links

* Class struggle boardgame. Kremlin boardgame. Review of Karl Rove memoir
* Facebook mail censorship. Facebook gone rogue?. Privacy history graphic. Ten reasons to delete your account, and how to.
* Taxes as %age of GDP. also, and picture.
* Czech Soviet chic. o_O

* Krugman: Greece is the new France for moralizing conservatives. Worries about Europe's plan. BP disaster rooted in Bush era deregulation
* Southern GOP embraces Arizona
* Unemployment and education. Economist on US income inequality and social mobility
* Maine GOP dominated by economic cranks
* Social Security solvency
* Canada balking at funding gay Pride festival
* Food allergy vs. food intolerance

* Programming language humor
* On Hayate Yagami, in the Nanoha animes: The poor girl is a crippled orphan who never had any friends or family and learned social skills from watching Japanese animation. It's a miracle she can function at all. It is worrisome to consider that a whole new generation of TSAB personnel is learning from her example.

from a political debate, me on Social Security

One way of looking at social democracy is minimizing maximum regret. If we make someone pay for services she thinks she doesn't need, she has a bit of regret per year, from those taxes. Integrated regret might be large but that's not necessarily a valid operation. If we let people plan their retirements, the regret from 70 year olds realizing their 30 year old selves were idiots, or from private plans failing, can be rather large all at once. Lethally so.

Another note is that individual retirement planning is horribly inefficient. While living a long time is hopefully good hedonically, financially it can be a disaster if not planned for: a saver has to plan for the 'worst case' of living to be 95 or more, vs. the life expectancy of 78. This leads to more resources being tied up than with a collective pension plan which only needs funds to cover the average life expectancy.

Of course, it'd be horrible if some big private insurer that people depended on went out of business or turned out to have had its funds embezzled or mismanaged. So horrible that the government would likely step in to bail it out. At which point perhaps the government should just handle the matter itself and cut out the profit-seeking middleman.

Yet another POV is that SS isn't really about *saving* for retirement, it's about collectivizing the practice of being supported by your children in your old age. Instead of being dependent on your children being successful, charitable, or alive, you're supported by everyone's children. Some people call this a pyramid or Ponzi scheme but they're obviously wrong.