I don’t see why it should necessarily be viewed through the lens of compassion rather than justice. I often refer to the political philosopher Woody Guthrie, who famously pointed out that this land is your land, this land is my land. That the fruits of our commonly held nation are distributed unevenly is historical, customary, and traditional. But that doesn’t make it right, necessary, or inevitable.
Nor is perfect equality necessary either, we can cobble up a rough approximation and adjust the tuning as we go along, until we can shrug and say its close enough for democracy and/or rock 'n roll.
Well of course it should. You have formulated a classic Utopian Argument. “Should the nation be prepared to do bad thing X if it results in a perfect world.” The response to a Utopian argument is always “Yes” because the argument is framed in such a way as to make it impossible to answer “No” without condemning people to never experiencing Utopia.
The Utopian Argument is one of the classical invalid arguments. It’s a subset of Begging the Question. You are trying to reach a conclusion (In this case that tampering with economic freedom is a good thing) based on a premise that is at least as dodgy as the conclusion you are trying to reach (That you can alleviate poverty through government handouts).
It’s easy enough to demonstrate that the Utopian Argument is invalid by proposing the exact opposite conclusion. In this case "“Should a country be willing to lower its overall prosperity, relative to both other countries and its current state, if this relegates its poorest members to greater poverty?”
The fact that the answer now is a resounding “No”. proves that you are simply begging the question. The question is whether tampering with economic freedom is a good thing for society as a whole. You can’t demonstrate that by assuming that you can alleviate poverty through government handouts and maintain only minimal reductions in efficiency.
The Utopian Argument really doesn’t have a very distinguished history. you can always claim that a proposal that will hurt people is going to produce a Utopia somewhere down the road. That’s why most such proposals are always backed by Utopian Arguments. The tricky part is when you actually have to *demonstrate *that the Utopia you claim will actually be the result of the harm that you are proposing.
Sorry for the hijack, but I really must take exception to this analysis of how the thread went. Throughout it you consistently waved away everything said about immunisation, efficiency of rolling out programs, herd immunity (dismissing them with weak anecdotes) - and ignored the lower cost of healthcare within society as a whole, and you adjusted your original question as you went along, reducing it to a demand that it be proven that social healthcare is a “public good”. [end hijack]
Nonetheless it is indisputable that it *is *right, necessary, and inevitable.
The idea that someone who refuses to work at all should have the same “fruits of our commonly held nation” as someone who has worked 16 hours a day for 40 years is ludicrous no matter how you look at it. Of course the person who works hardest and longest has a right to more “fruits”. Of course it is necessary that he have more “fruits”. Of course it is inevitable that he will have more “fruits”.
I am astounded that you would even imply otherwise.
Oh, all right then. The degree of work is how we are to gauge worthiness? The explain to me why a salesman is worth ten times more than a teacher? The one who works harder and longer, you say it is “inevitable” that he has more rights. Is it inevitable that he will actually get these goodies? Doesn’t appear so, not from here.
And who is going to make the judgement of who is worthy? Right now, we surrender that judgement to the Holy Free Market, blessings and peace be upon it. Personally, I don’t think its working out all that well.
And since we do not have, nor ever have had, full employment, what do you propose we do with all those leftover people? Storage? Soylent green?
Blake, I’ve no doubt that your knowledge of economics is greater than mine, and I’ll accept that you’ve punctured the various numbers I’ve presented. Instead, then, allow me to rephrase things in a way that may (if I’m lucky) make more sense.
First, it seems that the United States already uses a system that’s been subject to artificial meddling in order to improve its outcomes. The fact that we decided on progressive Federal tax rates at all, means that as a society we’ve already chosen to take a greater share of a wealthy person’s income and turn it into (among other things) low-income tax credits and food stamps. And we’ve discovered that pure capitalism needs some rules and brakes, because its natural equilibrium can be disastrous – thus, laws against monopolies, for instance.
The result of our engineering is what we have now – a generally prosperous nation, but one in which the top quintile’s wealth is increasing quite rapidly, while we still have large numbers in poverty whose lot is not improving. (I’m not convinced that any significant number of the bottom quintile are people with no interest in work or education. I think a vast majority either are working at low-wage, low-mobility jobs, or want to work but lack opportunities. Sure, there are lazy people, and moochers, or whatever you’d like to call them, but I don’t know that their numbers are statistically significant.)
