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Arnold writes: "I think that a bureaucracy gets established when a Bad Thing happens to an organization. The response is to set up the Department To Make Sure That Bad Thing Never Happens Again... I think that this explains why DEI bureaucracies... are so prevalent." Arnold goes on to note that it is not in the interest of the DEI bureaucracy to come up with a solution.

The situation is worse than that. They are set up to address a non-existent problem and so they have to create the appearance of one. They are pure grift operating under a specious moral cover.

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Arnold quotes Cochrane: "from zero to about sixty thousand dollars of income, if you earn an extra dollar, you lose a dollar of benefits. Fix the incentives, and more people will get ahead in life." Is it even possible to fix this? Benefits without a cutoff become hugely expensive mass entitlements. Even a phase-out has the same disincentive effect. And in the bigger picture, the very large non-participation in the labor force suggests benefits may simply be too large, especially given the lack of work requirements to qualify. Earned income "tax credit," really a hand out since these people already don't owe income tax, is one approach, but not politically popular as anything other than an add-on benefit.

This unfortunate situation is not likely the result of inadvertence, but more likely deliberate. The more people kept in dependency the better it is for the bureaucracy and the political class. This is also likely a prime reason for open borders. The more people receiving benefits, the more bureaucrat administrators are needed; and the dependent are reliable votes for politicians promising to maintain and expand benefits. After the Clinton reforms which required showing up for work or training, welfare rolls dropped enormously, leading politicians to reverse these requirements as soon as they could.

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Freddie was able to talk over 30 minutes* about the mental illness issue in an admirable rephrasing of an article and some posts he's written recently. Since crazy Neely was threatening innocents and, in being restrained by an ex-Marine, was killed in the restraint.

Not explicitly discussed is the reality of both types of errors: (1) confining folks who don't need confining, and (2) not confining those who need to be confined. The pre-Cuckoo's Nest asylums had too many Type 1s, confining those who didn't need it. Today we have too many Type 2s, not confining crazies who need to be confined.

Freddie is correct that we need more involuntary confinement - yet his correct arguments aren't convincing most folk (like John Alcorn!). Freddie says (many of?) those folks are unthinking, and my skim reading of many such progressive folk's tweets seem to confirm that "unthinking" label/ evaluation/ derogatory remark.

What I'm missing is more clear criteria for when an mentally ill person, who acts ill but claims he is not, should be confined against his will. I assume that most dangerous folk are not always dangerous - which is one of the dangers.

Freddie: "To be severely mentally ill is to be held hostage by internal forces that are not you. This destroys every argument about personal freedom and choice, permanently and totally. Opponents of involuntary commitment never talk about this point or even attempt to rebut it because they know they can’t. "

John A: " Public safety might require coercion of some persons who really won't fit in. But call it what it is: coercion to prevent crime and/or to remove public nuisance. Don't cloak it in paternalism."

Both agree that coercion to prevent crime might be necessary. Often it is necessary to protect the public. It's also necessary to help the sick get a treatment to stop being sick which they would reject if given a choice, but their rejection is because they're sick. I wouldn't call this paternalism - but I also can't fully claim it's not, and certainly there is an argument that all treatment of dependents "for their own good" can be called paternalistic. Children need to be taken care of - so do many sick adults, without having legal age be the objective criteria.

The failure to treat the mentally sick hurts both the innocents hurt by the sick, as well as hurting the sick folk themselves. I'm pretty willing to leave alone those who do NOT defecate in public or leave drug syringes around, and who do NOT threaten innocent folk. But as small aggressions escalate into minor, or major, criminal behavior, the innocent public needs to be protected - and the sick person needs treatment.

Yet today many mentally sick folk are NOT getting cared for very well, and the public is stuck with a lot of nuisance, as well as crime. Of course, if theft <$1000 is not "real crime" (worth arrest & trial & jail), the crimes have to be pretty bad before the sick are coercively imprisoned in some health place. (Does health facility or health institution really convey more meaning, rather just signaling?)

It's now time to reduce the error of not confining those who need treatment - more than fear of over-confining. Those who object and claim we need less involuntary care are wrong, whether they don't know how hard it is to confine crazies or not. Tho their opinion is that I'm wrong - and in a case of conflicting opinions about the balance of errors, their claim is that too many or the right number are confined, while my claim is that not enough, like Jordan Neely, are confined.

Both I and those who disagree want fewer errors - but reality is such that reducing one type of error usually means increasing the other type. So then democracy becomes choosing to make a change to reduce one bad, while knowingly increasing another bad. If most political problems are like that now, this becomes a reason to increase ... mental illness in society.

*Since I had read the article and most recent posts, it was both interesting to see a public intellectual rehash his arguments, yet also disappointing that there was so little time to talk about Freddie's silly Marxism or his excellent acknowledgement of genetic influences on IQ and possibly other traits.

I haven't read Szasz, and would be interested to hear about whether he or others explicitly talk about both errors for treating mental illness.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jordan-neelys-life-could-have-been-saved-by-involuntary-treatment

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Re: Bureaucracy replication

If Durmstrang and Beauxbatons launched a "defence against whatever department" each, then Hogwarts would follow suit (probably poaching some experienced stuff from the other schools in the same time). That is, I feel that avoiding to fall behind in the latest managerial fad can be a goal itself for organisations, so the bar for replication is even lower than envisaged in the interesting musings discussed here.

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"Roughly speaking, from zero to about sixty thousand dollars of income, if you earn an extra dollar, you lose a dollar of benefits. Fix the incentives, and more people will get ahead in life. We will also better help the truly needy, and the budget."

While I agree some face rather severe negative incentives, such as loss of Medicaid and that there are other lesser, and maybe greater, negative incentives to increasing one's income, I find the 1 to 1 ratio, even if accurate, to be rather unhelpful.

1 I'm really curious how it was estimated. How bad is the estimate? I'm guessing they didn't actually look at all the people getting benefits and calculate what they would lose with an extra dollar of income so how did they approximate this? Did they account for differences from state to state? What did they include as benefits? Home mortgage deduction? How did they account for benefits that are partly or wholly based on personal assets?

2 How much of these benefits go to people who successfully use the benefits to get out of poverty?

2a How much goes to people who will never be able to live independently due to some combination of physical and mental limitations?

2b How much goes to people in a temporary position needing help l?

3 I suspect some benefits go to people who would suffer severe negative incentives from increased income and some to people who would barely notice. This seems more important to me than the 1 to 1 ratio.

4 No doubt the policies for benefits are haphazard and sometimes (or often) miss the mark but how much can we reasonably expect the policies could be improved without more negative consequences (where the benefits were truly helping) than positive as a result of "Fix[ing] the incentives"?

4a Might a UBI be part of the fix?

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founding

Re: Freddie DeBoer on mental illness.

I call straw man. DeBoer should reckon with Thomas Szasz, instead of focusing on whoever asserts that the homeless schizophrenic is "inherently harmless." There is plenty of room to disagree with DeBoer without being "unthinking" (Arnold's term).

Friction and conflict can readily arise between an individual who has major "problems of living" (Szasz's term) — who really won't fit in — and people who do fit in. Public safety might require coercion of some persons who really won't fit in. But call it what it is: coercion to prevent crime and/or to remove public nuisance. Don't cloak it in paternalism. Don't wrap it in the self-validating meta-diagnosis, by which a person's refusal to accept a diagnosis of "mental illness" confirms the diagnosis.

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Interesting links. The connection to conversion to Judaism is unclear to me

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