- Interesting discussion of Sandman, focusing on the debate between “accept that change happens, adjust, and do your work” (Death), “accept that change happens and drop out” (Destruction), and “refuse to accept change, refuse to adjust” (Dream). Via Amberite.
- Louis Menand’s 2002 evisceration of Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and of evolutionary
psychiatrypsychology in general. - Zuky on the Native American roots of the Seneca Falls declaration of women’s rights.
- Debate: Should Feminists Endorse The Basic Income? (Via Crooked Timber.)
- Crooked Timber on the conservative case against equal opportunity.
- Bernard Avishai divides Israel into five broad groups. I think his analysis is well worth reading. His conclusion, almost dadaesque when decontextualized: “ORDINARILY, THEN, TRIBE Three hates Four, condescends to Two, and doubts One; Two hates One, resents Three and (for different reasons) Four; One is afraid of Two, patronizes Three and hates Four; Four hates One, proselytizes Two, and is afraid of Three. All four are afraid of Five.”
- Piny at Feministe on Carol Lay’s new diet book (which I wrote about here).
- Jay Rosen on the “donut” of acceptable thought in the US news media:
It’s easily the most useful diagram I’ve found for understanding the practice of journalism in the United States, and the hidden politics of that practice. You can draw it by hand right now. Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.”
I’d recommend also this interview with Rosen, in which he argues that for most journalists, “savviness” is the single highest value to which they aspire.
Are you asserting that a belief that immigration is harmful is widespread? Or is the situation actually that the belief…
Comments were closed at the Crooked Timber basic income post, so here is what I tried to post:
I am a Social Security attorney, and I have also spent time representing people with a wide range of welfare benefits in the United States. My experiences with my clients STRONGLY influence my support of BI. The need to prove inability to work cuts off many deserving recipients, is personally degrading and discourages a return to work. The income and asset requirements of SSI and other welfare benefits are a poverty trap: I have attended trainings of poverty attorneys specifically geared to how to help clients “spend down” windfalls in order to remain on benefits. That is, it is in the best interests of our clients to advise them on how to stay poor. I fail to see how a BI could be more isolating than disability benefits, and you would have to be a sociopath to think you are doing disability recipients a favor to cut off their benefits altogether to force them back to work.
My non-disability welfare clients were almost exclusively women, and I do not believe a sane feminist could see workfare in action in the real world – programs designed to put welfare recipients (mostly women) to work – and conclude that any bureaucratic system to “encourage” work is better for women than a BI. No government bureaucrat can run a woman’s life better than she can herself. I have seen many times how the bureaucracy can interfere with women’s attempts to educate themselves or return to the work the program is requiring they do in order to maintain benefits.
I believe that the basic income studies done by the U.S. government showed a 13% work disincentive from a BI, and the largest component of that disincentive were “secondary” workers who stopped working – that is, primarily women who decided to stay home and take care of the kids. First, I would point out the studies were conducted from the late sixties to the early eighties, and it is possible the results would be lessened now. But more important: If THIS is the primary empirical evidence that a BI increases the gendered aspect of labor, “feminist” opposition to a BI is crazy, bordering on sociopathic. It means that some middle-class academic feminists are willing to use the threat of starvation to force poor women to leave their children and go to dead-end jobs at Wal-Mart, etc. to create a society with more equal labor distribution. Not that it would work: The women would generally still be the ones taking care of the children when they got home. The government can control the lives of poor women all they want, and if men are still shirking their duties as parents, there will still be a gendered division of labor.
Another interesting, albeit horrifying (I honestly thought I might throw up) bit of reading: how the Jesuits dumped their pedophile priests in Alaska Native villages. The part explaining how an influenza outbreak destroyed the Native shaman culture and allowed various Christian denominations to take over is particularly fascinating.