I’m mostly wondering aloud here if we’ve struck the best combination of pure capitalism and governmental tinkering, and if not, which way ought we to nudge things. Obviously we don’t want a country run as a totalitarian dictatorship (like North Korea, or my 500-2-2-2-2 example). And we don’t want to switch to communism (my 15-15-15-15-15 example). We rightfully prefer a democracy with a regulated capitalist economy, but what we have now hardly seems like we’ve reached some kind of perfection.
I wasn’t assuming that those economies were perfectly free and democratic. In North Korea, I’ll bet the vast majority are interested in obtaining wealth, but they’re prevented from doing so. I can’t prove it, obviously, but my feeling is that pure entirely unregulated capitalism would eventually result in something similar. Money would accrete at the top, government would become wholly selected/bought by the wealthy, and eventually there’d be either revolution, or you’d be North Korea. Fortunately we have a regulations and tax structures and safety nets and all the rest, such that this is unlikely to happen in the U.S.
As for your notion that there have to be gaps between the quintiles or no one will bother bettering themselves – that does make logical sense, though it’s sad nonetheless. “There won’t be rich people without poor people,” essentially.
I was under the impression that providing (limited) unemployment benefits results in a better economy than not providing them. Isn’t that an example, albeit a small one?
Anyway, thanks (to you and others upthread) for giving my OP more of a response than it probably deserved.
It was a specific case that he was talking about. Comparing someone who worked long and hard to someone who didn’t work at all. In the end, though, you’re work is worth what someone else is willing to pay you.
Some salesmen make more than teachers. Many don’t. Is it your contention that no salesman should make more than a teacher?
You can mock “the market” all you want, but it’s really just a bunch of hippies deciding, collectively, how much to pay for pot. The market is the people. They can buy or not, if the price is worth it for them.
How do you extrapolate that from the post you quoted? I can’t see anything in Blake’s post that says that those whose work is of little value should be ground into fodder. Unless you have some of that extraordinary mind reading ability that you so often mock…
Well, not to put too fine a point on it, the question has to do with people whom we cannot employ whether they are willing or no.
And how we value that labor, and that person. Though I appreciate the effort that went into your rudimentary example of market economics, delivered in terms I can understand, you needn’t dumb it down to paramecium level.
Its not that we don’t understand how the free market works, its not that difficult. Its that we do not approve of such an arbitrary and capricious “system”. Did we decide, at some point, that what is best for our people is a system that rewards aggressive ambition above all else? These are the qualities we admire, universally?
I am astounded that you do not believe that the degree of work should never be used to gauge worthiness. That you believe that a person who works 16 hours a day is no more worthy of reward than her workmate, who arrives at work at 1 pm and returns home at 2 pm.
Yet that is your stated position: that the “fruits” of our commonly held nation should be distributed perfectly evenly and that it is wrong, unnecessary, and unjustifiable that a person who works 16 hours should be paid more than a person doing the same job who works just 2 hours.
I am absolutely flabbergasted that this is your position. Nonetheless that is what you said.
I will, when you clear up a simple point: are you saying that no salesman is ever worth more than any teacher? That regardless of age experience, effectiveness, hours of work, conditions of work, frugality, investment or any other factor a teacher and a salesman should always possess exactly the same “fruits” of our commonly held nation. That you are claiming that a 60 year old salesman who worked 16 hours a day in the hot sun and saved every cent he earned should have the same house, the same car and the food on the table as a 16 year old teacher who only works 2 hours a day?
Because if that is your position it is ludicrous, but I will happily explain why the salesman should be worth much, much more.
And if that isn’t your position then you have refuted your own argument that it is neither right, necessary, nor inevitable that some people will have more wealth than others.
Nobody has mentioned rights prior to this post. We have been talking about “fruits”. Specifically I have been referring to fruits such as cash, real estate, and luxuries.
[quote]
Is it inevitable that he will actually get these goodies? Doesn’t appear so, not from here.[/.quote]
Who said it was inevitable that any given individual get that? I said that it is inevitable that wealth be unevenly distributed and provided one hypothetical exmaple to illustrate that.
You claim that it is possible to have just and functional system in which every individual has exactly the same wealth as every other citizen. A system with perfectly equitable wealth distribution in which a 16 yo unemployed high school dropout has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon. That is a Leftist lunatic fantasy.
