Sometimes a society has symptoms, like a body. It coughs the cough of low wages or gets the headache of unaffordable schooling. We are empathetic, we want to help - so we say, give the cough drop of minimum wage! Take the asprin of government-funded schooling!
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These are real, empathetic motivations trying to solve concrete problems - but the body is deeply complex. Cough drops and asprin might relieve the pain, but maybe the medicine over time will cause other problems. Maybe the problem is actually a deeper disease.
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I am very hesitant to accept things like minimum wage and government funded schooling - not because I accept the symptoms, but because patching the symptoms might be worse for a the larger system - both in blinding us to the real issues, and causing more issues down the road.
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And too often I feel people who get outraged about social issues are not thinking in terms of large systems - they're thinking in terms of, "this thing hurts, and we need to make it stop in the quickest and easiest way." Our body is ridden with pills and stitches.
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This does not mean the symptoms are any less real or bad or motivating. Just because I don't agree with your choice of medication doesn't mean I approve of the disease. We are both fighting the same thing, just a little differently.
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I love this metaphor. Many gov't programs and policies are just an endless carousel of placebo effects.
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From what I've seen, people who identity as alt-right tend to approach things with a pretty closed mind, just as much as people from social justice circles.
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Maybe, but there’s sound economic arguments for minimum wages (labor market is oligopsonistic) and for schooling (public good/average-cost pricing/natural monopolies). That said, it’s certainly possible that policy could alleviate in the short term and aggravate in the long term.
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