Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

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> the lie that the rich benefit disproportionately from our society

Why do you consider that a lie? There's a reason why kidnappers try to target rich people's kids... because rich people are willing to pay much more to gave their kid back - they literally value the kid's life more (in money terms).

Another perspective is, a geting injured/killed will deprive a rich person of a lot of consumption, but a poor person of just a little consumption. Therefore, by protecting rich people, governments provide more value than by protecting poor people.

> Now personally, I'm in favor of eliminating all taxes on capital income (and capital, e.g. property taxes). Economically, the best tax is a consumption tax; you live in a home, you pay taxes on the value of living in it. No property tax, no income tax, etc.

What about income tax? What about corporate tax (personally, I think it makes sense, because it's a choice - you don't need to pay corporate tax, but they you don't get the privileges of the corporation being a separate entity)?

For the most part, rich people produce far more than they consume. Poor people consume far more than they produce. Consumption inequality is vastly lower than income inequality.

I'm opposed to income tax as well. A consumption tax is the best tax, since it's both a) hard to dodge, b) transparent and c) doesn't penalize investment.

In principle an income tax is equivalent to a consumption tax, but in practice taxing labor income but not capital income induces all sorts of tax avoidance schemes that treat labor income as if it were capital income.

Do you value "equality" at all? E.g. do you find huge inheritance unfair (because it's something you didn't produce) or not? How about "proportionate representation" (one person, one vote, as opposed to the current situation where rich have vastly more political power)?

I don't particularly value equality - rather, I value utility. If I can make everyone better off, but increase inequality in the process, I will.

How much poverty are you willing to create to reduce inequality? That's the fundamental question. For me the answer is zero.

I also don't assign much value to proportionate representation. I think I'd prefer the rich to have more political power, they seem to be the least insane. Unfortunately, in our system we do have proportionate representation. The only way a rich person can influence electoral outcomes is by persuading poor and middle class people to vote for his candidate. Sadly, as Trump demonstrates, this can be done just as easily with nonsensical emotional appeals as with intellectual ones.

> I don't particularly value equality - rather, I value utility. If I can make everyone better off, but increase inequality in the process, I will.

Unfortunately, inequality is, empirically, one of the strongest sources of disutility. So, as much as you might think you can "make everyone better off, but increase inequality in the process" when you use poor proxies for utility, you probably can't.

> I also don't assign much value to proportionate representation.

Comparative studies (at least among nominal democracies), show that proportionality is fairly strongly correlated with experienced utility of government. So, this may be incompatible with your claimed preference for utility. (see, e.g., Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.)

> I think I'd prefer the rich to have more political power, they seem to be the least insane.

Maybe they just have more power to shape perceptions through media, image management, etc.

What evidence do you have that inequality is a source of disutility?

Note that if you pull out one of the ever popular left wing scatterplots putting cross-country inequality on the x-axis, I'm going to pull out one with a higher r^2 putting something politically incorrect like single mothers or black people on the x-axis.

As for proportional repersentation, if it indeed is instrumentally useful in creating utility that's fine. But I only care about it insofar as it actually gets us other good outcomes - it's not something I intrinsically value.

Proportional representation makes sense because morality & values are subjective. Its implementation leaves a lot to be desired (see futarchy).

But you don't necessarily increase poverty by decreasing utility and increasing inequality. Arguably, 8-hour workweek and restriction of child labor reduced utility of people (at least on the short-term), but markedly improved their quality of life and probably decreased inequality as well. IMO it's likely that we would be much more productive and "better off" in a society where we're all "equal" (to some degree - e.g. a very good model of society is described in the story Manna by Marshall Brain - every day, everybody get's the same amount of energy (which cannot be stored) and they can use it however they want - including donating it to worthy causes).

Without proportionate representation, it's unlikely that you can achieve "everyone better off", because your measure will be biased - such a system practically ensures that the rich/powerful are better off at the expense of the poor, because their desires are weighted more heavily!

But you don't necessarily increase poverty by decreasing utility and increasing inequality.

I'm asking about values, not specific world conditions. Sometimes the world lets us get everything we want - e.g., globalization and capitalism so far have reduced poverty and inequality together.

But sometimes the world doesn't give us the easy case. That's when we actually need to understand our values, and answer questions like "how many people will I push into poverty to reduce GINI by 1%?" If your answer is zero, you agree with me completely and don't care about inequality. Are you agreeing with me that inequality is irrelevant now?

I agree that equality is not important as a goal, but it's important as a means - I think (i.e. based on my observation of reality) that inequality results in bad outcomes (i.e. takes us further from the goal of "less poverty" or "better lives"), hence my drive to oppose and fight it.

Of course, it would be even better if I/we could simply reduce poverty and improves lives directly (without the detour of fighting inequality), but currently I don't know how (and neither does anyone else).

One of the best, if unrealistic, solutions I see are robots; but between now and when we invent really useful robots, I think it's important to strive to prevent outcomes as displayed in the movie Elysium (or the alternative future in the story Manna).

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