i wanted to quickly add here a thanks to @Undisciplined, @denlillaapan, @charonnakamoto and @charonnakamoto for fleshing out this topic.

@itsrealfake also gave me some food for thought saying: if the government is going to be in the business of "helping the people", the only safe/reasonable way to do that is to give all the people the same help, and let the people decide how to use it.

I had been thinking about benefit abuse recently wondering why the gov doesn't just limit it to food or clothes or whatever, make a coupon, to stop most of the flagrant abuse (or program a cbdc and control it that way, Orwellian, i know).

But this is a good point that I hadn't thought of, and I didn't think of the analogy to the government creating distortions like subsidies.

so yeah, as usual, the interesting stuff always happens when I've logged off for the evening!