4. Basic Income has become popular among some conservatives as a way to demolish both progressive taxation and the welfare state bureaucracy. This makes me inherently suspicious of it ;-)
5. It’s the weakest conservative case that I’ve ever heard. The much stronger case is that the desire to give one’s children the best opportunities actually pushes people to work harder, be more productive and overall create more for our society as a whole, for which they will be rewarded with resources that will allow them to give their offspring an advantage. [Fill in your own evo-psych babble here.] I cannot deny that immigrant parents’ work often is fueled almost entirely by the desire to ensure that their children will be successful in America; they will sacrifice a lot of leisure and consumption (a nicer car, vacations, etc.) to achieve that goal. If the state guaranteed everyone exactly the same opportunities — *everyone* gets SAT prep, or alternatively there is no SAT so the prep is worthless — these people probably would lose a lot of their incentive. In other words, a lack of state-mandated equality of opportunity actually maximizes overall utility for our society.
I don’t know if I agree entirely that this is a factually correct, and it of course assumes that overall utility created by the parental generation outweighs the overall utility lost when the children of poor and/or uncaring parents don’t achieve all they are capable of doing. Also assumes that a net increase in utility is worth the loss of equality and, actually, fraternity (as we are more divided by what opportunities are available to us, we have less in common).
Decnavda, I don’t know what you mean by the concept of “Basic Income”, and I don’t want to go through registering on that site to read the docs. Does it mean that the taxpayers should provide a minimum income, sufficient to live on, for everyone regardless of their level of effort to support themselves?
Ron, that’s right. From Wikipedia: “A basic income is a proposed system of social security, that periodically provides each citizen with a sum of money that is sufficient to live on. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it.”
O.K. Presuming that the proposal Decnavda is talking about is the same as what that Wikipedia article cited by Amp describes (nothing personal – I don’t have absolute faith in Wikipedia): what’s the rationale behind giving money to a) people who don’t do what they can to be productive and b) other people who don’t need it?
Means-testing and ability-testing are expensive, difficult, and hard to do with real effectiveness.
Better to save money on all that bureaucracy by just sending a check to every citizen.
Also, research shows that there’s surprisingly little drop-off in productivity with a basic income; apparently most people prefer to work if the alternative is just barely being above the poverty line.
Most of the drop-off that exists is parents (mainly mothers) dropping out of paid work, or reducing to part-time, in order to spend more time raising their children — which isn’t really a failure to be productive, in my view.
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Those who don’t need it are the easiest to justify: A BI is essentially just a standard tax credit, or the equivalent if not administered through the tax system. A BI with a flat income tax rate would produce an effective progressive tax without necessitating higher marginal rates on higher incomes. (You still could charge higher marginal rates if you wanted, but the highest marginal rates could still be lower than without the BI to produce whatever level progressivity you are trying to achieve.
Decnavada, I don’t understand your post. A standard tax credit directly reduces one’s tax obligation – as opposed to a tax deduction, which reduces the income you compute your taxes on. But if someone doesn’t pay taxes giving them a tax credit does them no good – they get no money. And if they do pay taxes, but the tax credit is more than they would pay in taxes, then they get less money than the maximum. From what I understand you to say, a BI is an actual check for a given amount cut to the recipient regardless of how much taxes they pay, so it’s unrelated to taxes. It’s a welfare check.
Amp – there’s a lot of things that are expensive and hard to do effectively, but we do them anyway because there are benefits that are not necessarily quantifiable. It seems to me that providing money to people regardless of whether or not they are doing anything to help themselves encourages sloth and a lack of productivity and discourages the people who worked to get the money that is in turn being taken and given away. You get what you pay for. Did not the well-intentioned social support systems of the Great Society help encourage an explosion in single-parent families in poor people?
You say you have research that indicates the opposite. That seems intuitively wrong to me. I’d be interested in a couple of links.
Paying the non-productive, the empirical case:
Adding to what Amp wrote above, the other sources of the work disincentive shown by the studies included teenagers not working, which may have been related to the increase in grades the studies showed resulted from a BI, people who worked two jobs or just more than 40 hours a week reducing their work to one full-time job, and the unemployed and looking for work staying unemployed longer, which may have efficiency benefits as people hold out for jobs more suited for them. No study has documented a single case of a primary earner leaving the workforce entirely. Presumably, if a BI was given to 300 million Americans, such cases probably would occur, but they would be statistically insignificant.