Nobody has claimed that the degree of work is the only determinant of wealth, or that it should be. What I am trying to demonstrate is the Elementary School level principle that effort must be one determinant of wealth.
Your position that wealth can and should be perfectly equally distributed regardless of effort is pure fantasy. It’s not even vaguely possible. In the real world it is necessary and inevitable that different people garner wealth at different rates.
Whether it is working well or not does not make any difference to your position, which is that you can engineer a just and efficient system in which a 16 yo unemployed high school dropout has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon.
Nobody has claimed that the current system works perfectly. What has been claimed is that you can engineer a just and functional system in which every individual has exactly the same wealth as every other citizen. A system in which a 16 yo unemployed high school dropout has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon.
People with no knowledge of basic economics have tried to engineer such systems before. We all know how that turned out.
WTF are you talking about? Who ever suggested such a thing?
What were are discussing here is your claim that you are able to engineer a just and functional system in which every individual has exactly the same wealth as every other citizen. A system in which a 16 yo unemployed high school dropout has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon.
That claim is clearly a load of dingo’s kidneys. It leftist lunatic fantasy. Unfortunately it is precisely the type of fantasy devoid from rational thought or knowledge of economics or basic human behaviour that prompts schemes such as that championed by the OP.
And your claim is that you can engineer a just and functional system in which one of these unemployed and unemployable people has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon. Not only has the same house and car, but should have the smae house and car.
Still waiting for you to provide any details at all on how that can be possible.
When someone asserts that they can engineer a just and functional system in which every individual has exactly the same wealth as every other citizen. A system in which a 16 yo unemployed high school dropout has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon, I have serious grounds for questioning whether they have any understanding of economics whatsoever. And that is not meant to be snarky, it;s the expression of a genuine concern. The level of ignorance expressed in such a statement is huge.
Fine then, give us the details of your alternative system, the just and functional system in which every individual has exactly the same wealth as every other citizen. A system in which a 16 yo unemployed high school dropout has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon.
Well, no, which is why we don’t have such a system.
Er, excuse me. I wasn’t “championing” anything. I was floating a hypothetical to see what people thought of it, and I valued your (and others’) opinions of it. I personally favor market-driven capitalism, tinkered with and adjusted as much as we can without breaking it to reduce general suffering. I was simply musing on the effects of tinkering. I thank you for your insights, but not your insults.
I don’t believe that eluicdator is actually proposing pure communism, but if he is, I don’t agree with it. It sounds more like he’s pondering that we’ve ended up with a system wherein a salesman working 60 hours makes 20x more than a janitor working (just as objectively hard) for 60 hours. Obviously, the reason is because employers value salesman more than janitors and so are willing to pay more. And good salesmen are presumably harder to find than good janitors. But society needs both janitors and salesmen to function, and it’s kind of a shame that the market dictates that one set will be well-rewarded for its 60-hour weeks, while the other set will be poorly-rewarded. I don’t know what the solution is, obviously.
It’s a reasonable, though far from novel, query. There are a dozens, probably hundreds, of articles a month in economics journals addressing this exact question.
But that still doesn’t make your argument any more valid. It’s still a Utopian argument and still flawed for precisely the same reason. Of course everyone agrees that if we could eliminate poverty and enhance freedom and provide everyone with hookers and blow for a buck-oh-five we should do it. The question is whether we could possibly do so, not whether we should.
What you are proposing would hurt large numbers of people. And I am not talking about economic pain. A 10% contraction in the economy means that thousands of people will lose their jobs, and through that they will lose health insurance. Hundreds will be caused serious physical pain, hundreds will suffer irreparable health damage, dozens will die and hundreds will die years earlier than they otherwise would. Hundreds of people will lose their homes. Hundreds of marriages will break down. This is the direct, predictable and unavoidable result of the action that you are proposing.
Do you think it’s unreasonable, when you propose causing that sort of pain, that you provide some evidence that it will actually produce a greater good? Or at the very least any evidence at all that will actually work? To me those don’t seem like unreasonable requests given the damage that you are going to inflict on real people.
Of course we all agree that if we can eliminate poverty it is worth the dozen or so deaths that you propose to cause, provided that there are no other costs. But you can’t demonstrate how there could be no other costs nor how this scheme could reduce poverty.
