Redistribution of Wealth

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

How should it be accomplished and how far should we take it.

The extremists (Communists) want complete, worldwide equality of wealth and privileges (except for the elite, of course). It would be easy to accomplish I suppose at least in theory. Close everybody’s bank account and sell all property and redistribute equally to all (except, again, for the elite). Comes out to about $5000 a year per family. And nobody would have a refrigerator, stove, running hot and cold water or indoor plumbing. You get the point. But are people, even on this site, that advocate that, although I doubt any have taken it out to the bald faced consequences.

The middle of the road socialist statists want to allow for a difference in income and wealth, but how do we determine who has more and how much more. On top of that, we redistribute our wealth now with the income tax, but that doesn’t touch the wealth. So we could determine that the government gets everything you earn over $100,000. Arbitrary? Well yeah, isn’t it? And what arbitrary figure for total wealth should we use? Based on what?

2

The Paineful Truth:How should it be accomplished and how far should we take it.
The extremists (Communists) want complete, worldwide equality of wealth and privileges (except for the elite, of course). It would be easy to accomplish I suppose at least in theory. Close everybody’s bank account and sell all property and redistribute equally to all (except, again, for the elite). Comes out to about $5000 a year per family. And nobody would have a refrigerator, stove, running hot and cold water or indoor plumbing. You get the point. But are people, even on this site, that advocate that, although I doubt any have taken it out to the bald faced consequences.

K: Wealth redistribution is done all the time via taxes. A concept accepted by both Adam smith (the founder of capitalism) and
Karl Marx (founder of communism) in fact both accepted the idea of progressive taxes. I have no idea how you came up with
$5000 dollars. and why wouldn’t anybody have a refrigerator, or stove or running water that makes no sense of any kind.
and “the elite”? who the hell are they? You post really makes no sense.

PT: The middle of the road socialist statists want to allow for a difference in income and wealth, but how do we determine who has more and how much more. On top of that, we redistribute our wealth now with the income tax, but that doesn’t touch the wealth. So we could determine that the government gets everything you earn over $100,000. Arbitrary? Well yeah, isn’t it? And what arbitrary figure for total wealth should we use? Based on what?"

K: When 10% of Americans own 90% of all wealth in america, perhaps we should make some changes.
I would begin with no one can have more than 1 billion dollars and make no more than 10 million a year
and gradually lower both numbers. The one billion dollars one would affect about 500 americans.
The 10 million a year is more flexible and I am willing to go as high as 20 million per year,
but that still leaves less than 5% percent of all americans. recall Warren buffet only made 66 million last year
and he is the second richest person in america. I think these numbers are quite fair.
Over a 10 or 20 year period, I would lower the numbers to about 500 million and 10 million.
The left over money would than spread out over america. Nothing else really changes.
and we can leave the running water alone.

Kropotkin

3

I read recently that the top tax bracket only pays 18% of their real income, due to write-offs and loophole’s, etc. I don’t know how long it’s been this way, but I doubt it’s recent. We’re told they pay 39.6% (under the new administration). Why not just simplify the tax code so that people are actually paying what they should be? You don’t have to raise taxes or grow the welfare state, all you need to do is enforce the spirit of the bracketed tax structure.

4

One reason the tax code isn’t simpler is that the government tinkers with it to achieve specific goals. The mortgage interest write-off encourages home ownership, for instance, which has broader social benefits. As does the write-off for charitable contributions. Theoretically, at least. But nobody pays the actual rate. Everyone has some kind of exemption or deduction.

But if you get a write-off for a charitable contribution, it is written off against income, but you have to give the money away to get the write-off, so you don’t actually keep the money.

Fer instance.

5

“spread the wealth around” -obama

great. so when he gives up his $200 imported japanese steaks, his $300 bottles of champaigne, his multimilllion dollar jet, his $3000 suits, his $450,000 a year salary, his wealthy chicago home, his vacations at “the ranch”, his cadillac escallades, and gives some of it to the countless starving poor in washington dc alone, maybe ill buy it.

oh wait, he took vouchers (education grants) for better schools AWAY from dc kids, didnt he… hmm, interesting.

everytime the word “redistribution” comes up, among anyone favoring the idea, only one word follows immediately: hypocrite.

if you believe the “spread the wealth” BS then you are a gullible, envious incompetent.

