Income redistribution is more than just a tax break. It is a philosophical visualization of the country. Do we want an America that is 2 tiered. Extremely wealthy and powerful and the rest. Americas promise was to be something different than an European kingdom or an Indian caste system. We were to care about our fellow Americans and allow hard working people have a decent living and an opportunity to do better. Many industrial nations have instituted policies that give its citizens a bottom that is not without healthcare ,food and shelter.
Moving our manufacturing base to a country with low labor costs and no environmental laws is more than a business decision. So they made huge profits. But the cost is passed on to the middle class,the poor and government. Unemployment, alcoholism, foreclosures and crime increases, not their problem. Making a crapload of money in a short time is. Giving away our intellectual properties to China and Japan,just good business. But do they owe any responsibility to the country? Hell they don’t even pay taxes.
Rawls is a decent writer. In the beginning he gives the simple version, which is clear but has a number of technical holes. Then he gives the complicated version, which is more obscure but tighter.
I don’t know anybody who pushes Rawls POV, incidentally. His conclusions are too liberal, even by elucidator standards (to take an example). But I like Rawls, and he provides a great thought experiment.
I enjoyed Nozick as well, though I don’t share his libertarian framework.
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I’m not sure about what you mean by the “What is income” problem.
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Negative income taxes don’t imply a flat tax (and I’m pretty sure you know this). The EITC is a negative income tax (ditto).
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In poverty policy circles, there’s something known as the iron triangle.
You can design welfare policy with decent incentives.
You can design welfare policy with a reasonable minimum living standard.
You can design a cheap system.
You get to choose 2 of the above, but not all 3.
I like the thought experiment; I doubt his conclusion about what we would pick is correct.
We don’t all report to an employer for weekly paychecks. What counts as income for such a tax is important, e.g. capital gains. I’ve read commentary that a flat-rate tax would be easier to dodge for wealthy people, for some reason. We have a huge portion of the tax code treating different kinds of income differently. How a flat-rate system would deal with this is not obvious to me.
I’m specifically proposing a fixed disbursement and a flat-rate tax in place of welfare. If you look at the effective tax rate, no, it is not proportional. But relative to earned income, tax on the first dollar is as much as on the 1000th dollar.
These maxims are everywhere. Bit by bit they become impossibility theorems. The economics reading of the future is really going to be amazing. 
To your first point - I do not disagree with your concept of America, although I think that there were other purposes that were considered more important, like freedom to worship. In any case, I dispute the idea that these were supposed to be provided by the government.
The other side of the “they took our jobs” argument is the indisputable fact that, by moving manufacturing and other jobs overseas, they enriched the lives of the poor and middle class by provided them with the ability to buy cheaper goods and services. Some people will say “Oh, that’s just stuff” but the ability to have stuff is very important to the mental well being of most people, especially children.
And, no, crime, foreclosures and such are not the problem of any corporation. Individuals make their own choices, and should suffer the consequences of poor choices. Losing a job or being poor are no excuses for acting like an irresponsible jackass.
Well, I totally agree that corporations are not legally responsible for what happens to the neighborhoods or livelihoods of their former workers if they move jobs overseas. And that hardship does not entitle one to indulge in illegal behavior.
But y’know, this “not my problem” attitude is a two-way street. If corporations or the wealthy are completely indifferent to the consequences of their actions on other people, then they can’t expect other people to be especially considerate of them.
That means, say, that if enough hard-hit and laid-off people get disgruntled enough to exercise their democratic rights and vote themselves some serious tax increases on the well-to-do, the well-to-do don’t have any right to whine about it. It’s legal for our elected representatives to enact tax increases.
If a majority of the population decides that the system is so gamed against them that their only viable recourse is to soak the rich, well, the rich will have to suck it up. They made their own choice to alienate and antagonize the majority of the people they share this society with, and they should suffer the consequences of their choices. Right?
Right - that is fair. 
I’m no shill for the fat cats, and they deserve to reap what they sow.
