>that person should still get an equal say in society’s preferences
why?
why?
I realize how dangerous/potentially harmful a "taxpayer contribution === influence" is. But I think it doesn't have to be a binary. Perhaps a "three house" style system would be an improvement for representative democracy here:
One house for representatives of each state One house for representatives of vote by population One house for representatives of taxpayers by net tax burden carried
Thats called aristocracy.
As for having reps of taxpayers by net tax burden, what the hell does "net tax burden" mean? Tesla is useless without roads. Boeing is useless without airports. How do we apportion the tax paid against benefits received?
It's nonsense that "taxpayers" are worthy of further representation than any other citizen. The fact that corporations pay tax should not give them rights to representation in the legislature. Unless you think of corporations as one way to "represent taxpayers by net tax burden" because they are a collection of taxpayers.
Because as a society, we decided long ago that everyone should be treated as equally as possible.
We don't throw people into the garbage dump because they're not as good at certain things as others.
We've encoded this into our laws, our norms, our education, and our society as a whole. We've even fought world wars because of it.
That you could even ask the question makes me think that you're just being provocative.
That we have a progressive instead of flat personal tax rate system shows this is a pretty lie.
Why not just say, 'I don't believe in treating everyone equally"? If you have a different position then say so. Why try and redefine things? What's the goal?
Because that's not what I mean. I'm not redefining things - progressive tax was invented way back.
- If you're born into a wealthy family, how should we handicap you or boost others to give everyone "equality of opportunity"
- Or, should we outlaw wealthy families (maybe this is a 100% tax on wealth > $1m), assuming we could actually do this
- If you're born into a normal family, but one of your parents dies when you're 17, how should we compensate you, or handicap everyone else?
- If you get thyroid cancer at age 33, how should we compensate you, or handicap everyone else?
- How would we even quantify these opportunity gaps? The way we currently do it is by comparing lifetime earnings and try to ceteris paribus everything else, but as we start compensating, we're disturbing the experiment. Also, where does the money come from?
I'd love to hear a set of policies that deals with life's basic unfairness, but I bet it would look a lot like progressive taxation, a strong social safety net, and heavily subsidized education, and the people who support equality of opportunity definitely don't support those things. Mostly their position distills down to "don't tax us to subsidize low income/wealth people", and the best you can say about that is it doesn't reckon with the unfairness issue.
So I reject the premise. But, I also think that "equality" is actually a complex concept. Is a society that allows super wealthy people alongside homeless people equal? Is a society that puts a 100% tax on wealth > $1m but a 0% tax on income < $12,950 equal? What about a society that gives women 6 months paid leave for birth and early childhood, but men 6 weeks? What about a society that subsidizes insulin but not L-dopamine for Parkinson's sufferers?
My ideal would be that we treat people with "equal regard" for their needs and situation. Maybe that sounds like bullshit, or the idea of the government deciding what your needs are/should be is worrying, or you're skeptical we could ever really quantify it, and I would mostly agree. But I also can't come up with a better or more reasonable goal, even though we might not ever practically achieve it.
Equality of opportunity isn't equalising everything in life, it's equalising what the state (and other institutions) provides to each person. Equalising everything is equality of outcome, or how some people use "equity".
I.e. having a decent schooling, being treated equally by social institutions such as banking and law enforcement, and having an decent shot at jobs and housing, those are things to do with equality of opportunity. People shouldn't be unequally treated.
That doesn't mean that a legally blind person can become a fighter pilot, or people should be graded in school differently to compensate for ancestral sins; changing the treatment based on the individual would also be equality of outcome.
Outside of those definitions, to be clear, I'd say some things are definitely fantastic to do terms of helping people, such as providing braille on money. We just need to remember that each time we do this it's disproportionately expensive, so we need to make sure we're prioritising (somehow) to remove the most disadvantage from the most people. But I don't think this sort of thing should be in an equality discussion, as it muddles it too much.
> it's equalising what the state (and other institutions) provides to each person
Well, a couple of things about that:
- That's not equality of opportunity, it's anti-discrimination
- Generally the point of these programs is to create a more equitable society, i.e. when bad stuff happens to you (cancer, slavery) we drop a money bag at your door to catch you back up. People at least say (and indeed the Declaration of Independence starts off by saying) we want an equal society, and this is how we do it. If we give the same bag of money to everyone no matter what happened to them, that doesn't address the inequality, it just causes inflation. Indeed, you can't fix inequality by treating everyone equally, because life doesn't treat everyone equally.
