possibility that you will continue to be paid, and indeed, it’s not like you’re always only fired for reasons that are your fault, since the employer might just go insolvent or something. The expectation that you will continue to receive future benefits is against something. You can opt out of just burn any future cash. You receive the reason people don’t do that isn’t because of restriction on their freedom. It’s because they like having that option and in any case, most beneficiaries are such income, a demonstratably in favour of the program continuing to exist, just go ask them, they would not like the government discontinuing the program, the same way, I would not like my employer to fire me, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t enhance my freedom just that I would not like to lose the additional freedom he grants me. Century, I’m making an argument by analogy, arguing that there are no relevant differences between the government program and your employer such that one is freedom enhancing, and the other is not their are both similarly, freedom enhancing, even if you are dependent on them, and indeed, if you start treating dependency as making you actively less free and not being dependent, you end up arguing at a lot of mutually beneficial trade is actually freedom, reducing because you’re dependent on the other person and the possibility of future trade such that they have a lot of ability to pressure you to suddenly cause you a certain problem. After all. If tomorrow, the economy of China was to fall into ruins precisely because America trades with them, the American economy would not do so great, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t enhance freedom in America right now to trade with them or that, the prospect of future trade with them is somehow freedom reducing just because it means that American prosperity is somewhat dependent on continue Chinese prosperity and willingness to trade.
You are acting like it's the autonomy of welfare recipients that matters. But what about the autonomy of taxpayers? Surely being forced under threat of prison to hand over money to fund a cause one does not believe in reduces one's autonomy.
No, I was arguing against the ridiculous idea that receiving welfare payments does not increase your autonomy, an idea which was explicitly put forward in the comment that started this whole thread. You can certainly argue that it’s not worth restricting the autonomy of other people that’s a coherent stand, but I was objecting to a specific absurd claim, not evaluating the issue as a whole. If you go over my comments again, it will be clear that I am only making the narrow claim that welfare payments obviously increase the autonomy of recipients, not discussing whether welfare payments are a good idea or not. So of course I don’t talk about other considerations since I’m not even discussing the issue as such.
Maybe you don't like discussing such issues, but the point is precisely that a truly autonomous person needs control over earning the money that gets deposited into one's bank account, not merely control over how the money already in one's account gets spent. Being at the discretionary mercy of a particular patron to obtain the necessities of life most certainly is a form of dependency. If you didn't get the point of the mafia pension racket analogy I brought up previously, maybe Aesop's fable "The Dog and the Wolf" will help you understand: https://fablesofaesop.com/the-dog-and-the-wolf.html
One thing I will concede is that if you earn enough while you are still working, it is possible to voluntarily accumulate enough savings of your own and thus not have to depend on the state's promises for your future economic security. With enough savings one can be blissfully happy while collecting their Social Security checks knowing that one will still be able to put food on the table, etc. even if such checks were to stop arriving some day or if the fiat dollar were to hyperinflate, making such checks worthless in real terms.
Be aware, however, that most Americans don't have this luxury. Over the past half century, many felt they couldn't afford to save enough given the extent to which payroll taxes were reducing their earnings, while others were deceived by fraudulent government representations of the inviolability of future "entitlement" payments and thus led more spendthrift lifestyles instead of choosing to save and invest enough.
As a consequence of this, many Americans are now in a position where they are desperately counting on a present or future stream of benefit payments to assure themselves that their basic needs will be met. Is it your contention that these people haven't become dependent upon the welfare state? And should they be confident that they have rock-solid "old age security" given the dire fiscal condition of the federal government?
You are correct, but defenders of welfare statism typically try to rationalize such compromises of autonomy by claiming that having basic material needs for food, water and shelter met is more essential for achieving happiness than having exclusive control over your own life and property is.
But there would still be a decent number of traditional progressives, and a fairly large number of center-left, who willingly sacrifice long term growth for more short term redistribution.
But yes I’m with you we would have rule of law with way, way, way less regulation and consequently much more prosperity.
Maybe. I'm not sure how many liberals consciously acknowledge and prefer (almost) everyone to be worse off in exchange for less inequality. If they at least acknowledged that we could have a discussion.
