(10-09-2010 12:02 PM)emmiesix Wrote: (10-09-2010 08:50 AM)georgewebb Wrote: I sometimes wonder why redistributionists focus so much on money. Friendship and sex are also unequally distributed, and are much bigger determinants of human happiness. If one's goal is really to redistributively legislate our way to happiness, it seems one should start with those areas.
Wow. Spoken as only someone who has enough to live on could. You do realize that being poor is a struggle, right?
By what measure? Compared to not being poor, sure. But by nearly every material baseline I can think of, being poor today is less of a struggle than being middle-class or even rich was hundreds or thousands of years ago. For Pete's sake, we are the first society on earth in which poor people are FAT! Think about that.
(10-09-2010 12:02 PM)emmiesix Wrote: I don't buy the fallacy that money buys happiness -
Exactly - so why worry so much about how much money other people have? We should worry instead about whether they are free.
(10-09-2010 12:02 PM)emmiesix Wrote: I actually live comfortably on my grad student stipend (own a home, travel fairly often),
Congratulations -- you live better than a king did not long ago. I guarantee you that it's not because someone decided to redistribute money from kings and dukes to you. It's because a great number of people laid down a foundation of liberty and law, which has made our society so rich that even grad students can be well off.
(10-09-2010 12:02 PM)emmiesix Wrote: but I do buy that massive inequality drives resentment and hostility, and frequently begets crime/fraud, etc.
FIXED inequality may or may not drive resentment. I'm not sure there is any case in history in which TRANSIENT inequality, when coupled with equality of opportunity, drives resentment. Nor is suppression of resentment the sine qua non of policy.
(10-09-2010 12:02 PM)emmiesix Wrote: It's not good for society.
Perhaps -- although societies throughout history have put up with fantastic amounts of inequality. At any rate, what's even worse for society is giving government the power to decide who has too little, who has too much, and who needs to sacrifice for whom.
(10-09-2010 12:02 PM)emmiesix Wrote: When you can bring up the living conditions of many by reducing the wealth of a few (say from extreme to moderately so), I think that is a worthy end.
I respectfully disagree, for two reasons.
(1) It is a false choice. The real way to raise the wealth of the many is emphatically NOT to target the few, but to uphold liberty and the rule of law for all. Confiscating from the few does indeed bring down the few, but doesn't really do much for the many.
(2) Because it doesn't work. If you start with the goal of suppressing the wealthy, you way get an extremely short-lived bonanza for the poor -- like kids diving into Halloween candy. But the guaranteed end result just a decade or so later is the poor will be worse off than if you had left things alone. For a staggeringly clear example, see Argentina. Is that what you want -- a temporary feel-good fix that results in LOWER net living standards in the long run?
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(10-09-2010 12:02 PM)emmiesix Wrote: Some Europeans have told me that they consider the US far more classist than places like Germany, where you see people of all parts of life mixing in a beer garden, etc.
And many people, both Europeans and Americans, find the exact reverse to be true. Anyway, it's probably too vague and too subjective to prove. But I'll stack up Europe's record of openness, opportunity, inclusiveness, egalitarianism, and social mobility against our own any time. And so, I suspect, will the tens of millions of people, and their hundreds of millions of descendants, who for the past half-millenium have been leaving the Old World for the New for those very reasons.
(10-09-2010 12:02 PM)emmiesix Wrote: ...a big unspoken part of this is that it's still true that race determines class to a large extent.
Which is one reason I am proud to live in the first (and still one of the few) nations on earth that has separated ethnicity from citizenship.
(10-09-2010 12:02 PM)emmiesix Wrote: Anyway, I'm surprised that you are somewhat defensive about this.
My response wasn't defensive at all. Philosophically, I'm serious: study after study has shown that money has less correlation to life satisfaction than the other two factors I mentioned. Consistently less. So why the obsession with redistributing money? As long as we are advocating the use of government power to decide who has too little of something and who has too much, why not go for the stuff that really matters?
Unless either...
(1) The answer is that, well, it's just too frightening to have the government dictating human activity like that. To which one might say: exactly.
or
(2) The real goal of redistributionist policy is not actually to produce a more equal distribution of happiness, but to simply savor the feeling of mighty power, whether it's actual power to one's self as redistributor-in-chief, or a vicarious satisfaction that such power is entrusted to one's "right-thinking" fellows -- combined with the historically unwarranted confidence that such entrustment would hold up over time. And THAT is downright scary.
(10-09-2010 12:02 PM)emmiesix Wrote: Pretend you can play god - would you reduce the United Health CEO's salary and give working parents at minimum wage a raise? I would.
But that's the whole point: government is not a god, should not play god, and should not be treated as a god. The soils of Europe are rich with corpses created by people who thought it should be. God (capital G) forbid that we ever elect such people here.