Snowboarder Bo, that’s a good post. I agree with you.
I’m not concerned with “fairness” as a concept, but with “justice”, which is a sort of different thing.
The problem with wealth distribution is that it doesn’t discriminate between the truly parasitic, and those who may have worked very hard, saved and generally done the right things. Or, for that matter, families who got their shit together and strove to make the next generation better off than the current one.
Those people don’t really deserve to get their money taken to “better” people who don’t do those things. My wife and I come from families where 3-4 generations ago, the people in the families were very poor, blue-collar people. One great grandfather worked at a dairy, another was an illiterate longshoreman, another was a farmer, several were coal miners, etc…
Over time, they scrimped and saved, and impressed the value of education into their children, and the value of thrift and living within your means. Their children got high school diplomas and skilled jobs. Their grandchildren went to college and had white collar jobs. Their great grandchildren, at least in my part of the family, all have white collar jobs- writers, computer people, lawyers, teachers, etc… And, along the line, there’s been some wealth accumulation due to some real-estate purchases nearly 100 years ago that have been sold recently, as well as very sound investments over time.
I fail to see why this wealth accumulation within the family deserves to be redistributed- it’s ours and we as a family have worked very hard and saved for it. I tend to think that while I may not have developed it all myself, I have a responsibility to be a good steward and add to it as best I can, so that I can give my children a leg up, and they can give their children a leg up, and so on.
Well, yanno, life isn’t fair, is it?
It always does kind of surprise me that so many people who cheerfully admonish the poor to struggle through adversity and not whine about the unfairness of their hard lot, etc., etc., can then turn right around and complain that they themselves don’t “deserve” to have to sacrifice any of their own abundant assets.
What’s “deserve” got to do with it? Weren’t we just saying that life isn’t fair? Your hard-working, responsible great-grandparents didn’t “deserve” to endure grinding poverty, did they? If I’m going to feel sorry for anyone being cut a raw deal in this story I’ll feel sorry for them.
I’m glad they made it through and all, but I’d sure rather be in your shoes than theirs. Paying a modestly progressive tax to the government out of your accumulated wealth sounds like a pretty minor sacrifice to make, compared to the challenges they overcame.
Suppose we all set a good example to those whiny poor people of today by accepting the comparatively minor injustice of our own lot in a cheerful spirit, and making a few comparatively small sacrifices with a good grace? I think that would be a nice gesture, don’t you?
:Palm-forehead: Oh good grief. No, persons adapt to a level of stuff as normal. More useless crap does not create more happiness or mental well-being. I mean, I get where you’re coming from, but cheap goods are not wealth in a social sense, & what was once valuable may become seen as junk. (Maybe that “freedom to worship” is a problem, if there are now churches preaching happiness through stuff. Og.)
This is where we differ, and reading this thread makes me feel that it is a fairly fundamental difference, not just between me and you but between my side and yours.
No. I can’t imagine a transaction where somebody deserves some of their money but not all of it. Either the transaction is occurring under false pretenses and the money is all ill-gotten and undeserved, or else everything is open and above-board and the person in question deserves it all.
I’m not defining ‘deserve’ in the way everyone else is, I suppose. To me, you deserve what you get if the person giving it to you feels like you deserve it. None of you go around on the holidays accusing children of not deserving their Christmas presents. The parents feel they deserved them at least, it is their money and they don’t have to justify it to you. The kids apparently brought them some value that isn’t in evidence to us and we leave it at that.
I also think we may be talking at cross purposes. I’m defending the system, not the details. Of course there are some nefarious rich folks who got that way illegitimately. There are a few loopholes in the laws that allow rich people to advance their wealth mischievously. But overall, most rich people deserve what they got. They gave something of value to society and were duly compensated. Look at money as an IOU. That rich guy’s billions is value produced and given to society that has not yet been redeemed. It is the poor folks living beyond their means in debt that are the actual ‘leeches’, taking what they haven’t earned. But I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt. If Visa feels they’ll pay it back, who am I to argue? Why can’t we also give the rich the benefit of the doubt? If somebody is rich, let’s just assume they deserve it unless presented with evidence otherwise.
