@nazgulnarsil It is very unlikely people would give a lot more to charity just because their taxes are lower.
First, with lower taxes people would need to pay for services provided by government now, some of them would be cheaper on free market, others like healthcare and roads empirically are more expensive (market’s very high transaction costs compared to government in such cases explain it all even without other causes), so total amount of free money wouldn’t be all that different, invalidating need for rest of the argument.
There are billions of goods people prefer to giving money to charities. With more money around market would just provide more goods.
People give to charities to feel good about themselves, virtually nobody evaluates charities based on their actual effectiveness. That’s one of the worst ways to spent money, worse than buying real stuff for yourself on the market, and worse than paying taxes and having government provide stuff for you. Criticizing governments for wastefulness and then praising charities is anti-government bias, not based in any real data.
What’s the correlation between charity spending and taxes? I would expect something very close to 0, empirically disproving this libertarian charity theory.
Also—blaming NASA/LHC/etc. is a good idea in places like this, they’re useless expenses but they gets a lot of support from the “smart” people because they sound cool and high tech.
@nazgulnarsil It is very unlikely people would give a lot more to charity just because their taxes are lower.
First, with lower taxes people would need to pay for services provided by government now, some of them would be cheaper on free market, others like healthcare and roads empirically are more expensive (market’s very high transaction costs compared to government in such cases explain it all even without other causes), so total amount of free money wouldn’t be all that different, invalidating need for rest of the argument.
There are billions of goods people prefer to giving money to charities. With more money around market would just provide more goods.
People give to charities to feel good about themselves, virtually nobody evaluates charities based on their actual effectiveness. That’s one of the worst ways to spent money, worse than buying real stuff for yourself on the market, and worse than paying taxes and having government provide stuff for you. Criticizing governments for wastefulness and then praising charities is anti-government bias, not based in any real data.
What’s the correlation between charity spending and taxes? I would expect something very close to 0, empirically disproving this libertarian charity theory.
Also—blaming NASA/LHC/etc. is a good idea in places like this, they’re useless expenses but they gets a lot of support from the “smart” people because they sound cool and high tech.