But I have plenty of midwit liberal friends and family - as well as a couple who aren’t midwits - who argue exactly this.
Now I grant they probably mostly don’t fully grok the *magnitude* of the tradeoff in most cases between growth and their generalized sense of “equity”, and in some cases they deny the tradeoff.
But all acknowledge the idea and assert that at least in general they think it worthwhile.
And certainly, even in the extreme of your case re: “criticism and logic” where we got everyone to agree to eliminate most leftist regulation, reasonable people could and would surely disagree about the amount of redistribution.
I suspect what happened is that the person you were talking to discussed your answer with an AI and got the AI to write the responses.
That said, the actual content of the discussion is indeed productive. Perhaps running everything through am AI is helpful for some people to parse information. Still, it would have been nice if he wrote the responses in his own words.
My guess is similar: AI helped with the wording, but the thoughts are the author's own. This doesn't look like the AI writing I would expect via full delegation to AI. AI's agreeability might have actually helped the author accept Caplan's points more easily than otherwise, in which case it's an actual treatment effect rather than masking the author's true feelings.
I know this isn’t a new idea, and it’s not libertarian — it’s still redistribution — but replacing all existing welfare programs with unconditional cash payments to current recipients seems like a step in the right direction. You’d eliminate most of the bureaucracy, reduce paternalism, and let recipients allocate resources more efficiently, which partly offsets the smaller payments. Some disadvantages remain, like eligibility verification and phase-out effects, but those can be minimized with annual income verification, smooth phase-outs instead of cliffs, and consolidating everything into a single cash-transfer system. It’s not a solution, but it’s a cleaner and more coherent version of the welfare state than what we have now.
Not that this invalidates anything this person was saying, but for what it's worth, I thought their writing style was extremely suspicious so I ran their first reply through Pangram, and it was flagged as 100% written by AI with high confidence. Perhaps that why the dialogue appeared so productive.
Yes, all the responses appear to be 100% AI generated based on tone and concessions. Sounds like Claude to me
Makes sense in hindsight. But what would motivate someone to use AI to do this?
This mentality, but AI writing:
https://dchess.org/posts/how-memes-inform-my-work/i-made-this.png
I'm honestly surprised this is your first run-in with folks like this on the internet yet!
Lots of folks are using back-and-forths with AI "to think" but really it's just surfacing its own ideas in its latent space for them as their own. Chatbot sycophancy is a major hazard that labs are working on mitigating, but AI psychosis is one of the symptoms.
I found those numbers interesting but this feels like reading someone’s gpt chat (pretty sure every response is 100% ai generated)
It’s AI slop.
"maximizing well-being for the bottom 50th percentile of Americans." May be a laudable goal, but not libertarian.
Once you remove the regulation that artificially inflate the cost of necessities, poverty really ceases to be much of an issue. Most of the people who would remain poor would just be extremely irresponsible, and giving them UBI is no help at all.
Does it really matter if this person was using AI? My sons are engineers and use high powered calculators and design software—Should we markdown every person who uses some form of technology?
The point is that if AI gets a person to understand the actual economics of a particular policy that’s a net positive (especially if that person is an elected official). Knowledge is power—it’s not cheating.
Gotta read the room. Culture has quickly shifted to where sending people obvious AI copypaste is impolite if not offensive.
Your sons better learn quickly that AI writing stinks and their managers can smell it
You are certainly entitled to your opinion.
Did Bryan email back and forth with someone who was using chat or did he just share a chatgpt thread with us and make up the "lawyer"?
This is manifestly AI-generated. Immediate mea-culpa. "It's not an X. It's a Y that Z."
This is so obviously a chat with AI that I assumed this entire post as tongue in cheek, but everyone else seems to think Caplan was serious. I viewed it as sort of a joke about wishing that UBI defenders were as persuadable as chat bots.
"The libertarian case I make is that every dollar currently flowing through the welfare bureaucracy that reaches a recipient as unrestricted cash is a net increase in individual autonomy, even if the cash itself is a transfer payment. Is that coherent, or am I defining libertarianism down until it means nothing?"