6

Somehow, I think the odds (that you’ll buy it) are slim.

7

of course no intelligent person will ever BELIEVE the “redistribution” myths, thats not what i meant.

i meant that, when these so-called enlightened progressives who are so free to take from me and give to another, start actually practicing what they preach, then i will believe that THEY actually believe it, and are not just using socialist propoganda and ideology to further their own agenda and need for power… but it would take A LOT to actually convince me that they truly believe what they preach, and are not just liars. then again, it would almost be more frightening if they actually DID believe what they claim to…

8

If you mean that it’s “myth” that worldwide equality can be achieved, I’m with you. But there are no practising communists in the US government. But the redistribution of wealth takes many forms, including the Interstate Highway System, for instance. And education funds - the idea being that we are one country, and the common weal is served if poor states spend as much as rich states, per capita, on edication. Of course, this does not happen, strictly, but there is better parity than fifty years ago.

To characterise the issue as rich people writing checks to poor people is simplistic to the point of myth itself. When I pay local taxes to educate the children of my community, I am “writing a check”, as I have no children. If I live in the city, and have no car, I am “writing a check” when I pay taxes that go to road repair.

I am not implying that all redistribution of wealth is either good or bad. And no one really likes paying taxes. But redistribution of wealth is inevitable - if my house never catches fire, I can, I suppose, claim that all I have done is to subsidise others. But the great odds are that I have also been “subsidised” in some other way.

On a purely emotional level, almost any tax can be objected to. But the situation is a bit more complex than that.

9

we are so far away from your pragmatic ideal of “necessity of taxation” for kids education and roads, that we cant even see that ideal anymore. i admit it was there, once, but now we cannot even point to a single example of government spending or government program which is not bloated, inefficient, wasteful, and out of control, that is not far beyond a “necessary for the common welfare”.

it is the idea of common welfare which gets countries to the place the USSA is at now. the idea that we “owe” it to others. that they owe it to us. this is the lie, that you believe, and it allows you to justify endless government waste, immorality and theft as “necessary evils” or “a little over the top, but the intentions are good, and hey, the real world isnt as nice and idealistic as theory, so who am i to complain?”.

the number of government programs that should actually exist is so small, its not even relevant to call it redistribution. roads and education are not among them. no one has a RIGHT to roads or to schools, they are things whch exist only by virtue of the work and efforts of another. the “welfare” of others which you speak of is a myth, THE myth-- its the myth which serves to justify the literally endless atrocities by the USSA government against everyone, rich or poor.

its a rigged game, and a false system. once you take the first step, the end is written. you cant just get a little redistribution, it doesnt work that way. either you respect and abide by the rights of all citizens to their lives and work, or you dont. thats it. when government does not respect these rights and dips into the pockets of you and me to build roads and sewage systems and water treatment plants and trains and coal power plants and school systems and homeless shelters and phone lines and internet hubs and agriculture development and light rail and affordable housing and unemployment offices and FEMA emergency camps and Dept of this and Dept of that, there is no stopping point, other than the collapse at the end of the road. it cannot work, not forever. that system lives on borrowed time, and once so transformed, cannot be redeemed. there is no going back.

so if you want to tell yourself that “childrens education” and “highways” are the reason we need government spending, fine. thats up to you. its what they want you to think; do you think they care if you object to some services and programs here and there, as long as you buy into the basic game, that we NEED government doing things for us, “providing” for us, since we dont want to have to do it ourselves? they could care less. they know that today you object to social security, but tomorrow it will be all good, because it gets recognized as “just another necessary evil”, since “hey, if government doesnt do it, who will? what about all those elderly, huh? they have a right to live too!”

its a done deal. game over. redistribution fails to preserve and protect liberty, security, freedom, independence from tyranny, all the things which make human life on earth tolerable. there is no stopping the slow implosion, under its own weight, into a self-sacrificing system of theft, waste, poverty, oppression and tyranny which will bring an end to all productive, inventive and entrepreneurial spirits in men. and sure, our new system will, like the USSR, probably live on for a very long time, even hundreds of years maybe. who knows, the amount of wealth to plunder has never been greater in history-- plenty of goods for the system to feed off for a long, long time. it will sure outlive you and me, and probably our kids and grandkids.

speaking of kids, im glad you dont have any, and im glad i dont either, because anyone who has kids needs to look them in the eye and say solemly “im sorry”, because, if you care about your kids future or the future of the next generations, you indeed have very, very much to be sorry about.