RonF-
Here is a long list of research papers on BI: http://www.usbig.net/papers.html
Scroll down to June 2004, and download “A Retrospective on the Negative Income Tax Experiments”. The middle section, by Robinson Hollister, provides an overview of the results of various empirical studies of NIT & BI.
Society A: The Welfare Administration sends a check for $1,000 every month to each citizen. It has a personal income tax with a flat rate of 30%. Citizens are offered the convenience option of not receiving their monthly check and then taking a credit on their tax returns for whatever BI they did not receive.
Society B: It has a personal income tax with a flat rate of 30%, with a standard refundable tax credit of $12,000. Citizens are offered the option of having the Tax Administration send them advance payments of their standard credit of $1000 per month, which then reduces the credit they take on their return at the end of the year on a dollar-for-dollar basis.
I admit that B would be a much easier sell to the American people. But can you show me the difference?
I thought the conditions placed on that social support (a man in the house = no benefits for you) encouraged single-parent families, not the social support itself.
It’s a common issue: If the costs of selection get too big, then you will sometimes find it cheaper to provide support without regard to selection.
But as for the “not a single person”… really? I don’t have time to read the studies. I’m not English, but “living on the dole” was certainly the norm for some people, right?
Paying the non-productive, the moral case:
1) BI as a negative property right: If property rights a natural, pre-government, and in the hands of thier legitimate owners, there is no case for this. But if external property (everything other than your mind and body) is a social convention, and we all have status equality, then, absent other concerns, we should each be given the same amount of property. One other important concern is that we wish people to work, but do not want to force them to work, because they have freedom. Solution: a free market with a BI at the highest sustainable level or less. Those who live off of the BI without working are not free-riding, they are reciprocating for their use of the work of others by using less than their fair share of stuff, and allowing the rest to be used by those who chose to work. This is similar to a person who lives off a trust fund set up by their rich parents, or off of the rents from an apartment building inherited from their grandparents, except that we are all dividing the “rent” for the economic value of the whole world. The Alaska Permanent Fund is a moral model for this, as is Obama’s proposed carbon tax with a 100%, equally divided rebate.
RonF,
“But if someone doesn’t pay taxes giving them a tax credit does them no good – they get no money. And if they do pay taxes, but the tax credit is more than they would pay in taxes, then they get less money than the maximum.”
You might want to look into the Earned Income Tax Credit. Championed by Milton Friedman, instituted by Richard Nixon, expanded under Bill Clinton, and does exactly what you say “tax credits” don’t: gives money to working people who don’t owe any federal income taxes.
I thought the conditions placed on that social support (a man in the house = no benefits for you) encouraged single-parent families, not the social support itself.
Exactly. The unintended consequences of social engineering.
“The Alaska Permanent Fund is a moral model for this”
Decnavda, sorry to put you on the spot but you seem to know a fair amount about Basic Income — how does it not result in inflation to correspond with the level of Basic Income? That is, if everyone has a $12k annual income, then wages have to be at a high enough level that encourages people to work to earn more than that income, and prices don’t have to appeal to people with less than $12k. Wage and price inflation seem inevitable.
Sailorman-
From the paper referred to at the above link, in the section by Harold Watts, who was on the team that conducted primary U.S. NIT experiments:
People did work less, but percentage-wise it tended to be in the single digits for men in particular. Some of the work response came from taking more time to look for work. Some of it came from cutting down hours, say from 65 to 60 hours a week, which doesn’t seem like a tragedy. I don’t remember finding anyone (on an anecdotal basis), who as soon as they got the grant, left the labor market and sat on the porch and whittled for three years.