We certainly differ on this point, yes.
Yeah, no one ever goes around whining about “kids these days.” 
In summary, I believe in the possibility of overcompensation. I believe it is quite pervasive, actually, because the market is not free, and economic conditions are manipulated in the favor of those who are already wealthy.
I don’t believe it is by evil, greedy, capitalist leeches necessarily, however. Just a normal response to incentives.
Could you explain what you mean by this? And why don’t people just say they’re against unfair market manipulation instead of rich people in general?
I’m aware that greater wealth bestows greater power. So does greater athletic ability and greater intelligence. Unless you’re advocating a Harrison Bergeron-style handicapping scheme, you can’t wish away the fact that some people are better than others and in turn more powerful. All you can do is make sure that power is obtained and used fairly, honestly and legitimately.
As I said in my first post, there may be practical reasons for taking power in the form of wealth away from those at the top and spreading it around to the lower classes. You can argue that it is necessary to discourage the accumulation of power by a select few. But you can’t argue that it is fair; not when that wealth and power was obtained honestly.
Remember that the financial experts who got huge bonuses and raises often got them through creative accounting. The cooked the books to make it seem like they were making huge profits while they were losing millions. Is that honest? It may not be against the law.
Harrison Bergeron is, in all places, all times, & all contexts, a straw man.
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This is my concern. I must put necessity above fairness. As I said in my first post, too much concentration of wealth is dangerous to stability & a temptation to evil.
Do you really think inherited wealth is comparable to natural intelligence or athleticism?
Well, I don’t think it is incomparable. So yeah. But it really depends on the purpose of the comparison. They all instill a considerable amount of potential in their subjects while causing the less fortunate to resent them for it. The only relevant difference I can see is that it is easier and less bloody to deprive people of their financial inheritances.
Very short version: redistribution is seen as potentially more fair in cases in which original distribution is (correctly) seen as unfair. Capital does not really deserve as much credit as it gets for making the economy run. All of us have known hard workers with good, desirable skills who do not get rewarded because venal bosses keep as much as pssible for themselves. Sons and nephews get promotions. In many cases, CEOs loot companies, provide no real value – often choosing the same strategy anyone else would have, but claiming tens of million s in compensation for picking an obvious choice – and then depart with golden parachutes to be re-hired at new firms by old friends, despite their having been “fired.” When I get fired, it doesn’t enhance my chances of landing a cushy new job, even if I am very good at what I do. Those CEO-type people talk about providing value, but are often merely keeping what they can with grasping hands, helped by cronyism.
Why should the guy who stole 30 million from my health plan get no jail time, but the black guy who held up the 7-11 gets ten years? The health care CEO also threatened someone’s well-being to get his way; just because a handgun is more imediate than cutting prescription benefits doesn’t mean it kills fewer people or inspires less total fear.
People who genuinely don’t understand this are lucky people who have always had things work out for them. People who have seen how truly arbitrary fortune can be, and experienced the unfairness of bullies, backed implicitly by the guns of the police, taking the lion’s share of wealth generated by cooperative effort – often after putting in the least effort in the organization – understand ths yearning for a fairer world, even if they reject socialism itself.
As evidence, I’ll offer the words of Nobel economist Paul Krugman, who I suspect may reside to the left of you.
Executive compensation has skyrocketed over the past 30 years, in inflation-adjusted and GDP-adjusted terms. Those who say that current executives are getting what they deserve now, are also claiming that the business leaders of 1950-1980 were getting much less than they deserved then.
OBTW: Median income fell during the last business cycle - the 2000s expansion was one of the few ones where the rich got richer while the middle class got poorer.
(ETA: Re: Flat tax, etc. Joel? Slemrod is the go-to guy for tax policy, btw.)