Allegory wrote:
Your lifeboat situation is an example of prisoner's dilemma, that acting in self interests always best for the individual but if everyone acts out of self interest the group is worse off than if they all cooperated.
More or less correct. That's what I was going for.
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Your point is almost entirely opposite of that, that when people act alone out of self interest they make decisions that are beneficial to themselves and the group, and that is when they act together that they make bad decisions for the whole. You're working pretty hard to fight your own claim.
Nope. I'm saying that the rules have to be created such that the route to ones self interest does not require harm to someone else. If the rules say that the way to succeed in life is to develop skills that other individuals find valuable enough to trade the fruits of their labors for, the acts of each individual pursuing their own self interest will be positive for the whole. However, if the rules ever get to the point where the way to succeed for the majority of the people is to vote to simply take away the fruits of other's labor and give them to themselves, those acts become harmful to the whole.
The fear of the welfare states is that if enough people ever become dependent on the government providing for them to outnumber those who are not so dependent, there will be no way to prevent economic collapse (and a fast one at that). Individuals will realize that it's a bad idea to simply vote for more benefits since that can't be sustained. But the group dynamic in play is a little bit different than the classic prisoners dilemma. I've spoken of the "red/green game" before, and it's relevant here. It's not just about the need to advance at the expense of others, but the realization that if you don't do it, enough other people will so that all you're accomplishing is shorting yourself. Once that happens, everyone takes.
A relevant example of this is the stimulus money. Several Republicans are being bashed right now for insisting that their states get their "fair share" of the money, even though they opposed the stimulus spending in the first place. Why are they doing it? Easy. Because the money is already being spent. If they don't take their portion, it'll just get handed to someone else. They lose both times. It's a wonderful example of why you should avoid this sort of thing in political environments in the first place. Once the decision to spend X amount of money is made, and the economic impact of that decision is already present, there's no longer any rational reason not to take your share.
In the same way, once welfare programs are created, there's no reason for the individuals not to make sure they get their share, right? The same applies to any sort of spending program. It's why conservatives are opposed to them in principle. We recognize that they become a trap. The best you can do after the fact is not take the money, but then all you're doing is hurting yourself even more. Worse, in a republic, those politicians who do stand on principle will tend to be voted out by a public who wants the goodies that were denied them.
It's one of the flaws of a republic. It's something we should be aware of as a people and strive to avoid. It's why the founders created as small a federal government as possible and placed barriers to prevent it from being a clearing house of benefits. As I stated earlier though, this has been slowly eroded over time and today it's getting harder and harder for anyone to be able to even run on a platform opposing government spending. It's not unreasonable to expect that in another 50 years, no one will. And while some liberals today will insist that this would be a wonderful thing, it really wont be...
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The other issue is that you're taking a game set that can apply to this particular situational and stating that it necessarily does apply with no evidence beyond your own intuition. For example if I take your sample situation and try to force that framework onto the economy I get pure socialism, that individual consumers and businesses make self interest decisions that are opportunity costs compared to what can be achieved by cooperative planning, which I'm sure you believe is not the case.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Either you're misunderstanding what I said, or I'm misunderstanding what you are, because this paragraph makes no sense at all to me.
