Brandon: I don’t like…
I don’t like theft any more than you do, but we both know they don’t take that coin here.
My reason for stressing the moral illegitimacy of theft over arguments based on judgments about the recipients, is that it’s true, not that it’s agreed-upon. That said, if you’re really interested in strategically attuning your argument to the audience, I think you’re mistaken if you suppose that you’re going to have an easier time convincing people here to share your views about the poor than you would just trying to convince them that they shouldn’t force people to support their poverty relief programs — even if those programs are noble and valuable. Moreover, the rewards are greater: if you can make a case there, you’ll also have made a case for libertarian politics as a whole; whereas if you make your case based on the qualities of the recipients you haven’t made any case against other forms of forced redistribution, most of which are just as bad if not worse.
As far as the statistical wonkery goes, you cited federal entitlement programs as a reason to believe that “monied interests” aren’t exercising a heavy influence over politics. But you can’t count Social Security and Medicare spending as examples of the greater influence of the poor and middle class over the government unless they actually tend to financially benefit the poor and middle class at the expense of “monied interests.” But they don’t; if anything fact they are paid out disproportionately to the rich. Of course middle class people are most of the recipients, because nearly everyone is a recipient and most people are middle class. But the higher your annual income (up to the cap, currently about $90,000 / year) the more money is paid out to you, and richer people tend to live longer than poorer people, so the money ends up being disproportionately paid out to well-off people as compared with the elderly paupers the system was allegedly designed to serve. In any case, since the program is a more-or-less universal entitlement program, it can’t be passed off as a class redistribution scheme; the main redistribution of wealth involved is (1) from young people to old people, and (2) from ordinary people to the government.
I trust the government more than the unfettered free market to allocate resources for the poor because there can be laws requiring allocating resources to the poor in a government whereas, by definition, you can’t have those laws in an unfettered free market.
Why do you trust the people in the government to make the right laws for tackling poverty, if you don’t trust people outside of the government to make the right decisions of their own accord? Is there any evidence that elected politicians have some kind of special knowledge or virtue that the rest of us don’t when it comes to poverty and the people facing it?
Also, government spending is not decided by individuals. Senator X can’t decide that he is putting his percentage of the budget towards building a spaceport on his own. He needs approval of the rest of the Senate & the House to get that done. In Libertarian utopia, Senator X (who would determine only how he spends his own money) could decide to use all his capital towards building Senator X spaceport.
I consider this a virtue of libertarianism, not a vice. If somebody wants to sink their own money into a spaceport, I see no reason why he or she shouldn’t. What I object to is my money being sunk into foolish and destructive projects — or even noble and constructive ones — without my permission.
As a practical matter, Senators and Representatives get funding for all kinds of outrageous pet projects all the time; most of their colleagues don’t care about the projects that the tax money is going to, but they don’t see any reason to object, since it’s not their money that’s being wasted, and since by logrolling you can get support for your own pet projects in return. If you think that individual people are inclined to do all kinds of stupid things with their own money, why would you think that they are going to be more responsible with other people’s money, when they need only the approval of a few score of like-minded and similarly self-interested colleagues to sink it into any damnfool project they dream up?
Anticopyright.