That is, if everyone has a $12k annual income, then wages have to be at a high enough level that encourages people to work to earn more than that income…
No. The BI is not means-tested, so you do not have to earn more than the BI to benefit from working. In the above example, if I do not work, I have $12k to spend during the year. If I do work, and earn $500 per month, and there is a flat 30% tax rate, then I have [12k+(500*12*.7)=] $16,200 to spend during the year.
Are things currently priced for people making $12k a year? The cut-offs are different in different places, but it seems to me that people at that income level have a pretty hard time making ends meet and qualify for benefits for a lot of really basic needs – Section 8, food stamps, etc. No?
Paying the non-productive, the moral case:
2) BI as compensation for forcing the social contract: In social contract theory, we pay our taxes and obey the laws in exchange for the benefits we get both directly from the government and for having the laws enforced, including those related to property and theft. Democracy is demanded to ensure that the contract is one “accepted” by the most number of people. But the problem with social contract theory is that a contract must be voluntary, yet we enforce it even upon those who do not agree. The BI essentially compensates people for being forced to obey society’s laws. A different option might be to allow personal succession, letting people take their “fair share” of stuff and move somewhere else, but there is currently no where else to move (all livable land on earth is at least claimed by some government), and also this suggestion practically amounts to sentencing someone to exile for not accepting the social contract. In Ancient times exile was a punishment for crime in severity just under execution; such a choice could not reasonable be said to be voluntary consent. With a BI, a person could take their “fair share” of the world and just “sit out” our attempts to make them contribute to a society they never agreed to. It can allow dissenters to the social contract to engage in “internal succession” until we offer them a society which they are willing to contribute to.
Decnavda,
“The BI is not means-tested, so you do not have to earn more than the BI to benefit from working.”
Right, but you’re still trading your leisure for money. If I am a struggling musician living in a rural area where the cost of living is quite low, why not devote my time to songwriting and unpaid gigs to publicize myself, instead of having to work a 9-5 job? For the regular job to be attractive, I’d have to be offered enough money in wages to compensate the loss of leisure (wage inflation), or the cost of living would have to be high enough that $12k isn’t an acceptable income level (price inflation).
Chingona,
If the $12k is paid to every individual citizen, then it is well above the $10,830 that is the federal poverty guideline for the continental U.S. (Alaska and Hawaii are slightly above $12k for their poverty lines). Once two adults combine their allotment to make $24k for a household, they’d be almost $10k above the poverty line for a 2-person household.
I grew up in East Texas and my parents live a mile from the local Super Wal-Mart, which is an obligatory stop every time I go home for groceries, batteries, cosmetics … pretty much everything except books, of which there are few, and clothes, precisely because their clothes are priced for the $12k income and I like to dress a bit more nicely than that (although I’m happy to buy socks and other undergarments there because no one can see those). When John Edwards was running on a kind of anti-Wal-Mart platform, I used to say that it was doomed to failure because many more people were shopping at Wal-Mart and enjoying its good deals than were working at Wal-Mart and being exploited.
There’s a lot of America where $12k is enough to get by, and $24k is enough to think about starting a family. The federal minimum wage just got raised to $6.55/ hr last year. At 40 hrs a week, 51 weeks a year (I’m guessing there will be unpaid sick days and holidays) on the minimum wage, once there are deductions for FICA (Social Security and Medicare) taxes, you’ll make less than $12k.
Okay. I was thinking family income, not individual income, so you’re right. Does BI go to every individual or to every adult? If we’re talking a single parent with even one kid, $12k is still under the poverty threshhold.
PG-
First, even the example you gave contemplates someone trying to build a career, which they hope will eventually start paying them money that they will then have to pay taxes on. The vast majority of people WANT to be productive, as your example assumes and the empirical studies demonstrate.
Still, I agree that at SOME level of BI, which I strongly believe would have to be significantly above poverty level, large numbers of people will decide that their leisure time is not worth the money they get from working. At that point, the BI becomes unsustainable, and would need to be lowered. I am not at all wedded to the $12K per year figure, I just used that for the convenience of being $1K per month in my example. The process of raising and lowering the BI, and the tax rate to pay for it, to get a sustainable rate could be thought of as adjusting the “price” that society pays those willing to work.
chingona-
Whether or not children would get the BI, and when, is a subject without much agreement among BI supporters. So you can support BI whichever way you think is best.
btw- What does your name mean? It sounds a lot like something that my mother-in-law often says in anger that my wife refuses to translate.
