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 Originally Posted by spoonitnow
I spit water all over my desk reading this part.
I have a thought experiment where it could happen.
Let's say there are ten subjects in a room and one researcher with them. The researcher shows them an object that can be bought and if it is bought it is shared amongst them all. The object costs $50. Each individual is asked how much he would buy the object for. Each response is $10. They are asked if they want to buy the object. Each answer is no, because each would lose $40 of value/happiness/preference if he bought it.
Then the researcher says that they can organize their money in such a way that they can buy the object together, so they could each put in $5 to buy the object, and by doing so they would each increase their happiness by $5 since they value the object at $10. Then each individual says "How dare you assume we want to work together to make ourselves better off, you bigot! We want nothing of this cooperation! Now we only value the object at $2 a piece!" So they don't organize to buy the object and they don't gain.
But then the researcher tells them he will take $5 from each of them regardless of their input or their efforts and he will buy the object for them and they will all benefit by $5 and there is nothing they can do to stop him because he knows better than they do. They each then say, "Yippee glorious enforcer of good sense! Please take our money and do what is best for us!"
Well, I just showed how a government could hypothetically make people better off than they could make themselves. One problem: it involves assuming people are fucking ridiculous. Though that isn't entirely out of the question in the real world. The case can be made that because government is thought of similarly to God, people gain benefit because they think government is helping them even as government is harming them.
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