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> Now. What if I sell widget polish. And you make widgets. You buy polish from me. So now, if we split the money, I sell you a bottle of polish for $1. Now the money is unequal again, so we equal the money. Effectively, I'm just giving you free polish. That's rational? Fair?

By the same rationale you can just pick up a free widget, so it seems both rational and fair.

Only if I need/want widgets. Which isn't included in the hypothetical. Because the point is to highlight what happens when I sell you something and makes the distribution unequal again.

If I come out the same whether or not I sell polish, why should I sell polish? Rationally, I shouldn't.

That's also a good reason we should be very careful about using words like rational and fair. There's a lot of perspective hiding in both. And at the very least, fair does not have an easy definition for all situations.

> If I come out the same whether or not I sell polish, why should I sell polish? Rationally, I shouldn't.

Because you like polished widgets, I'd imagine? Or maybe a fascist government forces you to make widget polish, I don't know. I do know you can't have it both ways, if your hypothetical economy is not consistent then it is a useless example.

You're investing way more into the hypothetical than exists.

I wasn't asking what imagined scenarios would force me to sell polish. If you want that, then aliens for all I care.

The entire point is to ask what happens when the results of my actions are nil. Rationally, if two courses of action have the same result, I should take the course that costs me the least.

I mean, here I am describing a situation and you're saying "Yeah, but what if the situation were different". Then the situation would be different and not the one I'm describing.

It's ok not to have an answer to any of the scenarios. To not know. I don't either. I don't know if there is a good answer to a "fair and rational distribution of wealth". The point is to make you question your own perception of the situation and realize that the answers you believe you have may have issues of their own.

I guess, like you, I don't know that I have any answers. What I reject is you describing a made up situation that is unfair then simply noting that it is not fair. That may be true, but it tells me nothing, causes me to have no new interesting questions, and is unrealistic to boot.

What about actually putting tax money to good use by offering free health care and education like Scandinavian countries?

Would be a good start.

From there the concept could easily be expanded. Reward those who work hard at specific things but let the rest of the population enjoy the benefits as well. Give them (free or cheap) access to your widgets. And ensure that you don't end up owning a monopoly taking most of everyone's money and giving nothing back.

I think you're missing the point as well.

Why is that fair? Why is that a good start?

If something is good and fair, sure let's do it, but we've skipped some essential work here. You've declared certain things as good and fair, you haven't actually proven these things are either.

What are the benefits that we should give those who work hard? What are the rewards? It's all fine and good to say "we will reward them". But if that reward is nothing but a sense of pride and accomplishment, I'm going to feel hoodwinked.

And you talk about "taking most of everyone's money and giving nothing back" but aren't you really talking about double dipping here? I'm giving you the widget. The thing you've given me money for. That's the exchange. You're basically saying the person who makes widgets needs to work for something else. But you don't say why. Or what that something else is.

That's what I'm talking about. We need that groundwork in order to actually start a conversation about redistribution. We are talking about literally taking stuff from people. Stuff they're under the impression that they've earned. There are two ways to do that. By convincing them to just give it up. Or by using force. Now, of course, there are those out there who have accumulated fortunes through rather nefarious practices. And it is a perfectly reasonable argument to say that those who have used fraud, deception, and various forms of coercion to build their wealth should have that wealth taken from them by force. It's not theirs. It needs to be returned to those who it does belong to. But we have to establish what are legitimate means of accumulating wealth and what aren't legitimate means. There are obvious cases, but there are also very contentious cases.

Literally zero percent of the economy works like this in reality.

Some people do not start out with different starting conditions? Some people are not more productive than others?

In what way are varying starting conditions and varying productivity levels (cost structures) not realistic?

If I were to guess, GPs point is that post-hoc redistribution is not fair (or can not be made to be fair?). Do you disagree with this conclusion?

It's close. My point is that we need a clear definition of what's fair to start from. And it has to be a definition that is satisfactory to most people.

Interesting. If you have 51% of the people declaring that 49% percent of the people should start with nothing, and that they (by right of popular demand) should get the 49%'s stuff, as a starting point, then, ... that's a clear definition, I guess. And it's satisfactory to most people, I guess. I still feel vaguely unnerved.

While 51% can be defined as "most", "most" doesn't necessarily mean "at least 51%". I was being rather vagueish, because requiring 100% acceptance is likely to be impossible. For instance, I really doubt that the white supremacist movement is going to find any situation where members of other ethnicities get as much or more than any of their members to be "equitable" according to their values. But just because they won't accept a solution that everyone else does doesn't mean we should throw it away. They're being unreasonable.

Not to mention, you're just describing a bullying situation. If you present that scenario to most people, they'll say that it isn't fair. Because they don't know if they'll be on the 51 or 49. I mean, even some of the 51% could say that it's not fair to the 49% to just lose their stuff by popular vote. Which would mean doubly that most people wouldn't find that definition fair.

And of course, the problem is that there's enough variance in "fair" that you probably can't get more that 5 or 10 people to agree on what's fair in all aspects. Which is why I kind of tune out when people just harp on "fair" without being specific. "Fair" is a weasel word. "Not getting shot by the cops during a routine traffic stop" is a clear complaint. That I can work with.