This is the second time in two days I’ve been called out on it, after about two years participating under this handle in different forums. I kind of picked it on a whim, without much thought, the first time I ever commented on a blog, and sometimes I think about changing it, but I’ve been using it for such a long enough that I feel a bit stuck with it.
The root word is bad. It’s basically fuck in Mexican Spanish, but probably with even stronger overtones than that word in English. But my name isn’t bad. It’s like … awesome, great, the best at something. It is a bit crude, though. It’s the kind of word you might use around your friends but not around your grandmother. Like I said, I’m not without regrets.
What your mother-in-law says is mostly likely chingado or just chinga.
Thanks for the info!
I’m not exactly sure I follow what this quote is saying, Decnavda. Taken the wrong way, it can be read as saying that everyone should be forced to have the same amount of property, which I’m sure no one supports.
I think the quoted segment is playing on this idea of equal opportunity, which is what “status equality” is as conservatives see it*. A baseline income is made out to be just as much a necessary component of equal opportunity as a baseline level of education is. Thus, it’s pre-empting conservative arguments against BI. But the more logical application of income assistance + equality of opportunity is giving every American baby a stipend at birth. (Or better yet, in my view, upon reaching legal age or first entering the workforce.) I don’t see how it translates to a monthly check given to adults.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this line of reasoning. I see nothing wrong with the “social contract” being compulsory, and the chain of logic here only seems to bolster right wing positions on economic relations. I’ve defended the social contract concept from the right, and I’ll defend it from the left as well.
The main aspect of social contract that is “involuntary” is that it’s a condition into which you’re born from which you can opt out (by leaving your government’s jurisdiction) rather than born outside and opting in. This is true, but in the absence of government, some private landowner would do the same anyway – after all, the Earth is finite, and the land you live on and the air you breathe as a child is going to be owned by someone, be they public or private – so it’s not an argument for getting rid of democratic government. Of course you could say that ideally, a benevolent government should simply make it so that the system is completely free and opt in for anyone, and no one, the government itself or private individual or corporation, should rule otherwise. However, something about the concept of paying people to obey laws irks me. Call me old-fashioned, but being a citizen should be a responsibility. If the rhetorical justification is that we pay people to be citizens, could some official down the road use that to punitively cut off people’s pay for not being good citizens – whatever that may arbitrarily mean? What about nonviolent drug offenders, or those who were accused of, but not convicted, of crimes**? What about young men who refuse military service?
I’m not trying to be devilishly picky here. And my concern is not with these particular examples – it’s with the concept. I’m not strictly opposed to the concept of BI, but I remain somewhat skeptical, and in either case would not like to see it justified along the “social contract” line outlined above.
I do see the ECONOMIC argument for BI – by just giving everyone a lump sum giveaway, we limit the extent to which government action may inadvertently alter economic behavior. (People who may try to remain technically under the poverty line, etc.) I do think, however, that the benefits of the traditional welfare setup outweighs the costs, and would rather see the existing system streamlined rather than completely go the BI route.
*It is also status equality as American liberals see it. The difference is that conservatives stress equal opportunity in theory and letter to be sufficient, saying that anything more is impractical and amounts to social engineering. Liberals stress equal opportunity in practice and spirit, believing that anything less is a hollow gesture. Practically no one, at least in America, either believes in inequality of opportunity, nor that hoary old canard “equality of outcome”. I hope I’ve been relatively evenhanded here.
** Those in the latter group, who not coincidentally come disproportionately from economically disadvantaged classes, already have to deal with a lot of unfair shit today. Consider that merely having a “record”, whether or not it was justified, can affect eligibility for visas or government grants. As far as I’m concerned, this obscenely violates the spirit of innocent until proven guilty.
