quote:

Or, perhaps you have studied all examples of redistribution that you can find, and you have found them to lead to abuses of government power and to not even be in the long-term interests of the parties who supposedly benefit.

Since virtually every society on the planet is an example of direct or indirect redistribution to some degree (The poor don't have the money to fund an army on their own, you know -- the very existence of an army in a nation is redistributionary in the truest sense. Yay for public goods!), I would reply "Or, perhaps you haven't truly done that. Or, if perhaps you *think* you have, it's more than apparent that you haven't."

Redistribution leads to abuses of government power?

Government's *existence* leads to abuses of government power. Human nature leads to abuses of *any* power, including that held by the government.

That's not an argument, in and of itself, for why any given redistributionary policy is a bad idea -- that's a point against on a cost/benefit analysis that you haven't done.


Creative destruction pretty well demonstrates the most efficient way to run an economic system -- but not how to make sure it benefits everyone as much as society deems they 'should' be benefitted.

quote:

Originally posted by Joe McReynolds:
Since virtually every society on the planet is an example of direct or indirect redistribution to some degree ....

Of course, that is not what we were talking about. The thread was about taxing the rich in order to redistribute money to the poor, not to redistribute non-money benefits like military protection. As no one I have ever encountered advocates avoiding the latter type of "redistribution", you were obviously referring to the former kind when you stated that anyone who opposes government redistribution has a "let them eat cake" attitude.

Thus, I was obviously referring to the standard welfare-state programs, AND SO WERE YOU, if you will be honest. Thus, your entire reply is just the logical fallacy of equivocation: using the word "redistribution" in one sense in your prior posting, and in an entirely different sense in your later posting.

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Of course, that is not what we were talking about.

On the contrary, it's exactly what we're talking about.

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The thread was about taxing the rich in order to redistribute money to the poor, not to redistribute non-money benefits like military protection.

You're making an unfounded assertion that I think is easily proven to be incorrect -- that aside from the semantics, there's any meaningful difference between either policy. Money is simply an intermediary used to purchase non-monetary things; a measure of power, if you will. Whether it is money or other things (such as military protection) which are disbursed in a to-some-degree egalitarian fashion throughout society is a distinction that is arbitrary and lacks significance.

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As no one I have ever encountered advocates avoiding the latter type of "redistribution", you were obviously referring to the former kind when you stated that anyone who opposes government redistribution has a "let them eat cake" attitude.

Incorrect -- since you haven't established the meaningfulness of any distinction between the two, you're simply highlighting rank hypocrisy (not that that's such a terrible thing, in and of itself).

quote:

Thus, I was obviously referring to the standard welfare-state programs, AND SO WERE YOU, if you will be honest. Thus, your entire reply is just the logical fallacy of equivocation: using the word "redistribution" in one sense in your prior posting, and in an entirely different sense in your later posting.

They're both clearly the same thing. That's what you haven't thought deeply enough into it to get.

People's support for any given form of redistribution tends to be a mere function of their self-interest as best they understand it. That individuals' self-interest may differ from one another in any specific case in no way means that the two policies being examined are at all inherently different in their 'core'.

Mr. McReynolds' latest post is one of his less intelligible ones, as is often the case when he limits himself to playing word games. Let me try to give us something intelligible to talk about.

When the framers of the Constitution used the phrase "the general welfare" in the preamble to the Constitution, they used a well-known phrase in political writings of the time. It meant that they were establishing a government that was to serve the general interests of the country, rather than special interests. Military defense of the country is generally taken to be in everyone's interest. On the contrary, giving an export subsidy to McDonald's to help them open new reataurants overseas is generally agreed to benefit a special interest.

Having studied the goods and bads that come with government, I conclude that we should maximize the promotion of the general interest and minimize the promotion of the special interest. Special interests will always benefit from programs for the general interest; the federal judiciary is in the general interest, but federal judges get paid reasonably well, as do the lawyers who argue cases there. If the primary goal of the judiciary were to redistribute money from taxpayers to judges and lawyers, it would be primarily a special-interest program in need of reform. Likewise, defense contractors benefit from military defense spending, and I do not share the blind spot towards the waste and abuse within this system that many of my fellow conservatives seem to have.