Well, yeah: not having the agents of the monopoly on preemptive violence that the state has reserved to itself getting too trigger-happy is something that I think all us plebes can agree upon.

When you are talking about normalizing starting conditions (up-thread), you are talking about ad-hoc/post-hoc redistribution of assets. Presumably assets that have been earned at an earlier time based on providing customers products or services that they wanted to buy at a price they were willing to pay, at a margin above their cost to the producer, allowing the wealth to accumulate. Like Steve Jobs creating a company that sells iPhones generating wealth.

Now - Steve Job's offspring will start at a better position in life than my children will. They didn't earn it - but my children didn't either. I find myself vaguely uncomfortable with the idea that I/we could form a group of 51% or 55% or 65% or even 80% that would vote to expropriate from them their property, so that I/we could distribute those spoils amongst ourselves. Is the current state 'fair'? Almost certainly not! But legitimized piracy by democratic consent? Where would it end?

I mean, we could form that group anyway. Viva la revolution and all that.

And it's good that you're uncomfortable with it. It's an uncomfortable thing.

I am not talking about the redistribution of wealth per se. I'm talking about the footwork needed to get to the place where we can even begin talking about it. I'm acknowledging that it's difficult. That it needs some hard answers to wicked problems. Something a lot of people ignore in their "eat the rich" rhetoric.

And I'm not really advocating for any sort of change. I'm just saying if you want this, you need that first. If you want "a fair and rational distribution of wealth", you are first going to have to explain what that means to you, why it is fair, why it is rational, why it even needs to be done, and do it in a way that convinces me.

And to the point of fortune of birth, we're all affected by the circumstances of our birth. We're not all created equal in all aspects. Is that fair? Don't know, but it is how the world is. Some people are born taller, prettier, smarter, richer. When you get down to it, there is a large degree of our existence we didn't "earn" by the metric we judge inherited wealth.

I'm vaguely comforted by the fact that redistributionists haven't come up with the idea that 80% of them are going to vote to chop 2" off me...

You've triggered a thought related to something I've been thinking about for a while (and almost certain to be followed by one or more questions) that I would like to run by you.

But I don't want to compose it on a mobile device, nor at work, so it will be a day or so before I follow it up here.

Cheers!

Ok ... I'm pretty sure I'm going to express this badly - but I'll try...

A long long time ago, humans got humanized in places where small numbers of them grouped together and cooperated/traded/shared with each other for day-to-day life.

There might be a (for example) wandering minstrel, who might spend a week or four in each of 20-or-so places. Each of those 20-or-so places (and their surrounding area) might have 150-people-or-so, who would chip in to cover the minstrel's room-and-board-and-drink. It wasn't a rich living (for sure), but one could (in theory) get by). Let's call it 10~30 multi-talented bard/actor/repair-man for every ~3000 inhabitants.

To the degree that people were literate/educated or Western Europeans, they might swap bible stories and memorize the 10 commandments. Amongst which would be admonitions against greed, envy and lust. (The Buddhist would similarly admonish against intoxicants - except they weren't incredibly dedicated to banning stuff...)

So ... fast forward a while. We've got winner take all markets. Let's talk music/film, not sports (but the math can be considered similar): Instead of having maybe 1 itenerate per thousand people, we've 1 superstar per 5~10M people. Woah! Now it's big money, so we've got back-up staff, support, stages, studios, advertising, promos, sponsorship - but it went from (say) $100/month to $10M/month.

Now back to the sins of lust/greed/envy: I believe that we (humans) were not built to envy our neighbor's goods at that scale. There was no Bill Gates. There was not even a David Rockefeller!

So you get a guy (or girl) who is willing to provide a product (or service) to national or global markets, that people want, at a price that they are willing to pay, at a cost-to-produce dramatically less than that price (on a per-unit basis). You have the recipe for a kajillionairre, by that person simply making the world a better price by providing more/better stuff for less. (Or in the Steve Jobs case: by making a religion out of a pocket computer).

But! As wealthy as we all become, with our jobs and income, and housing and clean water and indoor plumbing and always-on-electricity and wireless internet and 24-7 entertainment and a global library at our fingertips and an every improving environment (on most metrics - you would have to track data and not watch the news to learn this), many of us, with our hold Monkey-DNA encoded greed/envy/competitiveness, are jealous of the "Captains of Industry" that have made our lives to much better. And we want to take their money ("The 1%!") and distribute it to a bunch of morons that (from what I can tell) are trust-fund babies that can't hold down a job. (Or even find a place to defecate that is not a police car - given how some of the denizens of OWS behaved).

So! (It took a while to get here). Do you believe that income and wealth equality could be, should be, a first-order goal, given that our current system has generated so much wealth? Why would we want to tear down something that is working for all of us, for the purpose of instituting an abstract noun that no one seems to be able to define? For my part, I'd rather be an increasingly wealthy part of the 99% and am grateful to the 1% for dragging us along with them...