“the Earth is finite, and the land you live on and the air you breathe as a child is going to be owned by someone, be they public or private”
I’m not clear on why finite necessarily entails ownership. To get all Once and Future King on this, the Earth and air are finite for geese, too, and yet they don’t have to block out who owns great tracts of it. Theoretically, we too should be able to build only a nest that is ours without laying claim to more. Certainly some human societies have not been as dependent on land ownership as modern capitalism is, so there’s nothing inherent to being human, much less to living on the Earth, that necessitates land ownership.
(And the idea that air can be owned is radically new; it pretty much only came up as industrial pollution made clean air not the default.)
Taken the wrong way, it can be read as saying that everyone should be forced to have the same amount of property, which I’m sure no one supports.
First, I did say, “absent other concerns,” and then immediately after mentioned one such concern: the amount of labor someone contributes. Other concerns are why no one supports that.
Still, absent other concern, yes, that is EXACTLY what I am saying. That is, given status equality, material equality should be the “baseline” from which other concerns cause us to deviate.
The problem is that the idea that property is natural and pre-government is so ingrained in your mind that you have difficulty seeing it any other way, even when you are trying. This can be seen from the fact that you refer to everyone being “forced” to have the same amount of property. If property is not natural but is instead a social convention, then ALL property is “force”. All property exists because the government uses the threat of force to exclude everyone except the designated “owner” from its use. The only alternative to everyone being forced to have the same amount of property is some people being forced to have less property than others. Which I do support, because of other concerns.
However, something about the concept of paying people to obey laws irks me. Call me old-fashioned, but being a citizen should be a responsibility.
This is a perfect example of why the term “libertarian” still applies to me.
Note that I also pay dissenters who refuse to contribute to society. The point is, we (unlike geese) force our laws on people without their individual consent, denying them access to the vast majority of the world by declaring that it “belongs” to other people. We consider this to be necessary, and I think it is. But it is still a imposition by force that was not consented to, and for which the individual should be compensated.
I do find it amusing that I am the one arguing from the individualist point of view, and yet I am also the one arguing for ending poverty by government fiat via just giving everyone cash with no strings. The question that needs to be asked of leftists who do not support a BI is: If you care so much for the poor, why do you want to control their lives?
I do find it amusing that I am the one arguing from the individualist point of view, and yet I am also the one arguing for ending poverty by government fiat via just giving everyone cash with no strings. The question that needs to be asked of leftists who do not support a BI is: If you care so much for the poor, why do you want to control their lives?
1) As you might have gathered from my questions about inflationary effects, I’m skeptical this will work.
2) As I mentioned above, the support this garners from conservatives makes me inherently suspicious as to whether it’s not actually just a way to minimize government without looking like “meanies” to the poor.
3) I’ve never thought that concern for the poor = my paying for people to do whatever they want. I believe that everyone should receive assistance in fulfilling their abilities, which is why I believe in universal education and health care (and guaranteed decent housing, food and other necessities for children and those who are too disabled to work). But if someone’s view of self-fulfillment is being on crack, I don’t have any interest in supporting that. I’ll pay as much as necessary to help them get out of addiction, and I find it appalling that we imprison instead of rehabilitating addicts, but putting my money toward their next hit? No thanks. If that makes me less of a liberal, eh. I’ve never bought into P.J. O’Rourke’s caricatures of liberals based on the hippies he hung out with.
1. As long as the BI is paid for with a tax, the money supply will stay constant and their should be no inflation.
2. So? If we can end poverty in a way that reduces government, does it make sense to keep poverty just to keep Big Government? Believe me, as a professional advocate for the poor, I would love to see welfare agencies disappear along with poverty. I will agree to keep government agencies that can provide a necessity to everyone more efficiently than the market – universal health insurance is an example, albeit one the U.S. currently does NOT provide. But for the vast majority of welfare beuracrats, good riddance.
