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  taking things by force from people performing better

And this is where your argument will completely derail, not in consistency, but in it's ability to convince anyone with other basic assumptions about the goal of income redistribution policies. Asserting this, you've already lost and are preaching to the quire.

The pertinent point is that people perform better through a combination of 'working hard', 'being more able' and 'luck', where the latter is not to be underestimated. You're elevating 'economically better performance' to 'being morally entitled to a greater share of our aggregate affluence'. That is as hard to defend as any other moral standard and probably not a debate you wish to engage in. I certainly don't believe all those bankers have 'performed better'. Many have merely been lucky, many others have gamed the system.

It also shouldn't be necessary to argue that point. What we care about is 'what works?'. How much wealth should people be allowed to keep, to optimize the sum of their performance not just in terms of economy, but also in terms of humanity. What have they added to this world, to all those around them?

I gladly give up half my income to live in a society like the one I live in. I love the Western European welfare state and regret the American winner-takes-all mentality that disregards how lucky you are to live this specific life in the first place. I'm not just me; I am everyone I love. You cannot convince me of allowing you to retain more of your wealth, unless you can convince me that it would not decrease the wellbeing of people I love, including those that are disabled, without a job, etc. Today you, tomorrow me.

> Sooner or later, I'm going to get around to writing a piece and titling it, "I reject equality" where I lay out the argument that the goal of equality is fundamentally hostile to excellence.

I will offer a pre-counterpoint: equality is not (should not be) about everyone being the same or at the same level, but more "from each according to their ability" — but at the same time considering the 100% effort from everyone to be (nearly) as valuable. This leads to the second question of what you consider essential in achieving exellence: I hope you can offer more of an explanation than "more money as reward".

> I will offer a pre-counterpoint: equality is not (should not be) about everyone being the same or at the same level, but more "from each according to their ability" — but at the same time considering the 100% effort from everyone to be (nearly) as valuable.

Honestly, I'm not sure how to reply to that, because I don't think any single human in history has ever given anything near 100% effort or achieved 100% of their potential.

Maybe a rare few individuals - da Vinci? Jefferson? Tokugawa? Socrates?

But I'm not so sure of that, even. No matter how good you get, you can always make another incremental improvement.

Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of major breakthroughs come from individuals or small teams, and I think anything that stifles excellence to potentially help get more out of everyone is misguided. Again, though, I realize that I hold the minority position on this idea.

Substitute 100% with a percentage you feel comfortable with. Whatever puny humans consider "full effort" without ever aspiring for more…

I think it is probably correct to say that the tips of major breakthroughs come from small groups, but to claim entirety of the credit would be discounting all of the work, research, support and infrastructure currently and in the past. I do not think it is feasible to go to an "every man for himself"-system at this point — plus I'd like to see some historic examples of such successes if that is your gist. Notably fostering an overall empowering society is not the same as putting Joe Sixpack in the Manhattan project 'cause he's been trying so hard, bless his little cotton socks. You need not respond here, but I hope your article-in-potentia can sufficiently flesh out and support your idea instead of only trying to deconstruct the current (?) stifling environ.

I don't think any single human in history has ever given anything near 100% effort or achieved 100% of their potential.

However ridiculous I might find much of what you say, I love your optimism here.

Now, wouldn't it be desirable for more people to have more of an opportunity to achieve their potential?

Also, I've experienced "taking by force" only a couple times in my life and I don't think the tax system resembles this.

> but at the same time considering the 100% effort from everyone to be (nearly) as valuable

Why should we do something so wrong?

Consider Derek Jeter and me. No matter how much effort I put in as a baseball player, I'm not going to approach him on his worst day. And that's true even if I was 10 years younger than he is.

Some people are better than others at some things. Their effort is more productive. Ignoring that is dumb.

And then there's the problem that not all things are equally valuable, so even if two things take an equal amount of effort, that doesn't tell us that they're equally valuable.

I do not consider professional athletes to bring anywhere near the "value" currently ascribed to them (lots of sports fans prefer college/amateur sports anyway) but that is sort of beside the point: I never said to ignore people's relative strengths and weaknesses.

