Well, money is just a way of signalling what proportion of a society’s real wealth you have a call on. It doesn’t have any inherent value beyond that. If we were to magically duplicate every dollar in the world somehow, so that every person with $100 now has $200 and so on, absolutely nothing changes. Each person would have twice as much money but each dollar would be worth half as much. Ditto ditto if we halved the total amount of money each person had. Now, if we just take some money from a particular group of people and set fire to it, this is equivalent to taking some smaller amount of money from that same group and then redistributing it to everyone else in proportion to how much they already have. It’s not a great form of redistribution since it ends up being regressive rather than progressive, but nonetheless, if the group we’re taking it from is the vastly overcompensated super-rich, it would increase equality, which I have said I’m in favour of already, so my answer shouldn’t surprise you so much.
I think we just have some kind of fundamental disagreement here, in that you are perceiving rich people as inherently bad. That, somehow, if someone has more than you do, regardless of how well off you are, then that is bad… and their wealth should be taken away from them (even if it doesn’t go to you, and is just destroyed).
No. This is not what I’m arguing at all, nor is it the reason that I’m arguing for it. I’m saying that extremely unequal societies are less successful on most important measures of human well-being that less unequal societies are. I don’t hate rich people. I’m not especially envious of other people’s material wealth. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with enjoying material luxuries. But I do think there’s something wrong with a society which lets people die of preventable illness, or suffer from cold and hunger, or that leaves its children uneducated or in situations of abuse and violence, and at the same time devotes vast economic resources to, for example, positional goods that provide no net-positive outcome for the society whatever. I look at that and think, gee, it’s kind of obvious that this is screwed up. And therefore any ideology that tells me that actually it’s fantastic, that it’s the best of all possible worlds, that all we need is more and still more of the system that produces these results immediately seems rather suspect to me. That doesn’t mean I’m not willing to listen to arguments in favour of it. I want to give a fair hearing to all philosophies, whether they appeal to my first inclination or not. But so far I haven’t encountered any defence of these kinds of unjust outcomes of laissez-faire capitalism that does anything more convincing to answer my criticisms than to simply assume them away. For example, if we say that “price is value, all other values are meaningless” then pain and exhaustion and madness and death all the horrors that can be and are visited on human beings by this system are simply unimportant if the people they are visited on are poor because what matters are “revealed preferences”, eg, the stuff that people who already have money are willing to pay for. That’s it. Now, to me this isn’t just horrifically cold-blooded but it’s also philosophically incredibly weak. I ask the question, “by what method can you prove that price really is the ultimate value?” and the answer comes back, “oh, we just have to assume that it is in order to make the rest of the ideas work.” Well, as they put it in the Monty Python skit, that’s not an argument, that’s just contradiction. What non-question-begging defence can be made of this extraordinary assertion?
Now, you are right to point out that the attempts by communist regimes to solve all human problems at a stroke by running command economies have met with failure. But you’re wrong to conclude from this that therefore there’s no alternative but to wholeheartedly embrace free-market fundamentalism. You seem to want to turn every criticism of this extreme ideology into Marxism, presumably because this is a much easier target to go after than the various government AND market mixtures that are practiced, not just in Sweden or Liechtenstein or whatever, but all over the world.
Now, you’ve got Bill Gates and his giant mountain of money… and what’s he doing with it? He’s apparently giving it all away. He’s running what Bill Clinton described last week as the single best charitable organization in the world. So now he’s using his wealth to drive purely altruistic humanitarian programs.
And good for him. I don’t mean that sarcastically. I’m glad to see somebody using a position of privelege to give something back. But the way the free-market orthodoxy would describe this is that Gates has discovered that he gets more pleasure from giving medicine to African orphans than he would from snorting coke or parasailing with movie stars. What happens to the orphans is of consequence only to the extent that it’s of consequence to Gates, because his “preference curve” matters because he’s rich. In other words, the charity matters because it brings happiness to the people who are giving; the effect on the happiness of those who receive this charity is inconsequential. Again, to me, such an ideology is clearly and obviously wrongheaded. If you want to say that such a charity is important because of what it does to the recipients of the charity, then you have to step outside of the orthodox economic paradigm.
There will be some who aren’t affected by such a change, but SOME people certainly will be, so there will be some negative effect.
Yes, but there will also be the positive effect of putting the taxed monies to more efficient uses. Marginal utility of money falls as you have more of it. So, would the negative effect outweigh the positive effect? How large is that negative effect? Because it seems to me that there’s very little evidence that this negative effect is at all substantial. If we’re going to suffer all the bad consequences of an unequal society in order to counteract this slight reduction in productivity among the super-wealthy, there had better be some really solid evidence of enormous reductions in total economic productivity. Vague assertions based on ideological convictions certainly shouldn’t be enough.
This is a really general statement. I think you’d need to provide some more concrete data regarding this kind of thing. I presented two examples of the extreme case where pursuit of equality drove entire societies’ populations to their knees. I believe the only place that Marxism ever worked was in some little commune in Spain.
And that’s part of the issue when you’re doing these comparisons, that I think you need to keep in mind. Small economies/governements don’t function identically to large ones. Something that might work in Sweden won’t necessarilly work when you scale it up to the largest economy in the world.
Well, firstly, I’m not talking about Marxism. I’m talking about capitalism moderated and regulated by governments acting on principles of common sense and basic human decency. Is this some crazy, unrealistic notion of something that’s only possible in tiny European microstates? I really don’t see why. Here’s an interesting graph showing homocide rates in varies countries, graphed against income equality levels:
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why/evidence/violence
Among numerous others, Japan, Germany, Canada, France, Australia, Spain, and the UK have less inequality and less violence than the US. None of these are communist countries. All of them have managed to find a compromise between market and government control of economic life that delivers a better quality of life than the United States does. All of them, in other words, have done a better job of recognising the price is not the only arbiter of value than the United States does, and have thereby created societies that provide a better life for their citizens.
