However, those welfare systems then force other people to subsidize someone else working on something that, by definition, doesn’t contribute economic value that exceeds the cost of producing it. It’s an inefficient allocation of resources. Meaning money going to support someone building a “thing” nobody values instead of going to support a thing people do value. And by “value,” I mean willingness to pay for it. Free money in the form of welfare so someone could work on a hobby that may have no value is paid for by people who are creating value.
Should I get free healthcare and free food and free rent if I have a passion for making a widget that nobody is willing to pay for? Should I be able to spend my days walking in the woods while a barber spends his days cutting hair for money — money that is taxed to pay for someone to spend their day walking in the woods?
To be clear, welfare is valuable as a safety net, but it shouldn’t be a safety harness. If you are disabled or lost your job, definitely welfare is important. But welfare to support some guy writing a new JavaScript library nobody is willing to pay for? That’s ridiculous. Society needs people to build roads, cook food, and cut hair. If society rewarded people for sitting around doing nothing, then who would do those jobs? If people weren’t doing those jobs, who would pay the taxes for all the people that would decide to simply walk in the woods all day?
We would all like the freedom to pursue “this sort of thing,” however, what happens when everyone pursues “this sort of thing?” Who is going to pay for it? The guy hauling freight isn’t going to take too kindly to be paying for people to do nothing.
People should be able to do whatever they want, but it crosses the line of reason when other people are literally forced to pay for it.
Of course this will be an unpopular opinion here because there is an entitlement mentality that would suggest that someone’s latest JavaScript library should be tax subsidized. However, try making that case to a freight hauler who pays the taxes. Make that case to the restaurant owner that she should pay higher taxes so someone else can sit at home writing browser plugins or painting cute rocks with animal faces that nobody wants to buy.
Exactly. The whole response ignores the existence of consumer surplus. We can see the silliness by applying to the actual examples - since core-js brings in $16204 and is used by 2442712, by such definition it only contributes $0.006 in economic value to each user. Would any of them accept 1 cent - or even a full dollar! - in exchange for not using core-js?
"Should I get free healthcare and free food and free rent if I have a passion for making a widget that nobody is willing to pay for?"
Yes. Because if your widget is open or bits of it can be recombined into other things, one of THOSE things might be amazing.
You are assuming great stuff comes from great creators, and that ain't natural. Read up on the Genetic Algorithm, and a-life. It is hugely important to produce a class of superfluous creators making pointless things many of which will fizzle out uselessly, but become part of the genetic soup from which more elegant, counterintuitive things will emerge.
You CANNOT have just only 'excellent, worth-money products that stand alone' as your genetic soup. It produces stagnation, local maximums, and the end of progress.
We have seen this soup of uselessness and lots of indulged, well-off people tinkering away on passion projects, able to just burn money on whatever they pleased without concern for whether it was marketable.
It was called 'Silicon Valley'. There was this thing called the Altair. Quite a story really. This is not in any way hypothetical.
Wait, how do you know it won't contribute economic value?
Maybe it doesn't do so today, but it may very well do so tomorrow. New projects need investment. When somebody spends their time on pursuing an endeavour that they think will have economical impact, then I don't see any issue with supporting them by at least not letting them sleep on the street and suffer from not having access to proper health care.
There seem to be plenty of open-source projects that are used by many people, but aren't rewarded in a way proportional to that. So one could also argue the other way around: Why should society allow for companies making money off people who then are supposed to get financial support from all of us?
Should I get free healthcare and free food and free rent if I have a passion for making a widget that nobody is willing to pay for? Should I be able to spend my days walking in the woods while a barber spends his days cutting hair for money — money that is taxed to pay for someone to spend their day walking in the woods?
To be clear, welfare is valuable as a safety net, but it shouldn’t be a safety harness. If you are disabled or lost your job, definitely welfare is important. But welfare to support some guy writing a new JavaScript library nobody is willing to pay for? That’s ridiculous. Society needs people to build roads, cook food, and cut hair. If society rewarded people for sitting around doing nothing, then who would do those jobs? If people weren’t doing those jobs, who would pay the taxes for all the people that would decide to simply walk in the woods all day?
We would all like the freedom to pursue “this sort of thing,” however, what happens when everyone pursues “this sort of thing?” Who is going to pay for it? The guy hauling freight isn’t going to take too kindly to be paying for people to do nothing.
People should be able to do whatever they want, but it crosses the line of reason when other people are literally forced to pay for it.
Of course this will be an unpopular opinion here because there is an entitlement mentality that would suggest that someone’s latest JavaScript library should be tax subsidized. However, try making that case to a freight hauler who pays the taxes. Make that case to the restaurant owner that she should pay higher taxes so someone else can sit at home writing browser plugins or painting cute rocks with animal faces that nobody wants to buy.