What would the income distribution look like with no redistribution?

[emzie]

BasketCase, never quit these forums. You bring joy to so many people just by being yourself.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

It does not matter whether or not the whole world is monopolized if one cannot access unowned resources without trespassing on what is owned.

 

[warpus]

Is the current level of redistribution just? Would more redistribution be just, and if so, is there a limit?

In my opinion, and I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, too much money in your system goes to middlemen. That's one of the reasons why healthcare is so expensive there.

So no, it isn't just - too much money ends up in the hands of people who don't deserve it.

 

[BasketCase]

It does not matter whether or not the whole world is monopolized if one cannot access unowned resources without trespassing on what is owned.

Monopolized, owned, whatever. You're just mincing words here.

There's big chunks of the planet that the rich don't control--or just plain don't care about because there's no oil on it. Though the results are not always pleasant. Yemen is a good example of what can go wrong when nobody really owns/controls the land: various random people start fighting over it.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

BasketCase, never quit these forums. You bring joy to so many people just by being yourself.

I find your idea of joy tasteless

 

[BasketCase]

Getting overly personal here, folks.

What was the point of income redistribution? To help the poor. Is it doing that? No. As the old saying goes, the rich keep getting richer--and, more often these days, renouncing their citizenships to get tax write-offs. Income redistribution has had no measurable impact on human welfare, and there needs to be a measurable result before anybody can say it works.

 

[Farm Boy]

What was the point of income redistribution? To help the poor. Is it doing that? No. As the old saying goes, the rich keep getting richer--and, more often these days, renouncing their citizenships to get tax write-offs. Income redistribution has had no measurable impact on human welfare, and there needs to be a measurable result before anybody can say it works.

Then we are probably doing it wrong. Even if the bolded is almost certainly roundly incorrect. Since wealth creation and the existence of the superwealthy depends entirely on the labor of nations rather than the individual, you are making a pretty healthy case that income redistribution needs to be more robust. Millionaire citizen create his fortune at home and seeks to move it out of the country? Sounds like that country should craft some laws to claw back those assets. Is that actually your motive here? Clever!

 

[BasketCase]

Since wealth creation and the existence of the superwealthy depends entirely on the labor of nations rather than the individual

Wrong. The wealthy get wealthy in many different ways. Sometimes nations, sometimes individuals. Most of the time, rich people get rich by doing business with other rich people.

There are so many different ways to get rich, that it's impossible for the leftists to get rid of them all.

Millionaire citizen create his fortune at home and seeks to move it out of the country? Sounds like that country should craft some laws to claw back those assets.

Nononono, we can't have any of that. Think Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. isn't supposed to be violating the borders of sovereign nations, rememeber? Your own rules forbid you from grabbing assets that are now sitting in a bank in China.

See? The rich will always beat the system.

 

[Farm Boy]

And how do other rich people get their wealth? Hmmm? It all circles back around to communal good. Wealth without security is a curse not a blessing, who provides protection of law and armed forces?

I'm no great fan of taxes, and I certainly am not a fiscal liberal, but all shared public expense is wealth redistribution. Claiming it has no measurable impact on human welfare? I'm sorry, that has to be the most off-base statement I've read in a month. Smallpox? Where did that go? How about polio? Did the super-rich go out and pray it away from their children? Did Bill Gates build the roads you use to get to work? When was the last time a famine hit the U.S. when the grain belt suffered a drought? You don't seem to be looking very hard, which hurts the case of fiscal conservatives.

 

[BasketCase]

And how do other rich people get their wealth? Hmmm?

I already answered that. The answer was that there are many different ways.

It all circles back around to communal good.

No it doesn't. It's all about individual good. Advocates for the poor are merely yet another faction in the struggle over insufficient resources. What they don't realize is that trying to help the poor by taking from the rich is (at best) a zero-sum game. Mexico has tried it, and failed, because all of the immigrants who gained work in the U.S. produced stuff in the U.S. and not in Mexico, leaving the Mexican economy stagnant.

Wealth without security is a curse not a blessing, who provides protection of law and armed forces?

Two hundred years ago in the U.S., that was a horse and a gun. In areas of the U.S. with no law and no armed forces, wealthy people still did fine. By depending on themselves instead of relying on other people.