> changing the treatment based on the individual would also be equality of outcome.
Why aren't we concerned with outcomes? Whenever I hear the opportunity/outcome framing this is my immediate question. Aren't outcomes the only thing that matters here? Of course we need to consider tradeoffs and costs, but if the goal is to make a more equitable society, how can we not consider outcomes? Can you claim to be an equal society when none of your policies discriminate (let's stipulate this is the case in the US, but it definitely is not), but 2/3s of your people (women and minorities in the US) are effectively an underclass? If that's the definition of equality, it doesn't sound very useful. I think we can do better.
Again this sounds like an excuse to ignore life's basic unfairness, as well as bad stuff our society has done in the past (slavery, the chattel system) and currently does in the present (the war on drugs, the gender pay gap). It's like, it's fine if we deprived people of opportunity in the past, even last year, as long as we fix that opportunity inequality sometime in the future, as though that didn't permanently set millions of people back. How do we make up for past, current, and existing and future inequities of opportunity?
Or put another way, how will we compensate the people today who will be victimized by:
- a vindictive immigration policy
- a racist carceral system
- a misogynistic reproductive rights regime
- a transphobic... everything
Will we just fix the glitch and ignore the damage those systems and policies have created? Again that doesn't sound like it really addresses the full scope of the problem.
The fact that people have got to the point of personal selfishness that they think that only "money talks" is a measure of their societal contribution is a sad indictment of the past 30-40 years of Thatcher/Reaganite nonsense.
The purpose of money is to aid in trade and that very creation and distribution of wealth.
Billionaires should be taxed at 100% for all of their liquid wealth over that $1B. If they have it invested into productive and useful wealth creation, then leave it there, otherwise, take it and do something productive with it.
Therefore if one wants to know what the society's preferences are, that data must be collected in such a way the each individual's preferences are included in the data set.
We might still apply a weighting function at aggregation time, depending on why we're looking at society's preferences in that instance. There are certain group's of opinions that we don't value as much for answers to some questions, but we should like to be deliberate about those choices instead of applying an implicit weighting function during collection.
The nazi also had a criminal record for raping a young boy.
The parent put it this way:
> If a person is disabled or uneducated and can’t hold a job, that person should still get an equal say in society’s preferences even though they have no money with which to express their preferences
Morally and rationally the nazi child rapist should not have equal say in society's preferences. Any society - any culture - that is stupid enough to place that person's preferences at a level of equality, deserves and will have earned its inevitable collapse. And there are far worse monsters roaming about than the nazi child rapist. While my specific example is an outlier (on purpose), the premise is far more expansive in principle.
It's also why a Constitutional Republic is vastly superior to actual Democracy.
For example, when considering questions of crime and punishment / deterrence we probably wouldn't value the preferences of say, psychopathic murderers, on the same level as those of the families of their victims. That would be silly.
However, it would still be good to collect their preferences on conditions within the prison system and host of other topics. And we might still intentionally devalue those preferences too, but that would be a deliberate choice of values as society.
When we fail to collect the data effectively in the first place, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to determine what we value and what we don't. So we're still going to want to know these things, that way we don't just discover later that we were ignoring a big thing that, turns out, we would have liked to value once we knew about it.
In your particular example, add in the one stipulation that both the Nazi and the family of his victims don't have much discretionary income to spend and yet they live in a world where society's preferences are collected primarily or singularly by way of observing what people spend money on. In that scenario, all of those people's preferences share the equal status of being completely ignored. That seems unfair to victims as well.
Modify the scenario a little differently and say the Nazi is very wealthy while the victims are poor. So then because of the data collection method alone, as a society, we would then be elevating the Nazi's preferences to 100% greater value than the victims.
That outcome seems vastly contrary to what we would actually value if we just fairly and accurately collected the data first and then applied our judgements about what should be valued.
Further notice that in just asking the questions, we can also easily discover at the macro level that this guy is a Nazi, after all, given the chance, he'll tell us so. This means deliberately ignoring his preferences is easy at time of aggregation and now we can do that on purpose, because as a society, we don't value the opinions of Nazis when it comes to questions of how to run things in a democracy.