3. a. Empirically, as someone who has to deal with our society’s attempts to identify and exclude drug addicts from welfare benefits, I have seen these policies do FAR more harm than good.
b. You write about what YOU are willing to pay for. From what? YOUR property, again assuming your pre-tax income is “naturally” yours. Again, why did society decide that that drug addict on the street starts off with no rights to property or income from the earth, but that a drug addict living off a trust fund set up by their grandparents does? What right do you have to tell a drug addict what to do with their equal share of the world?
1. As long as the BI is paid for with a tax, the money supply will stay constant and their should be no inflation.
Again, this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Price inflation isn’t just based on monetary inflation. I find this paper noting the problem of inflation and recommending “employer of last resort” schemes a lot more persuasive.
2. If we can actually end poverty, I’m happy to get rid of the welfare bureaucracy. What I suspect is more likely, however, is that we will get rid of the bureaucracy first and never see the end of poverty.
3. a. Empirically, as someone who has to deal with our society’s attempts to identify and exclude drug addicts from welfare benefits, I have seen these policies do FAR more harm than good.
I’m not interested in excluding addicts from all welfare benefits, but I find the idea of giving cash to people who we know (not just stereotype, but actually know) will spend it on drugs to be a complete waste. This is why I do not give cash to people who ask for it on the street, but am happy to give food, transport to services and pay taxes and give charitably to organizations that help people who are homeless and financially distressed, as well as giving my time through efforts like the Homeless Population Estimate. I am not interested in paying for another person’s happiness; I am interested in keeping that person alive.
b. You write about what YOU are willing to pay for. From what? YOUR property, again assuming your pre-tax income is “naturally” yours. Again, why did society decide that that drug addict on the street starts off with no rights to property or income from the earth, but that a drug addict living off a trust fund set up by their grandparents does? What right do you have to tell a drug addict what to do with their equal share of the world?
You seem to assume a zero-sum conception of wealth, with which I wholly disagree. I think all of us should start with a decent level of health and education that will allow us as adults to use our talents to gain whatever level of material comforts we want and can obtain through those talents. (I don’t think anyone else has a claim on another’s talents, so if someone just doesn’t want to work more than is necessary for subsistence, I don’t have a right to force him to expend more effort in order to produce more total utility.)
I don’t think equality is the be-all and end-all of social good, because I’m much more of a Rawlsian than that; so long as my increase in wealth takes nothing away from your wealth, why do you begrudge it? If I invent a method of increasing grain yields, what part of that increased production is the drug addict’s “equal share of the world”? What has he done to create it or make it possible? This idea of a some static level of wealth to be equally shared at best makes sense only with the earth itself and its resources unaffected by humans (e.g. whatever level of fish come out of the sea without humans doing anything with the sea, etc.).
a drug addict living off a trust fund set up by their grandparents does?
Actually, I believe in a high rate of estate tax, so this is a red herring in the argument. A real argument would be about the drug addict who made a lot of money with his band and has been smoking it ever since. If that’s what he wants to do with it, I feel sad for him but don’t think I have the right to take the money he was voluntarily given by others, in exchange for enjoying his performance, away from him. The drug addict who subsists on others’ voluntary charity also has that right to money that I cannot take away.
Well, perhaps I arguably would have a right to try and make the BI low enough that there is no “extra money” for buying crack.
I also have the right to believe that some drug addicts have a negative effect on society because of their addiction, and/or that they are prone to dangerous and/or unpleasant behaviors, and that as a societal member and someone who wants society to be as good as possible, to therefore want to regulate drug use generally.
Like PG, I think that it would be entirely appropriate to significantly increase the estate tax. I’m not sure how PG comes down on it, but I also think that we increasing the estate tax eventually disincentivizes production, so there’s a balance there somewhere.
people who we know (not just stereotype, but actually know) will spend it on drugs
Yes, well, therein lies a HUGE problem – how do we know, who makes the decision, and how do we know the decision maker is not stereotyping? In the real world of welfare benefits, the presumption is always against the recipient, even though the law says it shouldn’t be.
