> when education is subsidized, you're implicitly making the decision that it's more important to pay for that education than to pay for e.g. more help for the homeless,
Not everywhere. Next to no homeless people here in Scandinavia yet education is universally available at almost no cost to the student.
The US is richer both in absolute terms and per capita so lack of money is presumably not the reason for the difference.
I wasn't saying that it's either education or specifically helping the homeless. I'm saying it's a tradeoff between spending on education, vs. spending on other things. If homelessness isn't a problem, great! There are still other ways to spend the money. Maybe raise the standard of living of the poorest 10% by giving them a UBI. Maybe build nicer gardens. Maybe just have lower taxes!
It's totally possible that education is more important than all other uses for that money. It's likely true to some extent, because that's what the country has effectively decided to do.
But that comparison has to be made, either implicitly or explicitly, because that money is either going to education or to something else. There's literally no way to not make a decision about this topic.
Abolish police and military, and suddenly you'll have plenty of funds for your UBI or whatever cool system you'd like to invest in.
Also worth noting: money is just a meaningless abstraction designed by the rich to extract value from the poor (without money, the rich and the poor don't even exist). If you're really concerned about welfare of people, abolition of money and private property is a question worth raising and studying seriously.
> Abolish police and military, and suddenly you'll have plenty of funds for your UBI or whatever cool system you'd like to invest in.
Abolish police and then what? Who will enforce any kinds of laws? Or do we just revert to having nothing?
Abolish the military and leave every country at the mercy of any invader that comes along? I can certainly understand the idea of not spending as much money on the military, but how can anyone that has heard of any amount of history take seriously the idea that a country like the US can just abolish its military without it being in catastrophic danger?
> Also worth noting: money is just a meaningless abstraction designed by the rich to extract value from the poor
That's... a pretty bold statement.
But I'm curios. What do you mean? If the abstraction of money didn't exist, what would happen exactly? In some sense you are right that money is just an abstraction, it's just an abstraction for the fact that there are limited resources that everyone wants.
Maybe you and me, and our neighbors, as a community. Why would we concentrate police powers in the hand of a specialized militia answering only to the psychopaths in government? Cops are never here when we need them to protect actual people, but they always show up and mess everything up when things were getting better.
Laws are written in a social context. You can break laws without harming anyone, in which case nobody in your neighborhood may mind (and maybe some people would like to repel that law at the next general assembly). If some people think you are harming others, then there are many ways to try and find an arrangement to the situation and repair any wrongdoing (see also: reparative/transformative justice).
Of course, some extreme cases require use of violence to control a person who's physically endangering others. Why would we make a job out of it, though? Concentrating those powers and responsibilities into a finite set of hands sounds like a fragile system that can be abused.
See also: past HN threads about the positive outcomes of not involving police for mental episodes, accounts/studies of indigenous systems of justice (such as in Chiapas), and academic research on the abolition of prisons (Angela Davis, Gwenola Ricordeau).
> how can anyone that has heard of any amount of history take seriously the idea that a country like the US can just abolish its military without it being in catastrophic danger?
The US is the catastrophic danger to many countries (Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc). By dismantling the US military industrial complex, we'd be doing a lot to promote peace and stability across the entire globe. The USA is still by far the largest military in the world and has helped countless coup d'État and assassinations. If only those, the war files released by Wikileaks and the recent debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan should be good examples of the military producing the exact opposite of its stated goals.
> If the abstraction of money didn't exist, what would happen exactly?
It depends on a wide variety of social/cultural factors. There's not a one-size-fits-all way of life, and each community may adopt different approaches to property and commercial exchanges. But in my opinion and experience taking away the abstraction allows us to focus on actual concrete problems.
For example, think about housing: by reasoning in terms of money, you reach the conclusion that we need more investment in new housing. By thinking without money, you can notice empty dwellings outnumber homeless people > 10-to-1, so the question becomes: if we have enough housing for everyone, why would we let people be homeless?
If you abolish money how will I ever be able to obtain a new computer with which to read Hacker News?
Money makes it possible for me to exchange my time, effort, and expertise for good produced using someone else's time, effort, and expertise. Without money or something that is so similar as to deserve the same name that is not practical except for the very rich and powerful.
This whole thread is in response to Bryan Caplan complaining that no one is actually engaging with the quantitative analysis he did in the form of a spreadsheet.
As far as I can tell scandinava has all the alternate uses you mention and more, plus the education.
But, your point still stands; what they dont have is an ability to push a button and wipe out the human race within 15 minutes, and fleets of stealth bombers flying low over every sporting event (support the troops you commie). All while the population struggles to figure out how many points their team will have if they score a field goal to add to the 7 points they scored in the first half.
For the most part governement spending is finite and there is only so much total money that can be dished out. Exepct for in crisis (Covid / War / Great Recession / Election time) of course and then the magic money tree is found in the back yard.
Not everywhere. Next to no homeless people here in Scandinavia yet education is universally available at almost no cost to the student.
The US is richer both in absolute terms and per capita so lack of money is presumably not the reason for the difference.