At a recent event, hosted by Andreessen-Horowitz, on the future of retail, Berland pointed out that there are two things you always have with you: a credit card and a smartphone. The day is coming when we combine them. “What we are hyper-focused on is how do we merge those two things,” she says. “Especially as one day the physical card will disappear.”
Even before I read that story, I was thinking of using two media to deliver flex-benefit dollars: smart phones, for people who have them; and paper, for people who don’t. With smart phones, you require use of biometric ID to spend flex-benefit dollars, and I assume you make fraud a lot harder to pull off. With paper, you could print the person’s photo on the paper in order to make fraud difficult.
Dreher comments on Brooks commenting on Room to Grow. A fairly un-libertarian / paternalist message.
Wait a second, the first half of that he attempts to illustrate that average Joe has trouble with the government’s convoluted tax forms.
By all means, less convoluted government systems! I’m not sure how that illustrates how average Joe can’t handle the things he is supposed to be handling if he had more time and money with less convoluted obstacle courses. Why don’t we try it and see before we decide that because people might not be able to handle convoluted tax forms as well as specialists or the author and his wife that we need even more convoluted forms to enact unproven paternalism?
Just a thought.
Yes; not everyone can play chess well, and government should not create processes which are mandatory for everyone and that feel like playing chess, and require that one play well in order to extract every possible lawful advantage. Yuval Levin’s response said as much.
But plenty of market choices are very hard to make too, and they require too much information and cognitive ability and effort to be genuinely digestible and accessible to most people. Intelligently choosing health care insurance plans was one of those challenges.
Lot’s of people need something like the equivalent of a professional agent that will understand their preferences and help them make the best choice, but the human versions of those agents are too expensive. Fortunately (maybe), there will soon be ‘an app for that’ to provide this kind of personal assistance.
But the core problem is really personal responsibility, discipline, willpower, conscientiousness, etc.
That is, we don’t let children make certain choices because they are too immature. But we don’t measure people’s actual degree of maturity, and we just substitute age as a proxy, and the reality is that it’s a pretty awful proxy. There are lots of adults that never develop past childish levels of maturity, and are unable to resist impulses to indulge in certain forms of carnal temptation.
A person you wouldn’t trust to manage your affairs for you is probably someone who has trouble managing their own affairs.
If you just give people cash, a lot of people will blow it on temporary pleasures, instead of building a base to improve their life situation and trying to live a more middle class life consistent with bourgeois virtues.
Look, even Dr. Kling is telling people they have to buy catastrophic health insurance first. And then apparently they can only use the rest of their money to buy government-approved goods and services. Why? Because he is wise and suspects a lot of people wouldn’t do it on their own, even if it was affordable and a ‘sure bet’. Then some of them would need treatment and show up at the Emergency Room, and given the norms of our society, it would cause a kind of emotional blackmail, and we would all feel obligated to treat them and eat the cost anyway rather than let people ‘die in the street’ or bankrupt their whole family. That’s the logic of the mandate.
What other ‘bad’ choices are they going to make with their cash. Well, a lot of Libertarians argue that the concept of a ‘competent-to-testify’ adult making a ‘bad’ choice about how to best spend their money is incoherent or poses such a dangerous risk of the slippery slope to nanny-state paternalism that we’re better off just accepting that a certain number of people are going to buy booze and cigarettes and drugs and junk food and lottery tickets and lap dances and pornography and video games and so on.
But I think anyone who’s been around for a while knows that this is exactly what a lot of people would do with an unrestricted guaranteed income.
Which is the problem. We want to give people a hand-up, not a hand-out. We want to teach them to fish, and not give them a fish. We want to make sure they have food, shelter, clothes, and some basic level of medical care and education for their kids, but we don’t want them to blow a bundle of cash irresponsible on their personal whims and end up in the same destitute condition we were trying to remedy in the first place, and which was the purported purpose of the safety net and welfare state in the first place.
Just handing people a little cash without strings attached and expecting them to take care of basic necessities first seems to work for old people on Social Security, but there are reasons for that, and also we give them health care and education for children isn’t an issue.
One of the big problems is the diversity of human reality presents us with a problem. On the one hand, we probably have to be somewhat paternalistic towards the lowest 10-20% of the working-age adult population. On the other hand, we have strong norms of egalitarianism and ‘equal protection’, so as soon as you start attaching strings to the benefits that are targeted to poor people, you start attaching strings to everyone, even people who don’t need strings.
And that’s the problem, because it’s be great to be able to give responsible, middle class people money or vouchers for services that are increasingly government-provided to be able to break that tether to one-size-fits-all and generate the variety and incentives of a competitive marketplace.
So the truly radical position is “Paternalism for thee [the immature underclass] but more free choices for me [the responsible middle class].
I think our grandchildren will think we are crazy when we tell them that we used to pay for things by scribbling numbers on easily reproducible slips of paper that frequently had pictures of Mickey Mouse or our favorite sports team logo on them.
I too find check writing to be archaic and I stopped carrying a check book ten years ago! As presented in the movie “Catch Me if you Can” the check processing system had few safeguards and was easily cheated by anyone with a little savvy. I don’t believe that is the case anymore. For one banks are reluctant to cash checks against their accounts if the payee does not also have an account. Also, those interested in checking account theft seem to believe it is easier done electronically – thus the phishing methods to get people to reveal their account numbers and to authorize payments from those accounts to them.