Malcolm Gladwell's excellent 2006 New Yorker article "Million Dollar Murray" directly addresses some of the grumbling in the comments below... it's easy for people who've followed the law to resent spending money on people who've broken the law, but it would be more efficient to spend a little money on decreasing recidivism and save a lot on incarceration. Gladwell sums it up nicely with an example from Denver's homelessness problems:
"That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn’t seem fair. Thousands of people in the Denver area no doubt live day to day, work two or three jobs, and are eminently deserving of a helping hand—and no one offers them the key to a new apartment. Yet that’s just what the guy screaming obscenities and swigging Dr. Tich gets. When the welfare mom’s time on public assistance runs out, we cut her off. Yet when the homeless man trashes his apartment we give him another. Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. We give them to widows and disabled veterans and poor mothers with small children. Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It’s simply about efficiency."
Now apply to the Greek debt case. The Austerians are applying a value-ethics model. The proponents of debt restructuring/condonation are applying a consequentialist model.
The Austerians' blindness to consequences will provoke a Greek exit from the Euro, and is turning many europeists in many other countries (me included) into euroskeptics.
Same with many other rifts between ideology and evidence in policy. Abstinence-based sex education comes to mind. There are probably many others.
As your comment is marked 1 hour old, I see little grumbling about spending money on people who've broken the law (conversely, there are several comments speaking to the rationality of attempting to rehabilitate people who will be released).
I don't think anyone likes spending money on people who've broken the law. But given that the options are 1. Incarcerate and spend more or 2. provide assistance and spend less, it doesn't look like much of a choice.. unless someone can think of a better solution
Didn't mean to put this forward as a "summary" of the thread, just wanted to note the moral argument going on in some of the comments -- the injustice that people who follow the laws pay to rehabilitate those who break the laws against them, versus the argument that it's far cheaper to rehabilitate people who break laws than to continually incarcerate people who remain unrehabilitated -- and point to a similar argument in another contentious public policy issue.
I've changed "much" to "some" to weaken my claim re: how much disagreement about that is going on this thread. There is certainly some: https://hackertimes.com/item?id=9899924
I was just pushing back on the thread summary that was offered. I think it is wrong, and it's a pet peeve of mine when people offer up a summary that is more convenient to their argument than it is accurate.
"That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn’t seem fair. Thousands of people in the Denver area no doubt live day to day, work two or three jobs, and are eminently deserving of a helping hand—and no one offers them the key to a new apartment. Yet that’s just what the guy screaming obscenities and swigging Dr. Tich gets. When the welfare mom’s time on public assistance runs out, we cut her off. Yet when the homeless man trashes his apartment we give him another. Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. We give them to widows and disabled veterans and poor mothers with small children. Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It’s simply about efficiency."
http://gladwell.com/million-dollar-murray/
EDIT: Changed "much of the grumbling" to "some"