Derek Jeter probably can't do [whatever it is you do] as well as you can — nor should he try if he's found his niche. You both are probably both examples of highly skilled workers, and there are also jobs which require less skill that nevertheless must be done. We could further argue that absolutely everybody has something in which they would be considered high-skilled if they realised it and developed their skills but even that is not really necessary for the thrust of my pre-counterargument which is that from the perspective of the entire society, all necessary work is roughly equally valuable regardless of whether it can be done by 1 or 999 people out of 1000 (or million).

The second part of that pre-counterargument is the motivation for excellence. Personally I do not think that wealth[1] is really a factor for geniuses, most of whom seem to do stuff out of sheer joy of doing it. I'm willing to entertain a pre-counter-counterargument, but some historical analysis would be welcome.

[1] Beyond a reasonable level of comfort and in a society which does not require you to hoard loot to ensure survival of progeny, and certainly not at the levels where you could not even conceivably spend it all.

> thrust of my pre-counterargument which is that from the perspective of the entire society, all necessary work is roughly equally valuable regardless of whether it can be done by 1 or 999 people out of 1000 (or million).

Your assertion that all necessary work is roughly equally valuable is wrong. And then you compound the error by ignoring supply. (It's unclear whether you're ignoring demand as well.)

> Personally I do not think that wealth[1] is really a factor for geniuses

That's irrelevant because few people are geniuses, so it doesn't much matter what motivates them.

I get it that you think that you're not motivated by money and think that other people shouldn't be, but the brain-power going into high-wealth fields suggests that money does have some motivating power.

There is pretty much no way to measure that objectively in practice. For example, our time spent on reading computer science books, learning more math, talking with other good programmers all affect our programming productivity. Moreover, learning to write clearly in English (or one's native language) also impacts how well one can code and comment. But much of those 'practices' has accumulated over years or even decades, some since childhood, some from family influence without one's trying.

The system you propose, if implemented, will soon degenerate to how well one can pretend to be disadvantaged or fake the effort, so that more rewards will be offered even when the work output stays the same. This is equivalent to giving bonus for the hours spent as face time in office while chatting on Facebook there.

> from each according to their ability

Good to see a bit of Marxism/Communism on HN occasionally! -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abil...

I think it's fairly simple: the goal should be equality of opportunity and not equality of outcomes. Furthermore, when opportunities are unequal, they should never be made equal by reducing some of them.

Yes, I think this nails it, and what's more, I don't think it's particularly controversial, in the US, anymore. This has been the Republican line since Reagan, and I think even most Democrats accept it now. There's a whole other conversation, of course. about whether we're really doing what we could and should to bring us closer to equality of opportunity -- I think a lot of politicians pay only lip service to that goal -- but that would take us a bit far afield.

It's not controversial because people (all - democrats, republicans, rich and poor) don't seem to have a clue how much unequal the US is. It's been a HN submission today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2039503 . If they really knew, they may change their opinion on that.

You know what's ironic about this reaction of yours to the article?

What's ironic is that a world of fewer and fewer superstars making more and more money is a world in which there is more and more equality - in that all the others are equally in shadow of the few superstars.

My Freshman philosopher professor told a parable. One despot asked advice from the another. The second despot lead the first to a field and proceeded to spin his staff, cutting all the stalks of grass above a certain level. That illustrated how to maintain the highest level stalk of all.

I'm into to the rejecting equality thing. I am seriously. I just suspect you haven't thought all of it through...

(for example, have you read Nietzsche?)

You should read Rothbard's Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature first and see if it says what you mean. (I couldn't tell you, since I read it so long ago that I can barely remember reading it. I have only a vague memory of what it said, but it did address some of your points.)

If you want to argue that policies which reduce income inequality should be repealed it could be an interesting essay.

Arguing against a "goal of total [income] equality" wouldn't be as interesting though: pushing for total income equality is not a mainstream policy position.

I don't necessarily think you mean to reject equality. I think what you mean to say is that you reject objective decision-making. Objective decision-making has a tendency to treat everyone and every decision the same, making no exceptions due to circumstance.

I think that what you're saying is that decisions need to be made in the scope of the current context. In other words, they need to be made subjectively. In other words, we can all be equal under the law. I am just as important under the law as anyone else (at least in theory). But that doesn't mean that the courts need to treat everyone the same.

In the context of a company, all employees can be more or less equal. But that doesn't mean they need to be treated the same. Everyone is different, and you need to take that into account when you decide on salaries and position and whatnot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility