| richardhutnik said: I am leaning towards the belief the American welfare system is as useless as it is, because of both the belief of Liberals that fixing external conditions results in humans acting better, and the belief of conservatives that people are inheritantly lazy, and you need to show toughness to them to motivate people to work (take away benefits and people will be forced to work). The third path of assisting people to develop living skills, doesn't show up, so the system doesn't do this. You have a system that warehouses people a few years, and then throws them out. |
I would contend that most conservative ideology leans towards attempting to achieve equality of opportunity, which is a very functional but (sometimes) not very compassionate approach; and that most progressive ideology leans towards attempting to achieve equality of outcomes, which is a very compassionate but not very functional approach. Neither leads to optimal outcomes ...
I would suggest that optimal results are achieved when you have equality of opportunity and a system which encourages the maximum capitalization of that opportunity; essentially trying to achieve the Nash Equilibrium within the economy. With education as the example, this would be a world where every child has the opportunity to go to school and every child takes advantage of this opportunity and receives a high quality education. This is an economy where everyone can obtain adequate food, clothing and shelter for a reasonable portion of their income; and the difference between the wealthiest individuals in the economy and the minimum wage workers is their capacity to afford luxuries.
Now, the government acting as a referee can aid in the building of such an economy, but the more active their participation in the economy to create better outcomes will result in this becoming a more elusive outcome. Essentially, any action by the government within the economy will result in an equal or greater counter-reaction in the economy. An example of this is the housing market where government action to increase home affordability and home ownership created a housing bubble which made homes far less affordable; and the options that many low income people used to have (save up a 10% to 20% down payment) to afford a home were taken away because of the price appreciation (saving up 20% for a $100,000 home is possible for low income individuals, saving up 20% when the same home is selling for $500,000 isn’t).