No, receipt of a transfer payment doesn't increase one's autonomy; it increases one's dependency. It is important to bear in mind that one's sense of being in control of one's own life extends way beyond just having enough stuff to meet one's needs in the present; it is also depends on being in control of recollections of one's past and anticipations of one's future.
The implication of this is that personal autonomy is primarily a function of one's independent ability to think and act--independent thinking and acting are what put one in control of one's past and one's future. When the satisfaction of your innate needs is at the mercy of someone else, you are not in control of your future or your past. Rather, it is your patron who owns your life. Their promise that you are "entitled" to their patronage is always revocable on their whim.
The libertarian principle of enforcing one's exclusive control over the use and disposition of oneself and one's peacefully-acquired possessions is what optimizes one's personal autonomy; coerced transfers of possessions obviously diminish the tax-payer's ability to realize their preferred anticipations and recollections while inducing such a state of dependency on the part of the welfare recipient.
The social welfare principle of state-guaranteed sustenance boils down to a demand to regress adults to a condition of perpetual childhood. While young children can find happiness in depending upon loving parents, this is only because they lack a conscious awareness of their own past and future strongly affecting their present emotional state. As they grow up and develop such an awareness, their psychological need for being able to think and act for themselves becomes essential to their happiness. Adults need personal ownership *and* personal responsibility just as much as they need food, water, and shelter to optimize their pursuit of happiness.
This proves too much if you are dependent on an employer who can fire you for his personal reasons. Does that also violate your autonomy for that matter if the government has the power to cut law enforcement spending and therefore increase crime and threat to your property does that mean you are not really autonomous because you dependent on them for actually protecting your property and having a realistic expectation of utilising it in the future?
In a free society you are not dependent upon a single employer. You can seek employment by a rival employer, or perhaps you can go into business for yourself. The same logic applies to sellers of goods and services as well as to buyers--competition, or even just a threat of competition, incentivizes business owners and employees alike towards satisfying consumer preferences, and systematically redirects capital towards those business owners who refrain from indulging in doing things for purely personal reasons.
Some people of course don't like serving consumers; some whose hearts are filled with contempt tend to think that ordinary people are wicked and/or stupid and really need to be bossed around by their betters (i.e. themselves), while others envy their more successful competitors or are filled with bigotry against others that they would find more profitable to be cooperating with.
One might argue that a free society that doesn't indulge such feelings of contempt, envy, or bigotry for others is not respecting personal autonomy, but the point of being autonomous is to think and act on one's own judgement, not to govern other people's actions according to one's feelings. It is self-ownership and the ownership of one's peacefully-acquired possessions that gives every person the maximum scope for thinking and acting independently without coming into conflict with one another.
Well, firstly, given that unemployment does exist and the fact that the labour market is not without its frictions. It’s just obviously the case that being fired has a negative impact on you, especially since gaps on your CV, don’t look good to future employers, but in any case, single employer is doing a lot of work there. Certainly all potential employers as a whole or the market as a whole do influence your job opportunities. If tomorrow, the world went into recession, you might very well find yourself without a job. That might feel like an unfair comparison to the state, but in reality to change major policies by the government, you don’t have to convince a single individual. You have to convince large numbers of people and indeed on topics of high public salience you have to convince a majority of the public as well.
In any case your conclusion is just counterintuitive somebody else handing you resources not making you autonomous is just a weird choice of wording when nobody is forcing you to take that money. If you really don’t like it, you can just give it to somebody else or set it on fire. So this kind of argument that people freely choosing money that they can easily get rid of and spending it as they wish reduces autonomy, just strikes me as ridiculous, and something which applied consistently would forbid a lot of mutually acceptable transactions. For example, AI companies are buying chips from a market which is heavily dominated by one company. Does this suddenly mean that that company is not good for their autonomy and they be better of if there was no such market, of course not having one person, willing to give you what you want, is still better than nobody, willing to give you what you want in terms of autonomy. You can redefine autonomy to mean freedom from other people influencing you by for example, offering you things you want in exchange, but that’s a completely stupid and non-standard definition of autonomy, which if applied consistently would give ridiculous results.
