We're All Parasites Now
In Ayn Rand's book, Atlas Shrugged, the world is filled with parasitic people who leach off other's productivity. In the book, they are the government and the unskilled who demand redistribution. Our world today is perhaps not so far off. Not just government, but most of the U.S. economy could be described as either tremendously wasteful, counterproductive entirely, or parasitic.
Defense
Imagine New Zealand getting attacked by Al-Qaeda. Not very plausible, is it? What about Japan? Chile? What do those countries spend on defense? Practically nothing, yet their citizens are far safer than ours. Their governments don't constantly bomb the Middle East, so terrorists don't attack them. It's very simple. If you attack someone, they will fight back. All you need to avert large scale war anymore is a few dozen ICBMs with some cluster nukes. No one will attack you. America simply does not need to spend a third of our government budget A) building hyper-advanced weapons that will never be used or B) killing random people in the third world.
Law - IP law is bogus. Health care lawsuits are a tremendous waste of money and don't really help anyone, except lawyers and those who occasionally win the malpractice lottery. Any advanced economy needs a legal system that can adjudicate contracts between parties. What we have is a massively overbuilt extortion racket.
Finance
Massive massive zero-sum games,which to some degree makes America very rich because we're the best at winning. However, a tremendous number of extremely intelligent people are wasted spending more and more time figuring out ways to defraud one another. Finance is useful when it supports businesses with loans and smooths cash flow and stuff like that. Is that worth 20% of GDP? I can't imagine it adds that much value. That's 2/3rds of the value of all the returns from capital in the entire economy!
Crime + Punishment
Over 1% of Americans are behind bars (over 2.3 million!!!). To find other countries with even close to that number, you must go to horribly oppressive autocracies. Approximately a quarter of them for drug possession, which is a victimless crime. In 1999, over a million prisoners were nonviolent. Who knows what it is now? Is all this imprisonment really helping anyone? Countries with far lower imprisonment rates don't have more crime; if anything it is less. There are many theories why this could be, but I'm not convinced that long sentences deter very much crime, nor that nonviolent offenders should be in jail at all.
Health Care
American spend on average $6,713 per year on health care. We live, on average, 78 years. Cypriots spend on average $1,483 per year on health care and live until 80. Sure, they're a bit of an outlier, but what about Costa Rica, which has a life expectancy of 79 and pays $355, or Singapore which gets 80 for $1035. There are tons of countries which average around 1000-2000 range which get much better health care outcomes than the U.S. As a ballpark figure, I would say that around 75% of our health care spending really doesn't add very much to health outcomes. Maybe we're letting ourselves get super fat and without such massive health care spending, we'd all die at 50. I don't know.
Anyway, I'm feeling a bit pessimistic today. Tyler always gets me into moods like this.
Defense
Imagine New Zealand getting attacked by Al-Qaeda. Not very plausible, is it? What about Japan? Chile? What do those countries spend on defense? Practically nothing, yet their citizens are far safer than ours. Their governments don't constantly bomb the Middle East, so terrorists don't attack them. It's very simple. If you attack someone, they will fight back. All you need to avert large scale war anymore is a few dozen ICBMs with some cluster nukes. No one will attack you. America simply does not need to spend a third of our government budget A) building hyper-advanced weapons that will never be used or B) killing random people in the third world.
Law - IP law is bogus. Health care lawsuits are a tremendous waste of money and don't really help anyone, except lawyers and those who occasionally win the malpractice lottery. Any advanced economy needs a legal system that can adjudicate contracts between parties. What we have is a massively overbuilt extortion racket.
Finance
Massive massive zero-sum games,which to some degree makes America very rich because we're the best at winning. However, a tremendous number of extremely intelligent people are wasted spending more and more time figuring out ways to defraud one another. Finance is useful when it supports businesses with loans and smooths cash flow and stuff like that. Is that worth 20% of GDP? I can't imagine it adds that much value. That's 2/3rds of the value of all the returns from capital in the entire economy!
Crime + Punishment
Over 1% of Americans are behind bars (over 2.3 million!!!). To find other countries with even close to that number, you must go to horribly oppressive autocracies. Approximately a quarter of them for drug possession, which is a victimless crime. In 1999, over a million prisoners were nonviolent. Who knows what it is now? Is all this imprisonment really helping anyone? Countries with far lower imprisonment rates don't have more crime; if anything it is less. There are many theories why this could be, but I'm not convinced that long sentences deter very much crime, nor that nonviolent offenders should be in jail at all.
Health Care
American spend on average $6,713 per year on health care. We live, on average, 78 years. Cypriots spend on average $1,483 per year on health care and live until 80. Sure, they're a bit of an outlier, but what about Costa Rica, which has a life expectancy of 79 and pays $355, or Singapore which gets 80 for $1035. There are tons of countries which average around 1000-2000 range which get much better health care outcomes than the U.S. As a ballpark figure, I would say that around 75% of our health care spending really doesn't add very much to health outcomes. Maybe we're letting ourselves get super fat and without such massive health care spending, we'd all die at 50. I don't know.
Anyway, I'm feeling a bit pessimistic today. Tyler always gets me into moods like this.