I'm no great fan of taxes, and I certainly am not a fiscal liberal, but all shared public expense is wealth redistribution.

No it's not. Who shares the expense is the entire question.

All of your examples were failures. Eradicating smallpox moved money from public coffers to the private coffers of whomever provided the vaccine. Probably some people got rich off that. Same with polio. The roads I use to get to work? Built by the public, and used by lots of corporations to make money. No measurable redistribution there, either. Famine in the U.S. due to grain belt suffering a drought? That last one is irrelevant. When the land isn't producing any food, no amount of money anywhere will change it; you have to have water. No water, no food.

I'm ready to go another round, if you've got more examples you wanna throw at me.

 

[Arwon]

Getting overly personal here, folks.

What was the point of income redistribution? To help the poor. Is it doing that? No. As the old saying goes, the rich keep getting richer--and, more often these days, renouncing their citizenships to get tax write-offs. Income redistribution has had no measurable impact on human welfare, and there needs to be a measurable result before anybody can say it works.

Old aged pensions, unemployment benefits, veterans payments, disability support, parental support and public healthcare all have fairly specific purposes and they all achieve them fairly successfully. It's pretty loony to simply assert otherwise.

 

[Farm Boy]

Eradicating smallpox moved money from public coffers to the private coffers of whomever provided the vaccine. Probably some people got rich off that. Same with polio. The roads I use to get to work? Built by the public, and used by lots of corporations to make money. No measurable redistribution there, either. Famine in the U.S. due to grain belt suffering a drought? That last one is irrelevant. When the land isn't producing any food, no amount of money anywhere will change it; you have to have water. No water, no food.

<sighs> You really need to open your eyes wider. Be warned the light of a complete picture can be painfully bright.

We run a hybrid of personal enterprise and public works in the U.S. Just because you can point out one part of a policy does not invalidate the public portion.

The oversight that regulated and enforced smallpox vaccinations as well as making them available for those who could not afford them was not free and it was a public expense. Paid for by everyone who paid taxes. Did some entrepreneurs make profit? Good. Ignoring the benefits of the eradication of smallpox and polio for the rich who weren't involved in vaccine production as well as the poor is well, for lack of better words, really dumb.

Roads are a good example of non-zero-sum wealth creation. Public funding of roads ensures that payers support more roads they they individually(corporate or personal) will use. An interconnected economy that can can ship and travel efficiently provides more vim then the initial expense of road construction and then ongoing maintenance.

If you don't think public policy and expense is involved in encouraging private enterprise to produce sufficient crops in years of plenty to ensure production and storage to insulate against years of little, then I really need to break into a separate conversation with you regarding agricultural subsidies. You should look up how much federal money goes into providing that food security. Definitely qualifies as wealth redistribution. Ironically, those who are involved in the production of food do understand "no water, no food" as well as how little control they have over the weather.

 

[Leoreth]

I'm not a historian, I'm a software developer. I don't need to know jack squat about history; I simply look it up in books and on web sites. All efforts to take from the rich and give to the poor have failed to elevate the poor.

And from which books and web sites did you pull this insight, if I may ask?

And how do you counter evidence contrary to your assertions, like Mise's graph from page one, other than ignoring it?

 

[Dachs]

It does not matter whether or not the whole world is monopolized if one cannot access unowned resources without trespassing on what is owned.

That's when you get into a right-of-way easement.

 

[Farm Boy]

A contract easement would be ideal, but if somebody is being stubborn an easement by prescription will work as well. Though I suppose that would be uncommon. Eminent domain I suppose would be more common.

 

[Dachs]

A contract easement would be ideal, but if somebody is being stubborn an easement by prescription will work as well. Though I suppose that would be uncommon. Eminent domain I suppose would be more common.

I guess my attempt to be tongue-in-cheek was foiled by an imperfect understanding of property law. I'll go back and hide in my notes on usufructuary code in Louisiana now.

 

[BasketCase]

It's pretty loony to simply assert otherwise.

<sighs> You really need to open your eyes wider.

Debate fail by the both of you. Attack the idea and not the person.

And from which books and web sites did you pull this insight, if I may ask?

No one book or web site will do it; you need to read a large number of both and use the lot of them to assemble the complete picture.

