“Five to one, baby
One in five
No one here gets out alive, now
You get yours, baby
I’ll get mine
Gonna make it, baby
If we try”
– Jim Morrison
Was he talking about how many dollars that make it through the bureaucracy, administration, misallocation, and graft to actually get spent on the “problem” government is intending to fix?
Probably not, but still, it’s an interesting statistic, and one I have been using on some “Democratic Socialists” lately who seem to think that “pooling everyone’s dollars together will create economies of scale” like Obama claimed when he was promoting Obamacare.
Extrapolating a bit, since people have preferences and they have scarce resources, they have to have an ordinal preference scale as to what they will devote said resources to. With fewer of their resources available to them, they must forgo their next highest valued desires and do without.
When you take away 30-50% of those resources, they now can satisfy fewer of those preferences (ie: things they would rather have done with those resources).
And remember, once the government gets their hands on the funds…only 20% of the money actually goes toward “solving” whatever problem the program was created to “fix”.
So, half of human desire unfulfilled and then an 80% loss on top which makes us all worse off.
Various sources:
James Rolph Edwards, “The Cost of Public Income Redistribution and Private Charity,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 21 (Summer 2007); 8-9.
https://mises.org/library/costs-public-income-redistribution-and-private-charity