Why I Don’t Celebrate Income Inequality
bothsidesofthetable.com
bothsidesofthetable.com
Being a libertarian does not in any way imply having no social conscience. Nothing whatsoever about libertarianism implies you should not be helping those less fortunate than you - only that you shouldn't be forced to. For example, Bill Gates' philanthropic activities are entirely congruent with libertarian ideas (although I don't know Gates' political leanings).
Think of it as an ROI. The state invested heavily in you - schools, roads, doctors, police, fire brigades, clean air, etc. etc.
We expect repayment from all members of society in order to continue providing those benefits to them and those around them.
If, when you reach the age of maturity, you don't feel that you want to be part of the social contract, you have a few choices available.
1. Leave. Go off to Somalia or some other place where the state won't force you to contribute taxes.
2. Lobby your elected officials (or become elected) to explain why we should stop supporting society. Remember, all those libraries were erected because people in your society saw the value in collectivising to enhance public education.
3. Opt out of society as far as possible. Generate your own electricity and grow your own crops. Just don't impinge on our rights to live in a safe(r) environment.
But, by and large, the Libertarians I've encountered don't think like that. They have the misguided idea that all their successes are down to personal endeavour and that they shouldn't be responsible for contributing at all. They see tax as theft of their hard work, not as a investor extracting their fair share.
Of course, you're right that Libertarianism itself doesn't imply having no social conscience - but many of its adherents simply don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library
> but many of its adherents simply don't.
To the extent that is true is irrelevant in complaining about libertarianism - it's a variation of the ad hominem logical fallacy. It's also true that many self-described libertarians have only a hazy idea of what it is.
I.e. the canonical "chicken in every pot".
By your logic, any slave who didn't run away from a plantation was "accepting a social contract" and had no right to complain about his state.
Nobody celebrates income inequality in and of itself. I agree that we shouldn't write puff pieces about founders that speak solely about their determination when there are other factors at play. But even then, that's not really a celebration of income inequality. (it's also a really small issue, compared to income inequality itself)
It reads like a critique of capitalism, but with several acknowledgements as to the fact that getting rid of capitalism wouldn't help anyway.
And I abhor the acknowledgement of privilege (which I understand is not a popular opinion) because it reads like an acknowledgement of some kind of insoluble Original Sin. Why do you feel the need to mention that you were never physically abused? How does that make you privileged? It seems to be completely unrelated to the rest of your piece.
Some people are dealt a really crappy hand by life. We don't live in a just world. And I agree that we should give people an equal opportunity to succeed. But without a resolution, this piece is probably no more meaningful than the latest startup puff piece. It's fairly obvious that the poor have a disadvantage. So how are we going to fix it?
That's true. So what can we do to fix that? And is fixing this particular cause (child abuse) the best possible investment to guarantee equal opportunity/ undo the unfairness of economic inequality?
This only works if you manage to trick the people buying the company that that is not what you did. Buyers do "due diligence" when they buy a company, meaning they carefully look over the books. A recent large layoff is a huge red flag that the company's situation may be misrepresented.
To belabor the obvious, encouraging people to stick with lower performing investments is not good for the economy. One of the good things about Reagan's tax deal, where he got rid of tax shelters in exchange for lower tax rates, is the tax shelters tended to be low productive investments, and the deal incentivized investors to switch to more productive investments.
I've never seen any discussion of this.
I could easily be quite wrong, but most articles I read of income inequality are simply descriptions of (perceived) social ills caused by systems which follow a Pareto distribution.
Pareto distributions have exactly one parameter - the "alpha". US income is distributed by two Pareto distributions added together - a bimodal Pareto distribution. One has a sort of offset such that its median is around $100K.
If inequality is increasing, it is because the distribution representing the higher income scale is growing - its alpha is increasing.
Nothing else need change except that, to change inequality.
I understand "the map is not the territory" but I write this just as a description of the process in a shorthand form, not to imbue the distributions with powers of anything more than description. The underlying process need be no more than increasing numbers of people in a "higher energy state" of the economy. Those in the lower energy state could probably not even "feel" this except through reports, and possibly changes in the prices of certain things.
In fact looking at this, they all seem pretty capitalist in nature: http://www.businessinsider.com/most-unequal-countries-in-the...