The idea is that you wouldn’t able to produce much of anything without a complex society backing you. At best, you’d be able to live on subsistance farming, and with a very poor productivity (assuming that your crops wouldn’t just be stolen from you). The community has a large part in your ability to produce food (or anything else) hence has a claim on it.
Actually, in the current world, the food isn’t lacking on the overall, and we would be perfectly able to feed everyone, so this argument is moot.
It’s not the food lacking that is the problem. It is the logistics.
This is a distortion of what I am saying.
What I am saying is that we collectively as a society have to decide how the fruits of the society are to be split up. Society is just way too collective to avoid such a decision. While I think a market economy may work as a “first cut” at such an allocation, it fails in some rather obvious ways. First, the idea that your pay in such a system reflects your contributions to society are true under such ridiculously unrealistic assumptions that I refuse to believe it as more than a rough guide. Second (or perhaps in part explaining why the first is true), the amount of money you earn depends on so many factors that we have collectively determined, like labor law, patent law, corporate law (not to mention so many shared resources) that the idea of the money you are paid fundamentally being the “correct” allocation for your contribution to society is just not realistic. Third, it is clear that you are not entitled to all the money that you “earn” because if you and everyone else were to keep all the money then lots of collective services that you use (and maybe some that you don’t use but that we have collectively decided are worthwhile) would not be paid for.
I also am not arguing that you don’t have grounds to complain when the government is using monies in ways that you dislike. Indeed, I complain…for example…that the government is wasting money to do advanced development and deployment of a “missile defense system” that is, at best, not ready for such advanced development and deployment and won’t work. However, I don’t claim that the government is “stealing” from me to do this.
The problem I have is not so much with you complaining about certain programs you feel the government should not be undertaking and that you feel are wasting resources…including resources that would otherwise accrue to you. The problem that I have is your attempt to claim that these resources are actually fundamentally are yours and are being taken away from you.
Well, I guess I would not strongly disagree with this point of view … I don’t think it makes every “red cent” yours however unless you don’t use any of the services. As long as you are part of the society, you are obligated to pay the “rent”. And, you can’t tell the landlord that he is stealing from you because he makes you pay for the full square footage of your apartment whereas there is some alcove that you don’t like and don’t really go into.
Oh yeah…another problem I have is with you trying to make very clear and rigid distinctions between redistributive and non-redistributive programs. This is because, as I noted, almost everything government does and every law it makes has distributive impact and the effect of most of those things that you don’t complain about are to distribute money upward (i.e., to help create and accentuate instabilities towards the very unequal distribution of wealth).
So, in practice, I think blasting what you don’t like as “redistributive” ends of amounting to supporting all those programs and polices that lead to massive inequalities of wealth and opposing all those programs that attempt to at all lessen these massive inequalities.
IMHO, there’s far too much talk in this post about rights, with nary a mention of obligations. Many have objected to ElJeffe’s example of the rich man with a $20K theatre system, taking this to mean he has a right to it. He doesn’t, but no one, by the same logic, has a right to prevent him from having it if that’s his choice of how to spend his own (legally acquired) money.
I have posted in another OP a long piece about what we mean by the term citizenship and it seems to me it’s perfectly relevant here as well.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=148529
The essential question, in my view, is what type of citizenship we are defining. If we talk only about individual rights, then the poor come out worst, because there is no community to help them change their position - they either do it all by themselves or they stay where they are. If we value the common good above all, then we create obligations that supercede individual rights. If we go so far as to say that there are no individual rights, only obligations (see Nazism and Russian “communism” for the classic examples) then you know what you’ll get in the end.
Talk about balancing rights with obligations and you can get somewhere in a debate like this.
Exactly right.
What we’ve come up with, with a mildly progressive tax system and a light estate tax (in the U.S.) is a compromise between keeping all the fruits of your labor and sharing some of them for social purposes we have decided are necessary, like defense, Social Security, roads, airports, and so on.
There is nothing wrong with any particular gap in income. What is wrong is that equality of opportunity is mostly gone at this time. American society has organized itself so that the richer you are, the more likely it is that your child will go to schools that are well-funded and staffed, and this situation gets more extreme in its injustice every year.
I naively thought there was quite a bit of equality of opportunity, until I began to work and actually became successful, and found that the vast majority of people I met at work came from prosperous backgrounds, instead of a mix of rich, poor, and middle class. Very few started out in poor families. I’m just about the only person I know who didn’t get a gift from his parents to afford the down payment on my first house, and who has a portion of his income going to support a poor relative. Everyone else seems to have started out well-off already, and to have huge amounts of money saved, as would I, of course, if I hadn’t had to finance my house entirely on my own.
The craziest thing is that this inequality of opportunity is taken for granted, and is considered just.
All we need is for everyone to be given a fair shot. It wouldn’t take a lot of money, not in relation to a Federal budget of 1 and a half trillion dollars. If that truly happened, we’d be an infinitely richer society, materially and in every other way as well.
jshore:
I strongly disagree. I think that the “correct” amount of money that is allocated to you is exactly equal to whatever you can get out of the system, while obeying the rules of morality. It should be completely independent of how valuable your contributions are to society. The person who invented Pokemon certainly clontributed nothing worthwhile, but he deserves every penny that Nintendo gave him for his creation, just the same. Similarly, if I’m a social worker who goes out of his way to help people, I should not have riches lavished on me by virtue of the fact that I’m a good person who helps others.
The fact that what people earn is influenced by certain arbitrary laws is not an argument that capitalism is only a very rough approximation of how Poppa Government should divvy up the goods. Instead, it’s an argument against creating too many arbitrary laws.
You complain that I have claimed that money I earn is fundamentally mine. Well, you’re claiming that the money is fundamentally everyone’s - and that’s simply ludicrous.
And as far as the distinction between redestributive and non-redestributive programs - you have a point. Every program is redestributive in some sense. However, there’s a big difference between building a road and cutting a Welfare paycheck. The road is something the government plops down and says, “Okay, everybody, have at it!” Anyone can drive on it. With the welfare check, the government is explicitly taking tax money and handing it to a very specific person. Perhaps some funds came from people with no cars, and in that sense money is being “redestributed” from the non-driving to the driving. However, it’s less redestributive than the welfare scenario.
If you look at it that way, “redestributiveness” is not a binary trait, it’s a point on a line, from (0 = completely non-redistributive) to (1 = completely redistributive). And I think that we should be very wary of programs that are too close to 1.
And I think this is a big, giant load of crap. Hugely redistributive programs can perpetuate inequality of wealth just as much as anything, by fostering a mindset of dependence on handouts, and squelching the drive to succeed.
Jeff