My approach, imperfect as it is, would be to evaluate programs as to their primary purpose, then use monitoring, and competitive bidding, and oversight by more than one branch of government, etc., to minimize abuses (for the special interest) within programs that are primarily for the general interest. The sticky part is, obviously, defining the general interest. George Will has argued that there is a general interest in a minimal safety-net welfare system, because of the supposed consequences of not having such a system. Even if I accept that basic argument, it is not clear that the safety net should be at the level of a national government, nor that it must be public-sector rather than through private charity.

I think the key perspective, arrived at through centuries of experience, is to recognize that the special interests always insist that their interests coincide with the general interest, and to be skeptical about all such claims.

As to the original discussion about "redistribution", there is redistribution inherent in any system of taxing and spending. If taxpayer money goes to defense contractors, redistribution has occurred. The system works as well as it can work in an imperfect world when all such redistribution is an incidental by-product of serving the general interest, and the system works much less well when special interests manage to persuade Congress to buy certain airplanes that the Air Force says it does not even want, because the special interests will benefit financially. Given the difficulty of monitoring a government that is dedicated to general interest programs, I cannot think it wise to introduce entire programs whose purpose is to take money from everyone and give it to a few, because the few will then be better off.

This view is also informed by studying the effects of such programs (family dissolution, crime, etc.). Whereas the primary result of abuses of general-interest programs is to waste some money and unfairly redistribute it (e.g. the export subsidy example), the negative effects of welfare state programs include gun battles in the streets, dysfunctional schools that have given up on educating and set their sights on keeping the kids from killing each other, etc. When the "beneficiaries" of welfare state programs have a more miserable existence than they had before the advent of the programs, I conclude that the programs do more harm than good.

At this point, Mr. McReynolds can tell us if it is still a fair characterization that those who oppose welfare-state programs are displaying a "let them eat cake" attitude.

A separate note on Mr. McReynolds' 11:39 p.m. posting of March 6: Note that every time he plays his clever little word games, he clearly contradicts what he has previously written.

In his most recent post, he claims that we were NOT talking about welfare state programs that redistribute money and vouchers and so on. Rather, we were talking about all redistribution, even if the good is non-money, such as military protection.

Let's compare that claim to his original words in this thread:

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Even if one takes it as a truism that there are some negative effects on raising taxes, one can easily argue that this is worth it to advance broader societal goals such as the redistribution of income.

The goal not being that everyone 'end equally', but 'end in a way that they're content with'.


Because if you hold that the government should have no role whatsoever in the redistribution of income, you've essentially tattooed 'Let them Eat Cake' on your forehead.

Shall we see what we were talking about here? First, note that Mr. McReynolds used the phrase "redistribution of income". This is a phrase with widespread usage in regards to the welfare state programs that I claimed we were talking about. The key word is "income". Income is money, not non-money. If anyone can cite reputable political or economic sources that claim as part of my "income" my share of the benefits of military protection, please do so.

Second, note that Mr. McReynolds speaks of redistributing income not to make everyone's income equal, but to raise certain incomes to the point where people are content. Can there be any doubt what kind of redistribution we are talking about here? Was he advocating giving our income to General Motors until the executives of General Motors are "content"? Was he advocating spending on defense until defense contractors are "content"? Obviously, he was talking about redistributing money to poorer persons, not about the kinds of redistribution he later tried to equivocate into the discussion.

Third, he characterized those who oppose redistribution of income as having a "let them eat cake" attitude. Now, according to his later equivocation, all forms of government redistribute, and thus no one can say they oppose redistribution (other than anarchists, I would presume). Is he saying that those who oppose "corporate welfare" policies have tattooed 'Let them eat cake' on their foreheads? Or is it more likely that he was referring to those who oppose redistributing money to the poor, as is done in numerous welfare state programs today?

It should be obvious by now that Mr. McReynolds is simply dishonest. He claims not to have said things that he obviously said. He quite clearly stated that those who oppose welfare state redistribution programs have a "Let Them Eat Cake" attitude towards the poor. When I pointed out that this is the standard leftist approach to cutting off debate, by using ad hominem charges of "not being compassionate" etc., he started equivocating over words and changing the subject. Apparently it requires more honesty than he possesses to simply say, "Yeah, you are right. I characterized opponents of redistribution to the poor as being people who did not care about the poor. Let's forget that remark and talk about the issues now." Instead, we have to have the kind of "I will never admit any such thing" dialogue that makes so many Usenet newsgroups unreadable.