Why "x% of people have y% of the wealth" is irrelevant.

[NickMPK]

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In fact, if one accepts that people's labor/leisure curves are backward bending at certain points, a higher level of taxation could create incentive to produce more wealth.

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If one accepts that incentives matter, one doesn't accept this.

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(I'm only responding to this part of the post because the rest your reply is necessitated on your assertion here, that backward bending-supply curves can't exist.)

I do believe that incentives matter. However, I believe that at a certain level of income, non-economic incentives completely dwarf economic ones. The result is a backward-bending labor supply curve. The marginal utility of wealth becomes so low that no amount of wealth can compensate for lost time.

I am reminded of a post in the John Edwards thread a couple days ago in which one of your fellow-ACists wrote:
Maybe I'm just selfish but if I had $10 million plus a sweet wife I'd retire and spend time with her instead of running for President.

This person has a backward bending supply curve! The greater his income, the less he will work. This is not an uncommon sentiment. For people who see their incentives in this way, a greater level of taxation would create more wealth, not less.

Why should I "accept" some piece of economic theory which is not supported empirically just because it simplifies the models to support a particular normative result?

[ianlippert]

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The socialist doesn't actually care enough about the poor and the downtrodden to get off his duff or reach into his own pocket; he would rather stay on his duff and have a man with a gun reach into someone else's.


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I think you could write a lot about the morality of socialists. They dont personally want to help the poor, but they also dont want that reality to conflict with their internalized view that they are moral people. Its like they get to say they are moral without actually being moral.

The fact that they inflict violence onto to others to further promote their moral fantasy is beyond psychotic. I mean I'd have less of a problem if people just violently distributed money to their personal ideologies but admitted that they were amoral thieves. Its the hypocrisy that annoys me.

[Borodog]

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But you aren't going to manage to convince everybody to think like you, so the conflict isn't going away. So even though you may be right, you are still a contributor to keeping the conflict alive (as am I).

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You are conflating intellectual disagreement with property disputes.

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No, I mean that the intellectual disagreements is not going away and thus the property disputes is not going away either. There are people that think that you aren't entitled to all that you think you are entitled to, as long as it is such there is a de facto property dispute as well.

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All I have to do is convince enough people to agree with me that people like you should not get away with coercing your views on others, and you will not. "Enough" is less than 100%.

[AlexM]

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You're making the mistake of treating wealth as if it were an objective, rather than a relative measure.

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Uhm... it is objective and not relative. It's those looking at it as a relative measure that are in error.

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It really doesn't matter whether the kings and queens were poorer than the janitor in terms of colot TVs and Ipods; because the kings and queens were not acquainted with the janitor. Their point of reference was to the people over whom they ruled.

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So what? The janitor is richer. End of story.

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Similarly, it doesn't matter if a janitor is richer than the monarchs. He's not comparing himself to the kings and queens. He's point of reference is to the people whose toilets he cleans. If he's poorer then them (which is what it means to clean their toilets), then he's poor. Regardless of the queens and kings.

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If he doesn't have the proper perspective about things and cares more about what he doesn't have than what he does have, that's what we call jealousy and envy. These are negative emotions on par with anger and hate and he needs to solve his emotional problems on his own, not spew them out onto society. Basically, what you're saying is that viewing your glass as half empty is better than viewing your glass as half full, but this goes entirely against common wisdom.

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To put it differently, the rich need the poor; without the poor, they cannot exist. The poor, on the other hand, having nothing to lose but their chains.

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No, the rich do not need the poor, and you're wrong about the poor too. They can lose a lot more than their so-called chains, they can also lose all the wealth that they have currently. Bye bye TV, bye bye birth control, bye bye flush toilets. Gee, but aren't we glad everyone's as poor as us now?

[ianlippert]

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When 1% owns 99% of all the stuff, the other 99% will rise up and take it - by force, if necessary.



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People only rise up when they are living in desperate poverty. I doubt a person is going to rise up when they are perfectly happy eating Big Macs while fragging people online, even if they are in the bottom 1% of wealth.

[AlexM]

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For me the x% has y% is more a way to show that there are funds available for distribution.

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And by distributing them, you make both x AND y lower in the future.

[Borodog]

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In fact, if one accepts that people's labor/leisure curves are backward bending at certain points, a higher level of taxation could create incentive to produce more wealth.

[/ QUOTE ]

If one accepts that incentives matter, one doesn't accept this.

[/ QUOTE ]

(I'm only responding to this part of the post because the rest your reply is necessitated on your assertion here, that backward bending-supply curves can't exist.)

I do believe that incentives matter. However, I believe that at a certain level of income, non-economic incentives completely dwarf economic ones. The result is a backward-bending labor supply curve. The marginal utility of wealth becomes so low that no amount of wealth can compensate for lost time.

I am reminded of a post in the John Edwards thread a couple days ago in which one of your fellow-ACists wrote:
Maybe I'm just selfish but if I had $10 million plus a sweet wife I'd retire and spend time with her instead of running for President.

This person has a backward bending supply curve! The greater his income, the less he will work. This is not an uncommon sentiment. For people who see their incentives in this way, a greater level of taxation would create more wealth, not less.

Why should I "accept" some piece of economic theory which is not supported empirically just because it simplifies the models to support a particular normative result?

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I see your point. I think you're violating ceteris paribus, but I have to think about it.

[LinusKS]

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When 1% owns 99% of all the stuff, the other 99% will rise up and take it - by force, if necessary.


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If 1% owns 99% of the stuff, it should be pretty easy to buy enough guns to shoot anyone who even tries. In fact, that's pretty much a guarantee.

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What you're missing is that the 1% are not making their own guns, or ammunition. They're not making their own beds, or breakfasts or dinners. They're not driving themselves, and they're not serving in the military, or even as their own bodyguards.

Those things are what poor people are for.

When/if the 99% rise up, the 1% won't know what hit them.

It won't actually come to that, fortunately.

The fact is you can't run a society that's not in the interests of 99% of the participants. It'd break down long before it got there.

[AlexM]

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FUNDS DO NOT NEED TO BE REDISTRIBUTED.

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This is where we disagree, funds do not need to be redistributed for the poorest 5% to increase their living standard, however they have to be redistributed in order to get that living standard to the point where I find it acceptable. The poor in 100 years time will be richer than the poor today almost regardless of how we run society, I don't disagree with that.

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The poor in 100 years time will be richer if we leave wealth "undistributued" now than they will be if we redistribute everything now. By not rewarding people for innovation and progress, people have no motivation to make things. If we had said to Henry Ford, sorry, you can do this assembly line thing, but you can't make a profit, he [iwouldn't have bothered. Instead, because we let him profit, even the poorest in this country today are able to travel distances with ease. This is true of practically every modern convenience that we have. To redistribute wealth says "ok, we've advanced enough and don't need anymore progress".

You believe that the poor in 100 years will be better off under either system, but you are wrong. The poor will be actively worse off under your system and since everyone will be poor, it will be a damned sorry place.

[Borodog]

The 99% don't make 99% of the things they use either. That's what the division of labor is for.