10

I didn’t mean to describe an ideal. And I don’t know that it was ever there. But here you change the issue - there’s the principle itself of redistribution, and there is the execution of that principle. The OP asks how, and not “if”. My favored plan is a national value-added tax. It’s simple, but nothing guarantees efficiency. Governments aren’t very good at being efficient.

Again it certainly admit to waste, but we mustn’t confuse waste with “stuff we each wouldn’t spend public money on”. I think it’s a “waste” to fund the National Endowment for the Arts, but that doesn’t mean the money is spent inefficiently, it means that I don’t think we should spend tax dollars on much of what it funds.

We, as citizens, have the responsibility to complain.

We don’t build roads pursuant to rights, we build them pursuant to prosperity. If it’s about the welfare of “others”, we must keep in mind that we are all “others”.

Then you favor an uneducated populace, with a high illiteracy rate and people dying from polluted water? A primitive transportation system? You would turn the US into a Third World country?

Well, that’s a plan, all right.

I can only guess that the fact that the US has been, for generations, the strongest engine for prosperity in the world, purely by accident.

Again, there has always been this redistribution. In the country that has always had the best conditions for entrepreneurial activity.

Every generation has said this, and every generation will. Despite that things get better all the time for the US.

11

Try redistributing my money or property. Sorry, it won’t happen unless its over my dead body. If asked politely for help I would give up some to help but don’t try to force it. I would defend anyone’s right to keep what is rightfully theirs. Yes I am a practicing capitalist. Sometimes I thing capitalists now adays are far to liberal and fearful of standing up for their rights. Politically Correct is fine but, it has its darkside too.

12

i hope you didnt file your taxes this year then, and dont buy anything on the open markets where you pay 6-9% sales tax. otherwise, your property is being redistributed every single day.

13

faust, as usual, you go so far to deliberately misread what i say.

context-dropping and unjustified exaggerations/implications of what i say dont get us anywhere. you know full well what my views on capitalism and the history of america are, what makes a country prosperous, what drives an economy. it doesnt do us any good here for you to try and distort those intentions and meanings behind my writings, which you are well aware of.

i could argue (as you know i would, since you surely know me well enough by now) that it is the governmentalization of education which leads to the low intellectual level of american people… or the governmentalization of water treatment plants which leads to floridated water poisoning our brains… or the governmentalization of highway construction which leads to hundreds of millions of dollars of wasted tax money on unnecessary road construction by DOT every year, needless new projects and tearing-up of existing roads just to replace them with new ones, when they were fine in the first place and there are plenty of other roads which actually DO need fixing, all to keep funding levels high and politically-connected unions happy year after year… but that would be to take away from the focus of this thread. so i wont go there.

14

I am most certainly not deliberately misreading what you say.

I’m not sure I am well aware of your views. I have read posts of yours, but I don’t hang on every word, and it’s not necessarily all that memorable. If this thread is about your ego (again), I have better things to do.

15

Taxes I have no problem with they are neccessary to a point. Since I voluntarily am a citizen then I give it up voluntarily. No one takes it. If I were coerced into being a citizen then that would be different.

16

Three Times Great: spread the wealth around" -obama

great. so when he gives up his $200 imported japanese steaks, his $300 bottles of champaigne, his multimilllion dollar jet, his $3000 suits, his $450,000 a year salary, his wealthy chicago home, his vacations at “the ranch”, his cadillac escallades, and gives some of it to the countless starving poor in washington dc alone, maybe ill buy it.

K: sounds like somebody is jealous and has some serious envy issues.