The history of humanity's attempts to eliminate (or at least reduce) poverty is riddled with failures, and utterly empty of successes actually attributable to income redistribution. Mainstream statistics and newspapers bear this out; in fact, the nations most dedicated to income redistribution are, for the most part, precisely the nations tumbling most rapidly into bankruptcy right now.

Ironically, one of my best sources is people like you. You guys on CFC. People like you are the ones who keep saying the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. You keep saying the rich aren't paying their fair share. And you folks are saying that today, after decades of effort at income redistribution. Your own testimony is that income redistribution is a failure.

The core of the problem is this: when you take from the rich and give to the poor, the poor don't have the faculties to make good use of the windfall; they simply spend it, and it's gone, and they stay right where they started. History is also full of cases where people get rich by various methods and then rapidly go bankrupt; those people, also, don't have the common sense to keep it once they had it.

And how do you counter evidence contrary to your assertions, like Mise's graph from page one, other than ignoring it?

That would be with basic statistics. Mise's page-one graph didn't actually prove any cause-and-effect relationship. It's not enough to show that money is flowing towards the lower classes; in order to claim a specific cause, Mise had to show why, and his chart doesn't.

 

[Arwon]

"lower classes"

Yeesh.

Why do you keep insisting this is about "the poor" as an undifferentiated mass? It sounds like you think people get given money just because their income is too low, as though it's unskilled workers being given some mysterious "income distribution" payment in the interests of utopian social engineering. Sounds a lot like the people who think "welfare" is a single payment going to everyone earning less than a certain amount a year.

Complete and total rot.

It's not like that. Again, income transfers are things like old aged pensions, unemployment benefits, veterans payments, disability support, and parental support.

Income transfers go to a number of very specific groups, not because of low income but because of other characteristics of those groups. They're not for "poverty relief" in the general sense you mean, they're not about social engineering, there's no utopian project - that's a strawman of your construction. And they don't go to people "because they're poor".

They're made either because the group is either temporarily or permanently incapable of earning an income (unemployment, disability, single parents with young children) or because it's considered that they shouldn't have to work (old age, veterans), or sometimes they can only work part time and require supplemental income (disability in some cases, single parents again, students in countries like Australia where there's a student payment).

(Public healthcare and public education and other such implicitly redistributionist policies have a different and arguably much more utilitarian rationale, but we're talking about direct income transfers here.)

 

[Farm Boy]

By asking you to open your eyes I am not attacking you. There is no assertion that your ideas are weak because they come from you. The implied statement there is that the argument you are presenting is so limited in scope and apparent(to me) understanding that you must not be looking very hard at the issue. If any personal statement at all could be gleaned from my request it would be implied faith in your intelligence. I think you are capable of better.

 

[BasketCase]

By asking you to open your eyes I am not attacking you.

Yes. You are. Knock it off.

If any personal statement at all could be gleaned from my request it would be implied faith in your intelligence. I think you are capable of better.

The assumption that an intelligent person would reach a different conclusion than I did, is also a personal attack (and a clever one). Don't EVER assume, in any debate forum, that smart people will think the same as you. You need to always go into every debate aware of the fact that intelligent people will disagree about things.

You tried to change around the meaning of the phrase "income redistribution". Integral was very clear in the OP, specifically mentioning the transfer of income from rich to poor. Income = money. Not vaccinations or roads or whatever else. Integral said, "How important is government in alleviating poverty?" Poverty. That's what this thread is about.

"lower classes"

Yeesh.

Why do you keep insisting this is about "the poor" as an undifferentiated mass?

Because it is. Re-read the OP: Integral asked how important government was in eliminating poverty. That's all. He didn't make any differentiations.

It's not like that. Again, income transfers are things like old aged pensions, unemployment benefits, veterans payments, disability support, and parental support.

Then, answer the thread question: how important are those programs in alleviating poverty? The answer is, these programs are worthless for that. None of these programs are capable of digging the unfortunate out of their dire circumstances.

None of these government programs can change the class strata, because most people who get money don't know how to hold onto it. People who get rich and stay rich, stay rich because they have the proper discipline in handling and spending money. You can't make the poor rich until they possess that discipline. People need to understand some very basic rules about how to handle money--if they refuse to learn or practice those rules, tough noogies.