Yes, it is true that there are costs to the worker associated with changing jobs, but the same thing is true from the employer's perspective--there are costs associated with having higher turnover rates and/or having to pay higher wages due to one's propensity for creating worse working conditions than competing employers do. Indeed, in all voluntary institutions (whether for-profit or not) founded on long-term personal relationships each person involved confronts tradeoffs between doing their own thing versus loyally serving the institution's goal. Having to earn the trust and good will of others and respecting their discriminatory judgement concerning you is the price you pay for respecting _their_ autonomy.
The problem of dependency arises, not from whatever money you have in hand after you cash a government check, but rather in connection with your hope of receiving a future stream of government checks. The facts are that you don't have a right to opt-out of the government's payroll taxes, you don't have a right to insist that the funds derived from your tax payments be invested for your benefit, and you don't have a right to enforce payment of the benefits originally promised by the politicians. In other words, the welfare state doesn't have to earn your good will nor has made any binding contractual obligation to you; you are simply not given any choice in the matter.
Back in the day, the Mafia ran rackets where a worker or small businessman would be forced to join a mob-controlled union or trade association and pay high fees into its pension fund, etc, which the mob then proceeded to plunder. How is that any different from how the politicians are running the Social Security and Medicare trust funds? And how is such an arrangement supposed to give us a warm fuzzy feeling that our "old age security" is in good hands?
To be clear, I’m hardly advocating that employers not be able to fire people that would be ridiculous. I’m just pointing out that your idea that the government paying you money does not enhance your autonomy and that the dependency disc creates means. It’s actually Aunty freedom is ridiculous after all. You don’t have a right to enforce future payment from your employer, even if you have in fact, Made expensive decisions regarding your future around the possibility that you will continue to be paid, and indeed, it’s not like you’re always only fired for reasons that are your fault, since the employer might just go insolvent or something. The expectation that you will continue to receive future benefits is against something. You can opt out of just burn any future cash. You receive the reason people don’t do that isn’t because of restriction on their freedom. It’s because they like having that option and in any case, most beneficiaries are such income, a demonstratably in favour of the program continuing to exist, just go ask them, they would not like the government discontinuing the program, the same way, I would not like my employer to fire me, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t enhance my freedom just that I would not like to lose the additional freedom he grants me. Century, I’m making an argument by analogy, arguing that there are no relevant differences between the government program and your employer such that one is freedom enhancing, and the other is not their are both similarly, freedom enhancing, even if you are dependent on them, and indeed, if you start treating dependency as making you actively less free and not being dependent, you end up arguing at a lot of mutually beneficial trade is actually freedom, reducing because you’re dependent on the other person and the possibility of future trade such that they have a lot of ability to pressure you to suddenly cause you a certain problem. After all. If tomorrow, the economy of China was to fall into ruins precisely because America trades with them, the American economy would not do so great, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t enhance freedom in America right now to trade with them or that, the prospect of future trade with them is somehow freedom reducing just because it means that American prosperity is somewhat dependent on continue Chinese prosperity and willingness to trade.
You are acting like it's the autonomy of welfare recipients that matters. But what about the autonomy of taxpayers? Surely being forced under threat of prison to hand over money to fund a cause one does not believe in reduces one's autonomy.
No, I was arguing against the ridiculous idea that receiving welfare payments does not increase your autonomy, an idea which was explicitly put forward in the comment that started this whole thread. You can certainly argue that it’s not worth restricting the autonomy of other people that’s a coherent stand, but I was objecting to a specific absurd claim, not evaluating the issue as a whole. If you go over my comments again, it will be clear that I am only making the narrow claim that welfare payments obviously increase the autonomy of recipients, not discussing whether welfare payments are a good idea or not. So of course I don’t talk about other considerations since I’m not even discussing the issue as such.