Would you press the button knowing that you will cause the pain and deaths described above, with no reason at all to believe that the scheme will work? If you, the scheme’s author, wouldn’t do it, why should anyone else?
We aren’t talking about classic poor people here. There aren’t the Joads or Little Orphan Annie. We are talking about people who have a lifestyle that the upper middle classes in the 1950s would have envied. These people live in a stable modern house, they have full health insurance, they have disposable income, they have a 6 year old family car, they have a wide screen TV and two children in full time education, they go out to dinner regularly, they go to the movies regularly and so forth. It’s not in any sense a terrible life. Yes, they struggle to pay bills occasionally and they will almost certainly not be able to buy their own home while they stay in their current situation. They don’t have accruing investment funds. They aren’t getting ahead. They are the “working poor”.
Now that may be something to be sad about, but I don’t feel too sad about it. I’m not too concerned if some people only have a reasonable standard of living while those above them have a great standard of living. Reasonable means reasonable. It’s not bad thing for people who have a reasonable standard of living to look enviously at those who have a great life. That’s where aspiration comes form.
You’re right, it is. I phrased that clumsily. I should have said that your redistribution is not going to *create *more jobs than simply letting the market do its thing.
What name would you give to a system in which everybody has precisely the same housing, food, clothing and other “fruits of our commonly held nation”.
We ended up there because places that payed janitors more have all failed to compete with places that pay salesmen more. Salesmen obviously have a skill that the janitors do not have, and somewhere in the supply line people are prepared to pay them for that skill. People exactly like you and me.
The ultimate reason is that people like you and me value salesman more than janitors and so are willing to pay more. If we gave equal amounts of money to places that paid salesmen the same as they pay janitors, then places that pay salesmen more would be unable compete. But we don’t do that. We give more money to places with good salesmen, so obviously you and I value salesmen more.
Why is it sad that people are allowed to make decisions about how to spend their money? You seem be implying that it would be less sad if I had to pay a janitor the same rate as I pay a salesman. But wouldn’t that be even sadder if a salesman with a degree and an MBA (and there are plenty of them) got no more reward than a high school dropout janitor? Sad for the person who wasted 6 years of her life getting an education that allowed them to provide information to customer and manufacturer and gets no reward for it, and sad for society as a whole because there would soon be no skilled, knowledgeable sales staff?
Personally I can’t see the problem, beyond the trite observation that life itself isn’t fair. Most janitors are there through choice. They could get better educated or move into other fields and get more experience but they choose not to. That’s not sad, that’s their choice. Some janitors are are mentally incapable of anything else, so they live a comfortable life doing unglamourous menial work. They don’t starve in the street, they do what they are capable of. I can’t actually see the problem, beyond the fact that life itself is unfair.
I don’t really mind if you sneer at my opinions Blake, its not my first rodeo, nor my first unpopular opinion, and I ain’t delicate. But I trust you can see my difficulty, here, as I wonder who this fellow you’re beating up on is, and why you think he’s me.
You said “That the fruits of our commonly held nation are distributed unevenly is historical, customary, and traditional. But that doesn’t make it right, necessary, or inevitable.”
That means that you believe that you can engineer a just and functional system in which one of these unemployed and unemployable people has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon.
If you can not engineer such a system then you are admitting that it is necessary and inevitable that the neruosurgeon will have more wealth.
Can you explain how you can engineer a just and functional system in which one of these unemployed and unemployable people has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon.
Or are you prepared to concede that it is necessary and inevitable that the neruosurgeon will have more wealth.
Yes.
You said “That the fruits of our commonly held nation are distributed unevenly is historical, customary, and traditional. But that doesn’t make it right, necessary, or inevitable.”
That means that you believe that you can engineer a just and functional system in which one of these unemployed and unemployable people has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon.
If you can not engineer such a system then you are admitting that it is necessary and inevitable that the neruosurgeon will have more wealth.
Can you explain how you can engineer a just and functional system in which one of these unemployed and unemployable people has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon.
Or are you prepared to concede that it is necessary and inevitable that the neruosurgeon will have more wealth.
Yes.
You said “That the fruits of our commonly held nation are distributed unevenly is historical, customary, and traditional. But that doesn’t make it right, necessary, or inevitable.”