I don’t think equality is the be-all and end-all of social good, because I’m much more of a Rawlsian than that; so long as my increase in wealth takes nothing away from your wealth, why do you begrudge it?
Agreed. I am also Rawlsian in that sense. But unless you produced it with your own effort, your increase in wealth does take away from me. Of course, there still might be a benefit to least well off of letting you keep it, and if so, then of course keep it. But the best way for others to benefit is for you to pay rent to society for it – thus something like a wealth tax.
If I invent a method of increasing grain yields, what part of that increased production is the drug addict’s “equal share of the world”? What has he done to create it or make it possible? This idea of a some static level of wealth to be equally shared at best makes sense only with the earth itself and its resources unaffected by humans (e.g. whatever level of fish come out of the sea without humans doing anything with the sea, etc.).
Actually, I am extremely sympathetic to this line of reasoning, and it is why I am still leary of taxes on wages. But how do you determine what of your wealth was your due to your sole labor efforts, versus the use of the earth, or building on the collective knowledge of generations past, or use of government privileges such as corporate existence? Honestly, I admit to running out of answers here. But I do know that simply saying that some people get NOTHING without their labor is the wrong answer. The portion that should be divided evenly is certainly greater than zero.
Yes, well, therein lies a HUGE problem – how do we know, who makes the decision, and how do we know the decision maker is not stereotyping?
What’s the false positive rate on multiple drug tests? Losing your cash supplement because you test positive for drug consumption, so long as you keep your food stamps, housing and health — the actual necessities of life — is hardly going to kill you. What really hurts poor people is that the illegality of drugs means they get kicked out of public/subsidized housing if there’s any suspicion they possess/ deal drugs. If positive drug tests just meant that you couldn’t get any more cash and that you’d be required to enter into free rehab, I don’t see the tragedy.
But unless you produced it with your own effort, your increase in wealth does take away from me.
Why? If my parents work hard so they can bequeath money to me, why does their bequest take away from you? Would you be better off if my dad *hadn’t* worked 18-hour days for his patients and then a moonlighted at a local emergency room, but instead had come home and read the complete works of Puskin, and had no money to bequeath? (This is hypothetical; my dad did work a lot when I was little, but did it to be able to afford sending all of us through undergrad and grad school, and I probably won’t inherit much. But my perplexity as why you see his hard work and the resulting wealth he gained as an injury to you remains.)
Of course, there still might be a benefit to least well off of letting you keep it, and if so, then of course keep it. But the best way for others to benefit is for you to pay rent to society for it – thus something like a wealth tax.
I agree that wealth should be taxed in order to support the roads, police, universal schools and health care, etc. — just not to pay for anyone’s crack pipe.
But how do you determine what of your wealth was your due to your sole labor efforts, versus the use of the earth, or building on the collective knowledge of generations past, or use of government privileges such as corporate existence? Honestly, I admit to running out of answers here. But I do know that simply saying that some people get NOTHING without their labor is the wrong answer. The portion that should be divided evenly is certainly greater than zero.
I know that the crackhead definitely *didn’t* contribute. If I’m building on the collective knowledge of past generations, that’s an argument in favor of my owing support to the elderly (and I do believe that children owe a duty of support to their parents if the parents were any good, and that the young collectively owe a duty to the old). If I’m benefiting from corporate entity status (e.g. by not having personal liability in case it turns out my super-yield grain invention creates a gluten-allergy reaction in people who’d never had one), then I owe money for support of the corporation itself, and for the governmental institutions that make it possible. But why do I owe the crackhead?
I’m leery of saying that people get NOTHING without their labor, but I’m disinclined to hand cash to able-bodied, able-minded adults who have benefited from universal education and health care but refuse to work. However, in the absence of an Employer of Last Resort, we of course can’t distinguish the “refuse to work” from the “can’t find work,” which is one reason ELR appeals to me. It also keeps people from losing the personal habits and social skills that are part of employment (showing up on time, taking orders, focusing on a task), and gives them a work resume for times when labor demand increases and they can find a non-ELR job.