Maybe you don't like discussing such issues, but the point is precisely that a truly autonomous person needs control over earning the money that gets deposited into one's bank account, not merely control over how the money already in one's account gets spent. Being at the discretionary mercy of a particular patron to obtain the necessities of life most certainly is a form of dependency. If you didn't get the point of the mafia pension racket analogy I brought up previously, maybe Aesop's fable "The Dog and the Wolf" will help you understand: https://fablesofaesop.com/the-dog-and-the-wolf.html
One thing I will concede is that if you earn enough while you are still working, it is possible to voluntarily accumulate enough savings of your own and thus not have to depend on the state's promises for your future economic security. With enough savings one can be blissfully happy while collecting their Social Security checks knowing that one will still be able to put food on the table, etc. even if such checks were to stop arriving some day or if the fiat dollar were to hyperinflate, making such checks worthless in real terms.
Be aware, however, that most Americans don't have this luxury. Over the past half century, many felt they couldn't afford to save enough given the extent to which payroll taxes were reducing their earnings, while others were deceived by fraudulent government representations of the inviolability of future "entitlement" payments and thus led more spendthrift lifestyles instead of choosing to save and invest enough.
As a consequence of this, many Americans are now in a position where they are desperately counting on a present or future stream of benefit payments to assure themselves that their basic needs will be met. Is it your contention that these people haven't become dependent upon the welfare state? And should they be confident that they have rock-solid "old age security" given the dire fiscal condition of the federal government?
You are correct, but defenders of welfare statism typically try to rationalize such compromises of autonomy by claiming that having basic material needs for food, water and shelter met is more essential for achieving happiness than having exclusive control over your own life and property is.
Does it bother you at all that it was almost certainly written using AI?
The interlocutor either was an LLM, or the person heavily used an LLM in crafting the responses.
I'm not entirely sure what to make of that. I mean, it is a tool...
If people took criticism based on logic and changed their minds, there wouldn't be liberals at all.
There also wouldn't be libertarians who thought we should have uncontrolled borders, incidentally.
I respectfully disagree.
There would not be hardcore leftists, true.
But there would still be a decent number of traditional progressives, and a fairly large number of center-left, who willingly sacrifice long term growth for more short term redistribution.
But yes I’m with you we would have rule of law with way, way, way less regulation and consequently much more prosperity.
Maybe. I'm not sure how many liberals consciously acknowledge and prefer (almost) everyone to be worse off in exchange for less inequality. If they at least acknowledged that we could have a discussion.
Well, there are stupid people everywhere.
As well as largely ignorant.
I’m not talking about them.
But I have plenty of midwit liberal friends and family - as well as a couple who aren’t midwits - who argue exactly this.
Now I grant they probably mostly don’t fully grok the *magnitude* of the tradeoff in most cases between growth and their generalized sense of “equity”, and in some cases they deny the tradeoff.
But all acknowledge the idea and assert that at least in general they think it worthwhile.
And certainly, even in the extreme of your case re: “criticism and logic” where we got everyone to agree to eliminate most leftist regulation, reasonable people could and would surely disagree about the amount of redistribution.
There also wouldn't be commies who think "we" own the whole of the land mass of the United States.
I suspect what happened is that the person you were talking to discussed your answer with an AI and got the AI to write the responses.
That said, the actual content of the discussion is indeed productive. Perhaps running everything through am AI is helpful for some people to parse information. Still, it would have been nice if he wrote the responses in his own words.
My guess is similar: AI helped with the wording, but the thoughts are the author's own. This doesn't look like the AI writing I would expect via full delegation to AI. AI's agreeability might have actually helped the author accept Caplan's points more easily than otherwise, in which case it's an actual treatment effect rather than masking the author's true feelings.
Government rations are still government rations when you call them "UBI".
I know this isn’t a new idea, and it’s not libertarian — it’s still redistribution — but replacing all existing welfare programs with unconditional cash payments to current recipients seems like a step in the right direction. You’d eliminate most of the bureaucracy, reduce paternalism, and let recipients allocate resources more efficiently, which partly offsets the smaller payments. Some disadvantages remain, like eligibility verification and phase-out effects, but those can be minimized with annual income verification, smooth phase-outs instead of cliffs, and consolidating everything into a single cash-transfer system. It’s not a solution, but it’s a cleaner and more coherent version of the welfare state than what we have now.