TTG: oh wait, he took vouchers (education grants) for better schools AWAY from dc kids, didnt he… hmm, interesting.
everytime the word “redistribution” comes up, among anyone favoring the idea, only one word follows immediately: hypocrite.
if you believe the “spread the wealth” BS then you are a gullible, envious incompetent."

K: UMM, you seem to have an awful lot of anger issues about this matter. I mean you are angry about someone making 450,000 dollars a year
which is nothing, even to my communist eyes. I’ve known a lot of people who have made this much money and without the burden
of being the leader of the free world. I am not saying people can’t make this much money, what I am saying is that they must share in
the same burden as the rest of us. Notice in my previous post, I didn’t say people shouldn’t earn money, I said that they should only be
able to earn 20 million a year (which given the average American only earns 18.00 dollars an hour according to the U.S labor dept.) is
still 200 times times of what an average American earns. Warren buffet the second richest man in the world has said publicly,
he pays the lowest rate of taxes of anybody in his office of 15 people, the highest tax rate was his secretary at 33%, buffet only
pays 15% on his taxes. Now how is that in any way, shape or form, fair? My father in law a very good CPA once told me that if you
earn a million dollars a year and you pay taxes, you are just being nice because the tax laws are fixed to allow the rich to avoid taxes.

Kropotkin

17

If redistribution is even permissible, in my view it must be done under at least one guiding principle - that it is better to channel human drives toward creating a good rather than suppressing those drives.

As such, some form of economic meritocracy is a must. To take a basic human motivator - desire for wealth (borne from the good old survival instinct), and suppress that drive is wholly unfeasible. The Soviet Union never perservered beyond the first generations of their 1917 revolutionaries (note that once they elected the first premier not alive during their Revolution - Gorbachev - it all went downhill). Also, such suppression carries with it a whole lot of baggage we probably don’t want - totalitarian government and suppression of individual creativity. Totalitarianism was not an accident of suppressing meritocracy - it was a necessary outcome. Frankly, I can’t even believe that there are Marxists still out there, even if it is only confined nowadays to academic circles.

Okay, so left with a meritotcracy, you have two paradigms for redistribution. One would involve direct legislative actions to redistribute - freeze bank accounts, prohibit net worths above a certain threshhold, and others suggested in other posts. The second is to effect redistribution indirectly through taxation, penalties, etc. If we are to preserve liberties in effecting a redistribution, the indirect methods are more appropriate.

That’s all the descriptive piece of redistribution. Now comes the prescriptive question - should we want to re-distribute? I think the answer is yes, to some extent. It has become clear through the history of capitalism and of the United States since the mid-half of the 19th century that capitalism works best when the government plays the role of “referree” in sufficiently dire circumstances. Libertarians and conservatives tend to want no refereeing, and liberals generally want a constant referee role for government. Continued tension between the two sides will hopefully continue so that it will be done only at the right time. Now is such a time for the government to be referee, but Obama, Pelosi, Reed, and the most liberal US government since Jimmy Carter has all the potential to take it way too far on the liberal side.

18

You can’t play the game without a referee. Not if anything is at stake. Conservatives want referees. They just want conservative ones.

19

Not sure I agree, but it may not make sense to discuss this point since it would be tough to pigeon-hole every single conservative concerning this one question. Suffice it to say that I believe there are some conservatives who want referrees under certain situations (conservative referees of course) and some who TEND (emphasis on “tend”) not to want any such referreeing. I think it is a general principle of American economic conversativism, however, the that free market should do its thing. They will, however, allow for more exceptions that Libertarians and less exceptions than Liberals.

20

Yeah, we do disagree. Conservatives are the “law and order” group. And it’s not just street crimes.

Where a government is present, taxes are a given. The amount of taxation is not. Conservatives want rules about this. Just different rules than do liberals.

Social conservatives want rules about who can get married and who cannot. just different rules than liberals do.

While you can’t pigeonhole conservatives or liberals, everyone who wants government wants rules, and someone to enforce them. Libertarians are no different.

Anarchists are different. But they should really mosey on up into the hills. They have many more problems of their own to worry about an umpire.