Wait! You're actually making this a serious argument instead of just a thought experiment?
No, otherwise I'd be arguing for the actual Jophiel Tax.
Oh. Whew! So you were equating the liberal idea of redistributing wealth to something we both agree doesn't work? I'm good with that!
Try and keep up instead of seeking a way out.
I'm keeping up just fine. I'm trying to figure out why you thought it was a good idea to use an example you admit doesn't work to support a real economic proposal. Seems kinda counter productive.
The point remains that focused assets can be a force multiplier that diffuse assets are not even if the totals of both are the same. I know this is more complicated than your little "1-1!!" thing but the rest of us have moved on from preschool.
Fine. I'm yanking your chain. Whatever. Just channeling you for a moment there, with your silly analogy.
You're correct that focused assets can
be a force multiplier. And that absolutely can work in economics. Heck, it's the basic concept behind things like buying stock, right? A bunch of investors, each risking a small amount of capital, can collectively build something none of them could have done (or would have wanted to risk doing) on their own. I just keep coming back to three problems though:
1. Government isn't very good at picking what to focus on. I mean, food stamps are great if our objective is to help prevent people from starving. But is that really the best place to focus economically? More important, is it better than where we took the money in the first place? As I said earlier, that's a hard argument to make.
2. It's not a choice. When people choose to focus their efforts in some way, we tend to see positive results. When they are forced to do so by someone else, this isn't necessarily the case. I suppose this is an offshoot of the first problem, but it's a biggie IMO. I don't get to choose how my money is spent, and the person spending the food stamp doesn't really either. It's just not flexible enough to work.
2. It's not really focused enough, or "special" enough. When a group of people invest in a corporation, 100% of their investment goes into the corporation, with a single business plan involved (hopefully) to accomplish something none of them would do on their own. But what we're doing here is taking a smallish amount of money from a large amount of people, then handing it in the form of food stamps to a slightly smaller number of people, then having them spend those stamps at an even smaller number of stores (but we're still talking tends of thousands of stores spread across the whole country). Where's the focus? Take that money and spend it building a moon base or some other thing we wouldn't otherwise build, and you're using the focused-asset concept to great effect. Spending it to buy food? Not so much.
Um... Which actually brings me to another point. Not sure if this is number 4, or something else entirely. The big flaw specifically with the whole argument being made that more people on food stamps is somehow a good thing because of the economic effect is that it misses one important fact: The people buying food with the stamps didn't just magically appear today
. They existed yesterday and the day before that, right? Prior to losing their jobs and ending out on food stamps, they were buying food in the same stores that they'll be buying food with their food stamps. This ties into my whole "they didn't earn the money from their own labors" bit. Before they bought the food with their own money, which was a subset of that earned by their own labor output. Thus, the cost of the food was really zero from an economic standpoint. Now, even if we assume that they are buying the exact same amount of food, there's no economic stimulus effect since we haven't actually increased the amount of food the store sells. There is a negative effect because that dollar had to be taken from someone else's productive output.
Even ignoring the broader flaws with income transfers creating economic growth, in this particular case, we can say with absolute certainty that it can't create growth. Certainly, we can say that an increase in the total number of people on food stamps (the condition at hand) cannot possibly be said to be a positive economic effect. There is nothing but negatives resulting from the transfer from other people, and absolutely zero positive at all.