That means that you believe that you can engineer a just and functional system in which one of these unemployed and unemployable people has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon.
If you can not engineer such a system then you are admitting that it is necessary and inevitable that the neruosurgeon will have more wealth.
Can you explain how you can engineer a just and functional system in which one of these unemployed and unemployable people has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon.
Or are you prepared to concede that it is necessary and inevitable that the neruosurgeon will have more wealth.
Because you were th eone who said “That the fruits of our commonly held nation are distributed unevenly is historical, customary, and traditional. But that doesn’t make it right, necessary, or inevitable.”
That means that you believe that you can engineer a just and functional system in which one of these unemployed and unemployable people has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon.
If you can not engineer such a system then you are admitting that it is necessary and inevitable that the neruosurgeon will have more wealth.
Can you explain how you can engineer a just and functional system in which one of these unemployed and unemployable people has the exact same house and car as a 65 yo neurosurgeon.
Or are you prepared to concede that it is necessary and inevitable that the neruosurgeon will have more wealth.
You were wrong when you claimed that it wasn’t necessary and inevitable that wealth be unevenly distributed. I don’t know why you don;t just admit that you were wrong, rather than pretending that you never made such a claim. Because it’s all too easy to quote where you said “That the fruits of our commonly held nation are distributed unevenly is historical, customary, and traditional. But that doesn’t make it right, necessary, or inevitable.”
The OP is looking for arguments or s/he would have put this in IMHO but people could at least answer the question posed before questioning the relationship between the hypothetical and reality. Blake seems to assume the question is meaningless since everyone would agree that it’s a good idea but I’m sure that’s wrong. Some will feel that it is unjust to force those at the top to sacrifice in order to improve the standard of living of those at the bottom.
If I understand you correctly, you are asking if we voted for a market system. Right?
However, it’s unclear to me why you assume that the system we have “rewards aggressive ambition above all else”. It rewords giving people what they value above all else. It lets people decide what they value and rewards those who provide it. But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by “aggressive ambition”.
If someone said your thoughts were “fantasy devoid from rational thought or knowledge of … basic human behavior,” you might find that insulting, and insultingly phrased even if true. It’s a mild insult as things go, and I’m not terribly offended, but still.
Communism, of course. But I thought was fairly clear that he meant he wanted a system where the disparities were less pronounced, and not erased altogether – one obviously hyperbolic statement notwithstanding. I see he has already posted agreement with me.
All of those things aren’t the part that’s sad. I absolutely agree that it would be just as sad if not sadder if, if education (and the time spent attaining it) were not rewarded financially.
But it’s also sad that someone needs to work just as hard as a janitor, and who (for instance) may have been working just as hard at low end jobs to support a poor family while the salesman was at college, and get paid way, way less for it, thus making it harder for he and his family to pull themselves upward.
So, the truly sad part of it is, we’ve arrived at a system where one of those two things has to happen in order for the system to work. You couch that simply as “life isn’t fair.” I’m not wholly convinced that every janitor could move up in the world if they really wanted to. Who feeds their families if they stop working to get a degree? Or maybe, as you say, they’re just not smart enough for other work. Yep, life isn’t fair. I’d like to think that once a society reaches a certain level of prosperity, it can start to look for more ways to help those for whom life has been especially “unfair.”
One last thing I wanted to mention. To quote you from up-thread:
I can’t prove it, but my sense is that you overestimate the comfort of the truly poor in this country. I think it more likely that they don’t have any meaningful ‘disposable’ income, don’t own a car (and thus have to spend longer getting to/and from whatever job they have), don’t own a widescreen TV, maybe go out to dinner once every couple of months, and don’t regularly go to movies. Their money goes to rent, utilities, cheap food, clothes, and, every once in a long while, some consumer good treat for the kids.
I’m willing to let elucidator slide on that one quote, since his subsequent postings clearly indicate that it was hyperbole. Let it go, Blake. Not worth the energy. However, I’m also curious what system would be better than letting the people (sometimes referred to as “the market”) decide what another person’s labor is worth to them. And in the specific example given (teacher vs salesman), the teacher is a public employee allowing “the people” to literally legislate a higher salary if they so chose. And yet they (we) don’t.
So, it would seem that whatever system we put in to replace this would almost certainly have to be undemocratic. But maybe there is something about the proposed system that I am missing.