The Meaning Of Government

I agree with you on your first comment, That government is a tool of practical purpose to increase flourishing of human life through increasing and facilitating cooperation between those human actors. But let"s now go over the contentious parts of your piece. First you claim that the phenomenon of poverty it caused by "an unequal distribution of wealth, Which is propped up by a government with laws and policies that do not evenly spread out the costs and benefits of a society". Here you make again the mistake you reject in your second paragraph by seeing it as a zero sum game where the wealth is a fixed amount that requires some people to have more then they deserve for inequality to exist. This is exactly what I meant by the fraise "stealing from others". What you totally disregard is the generation and increase of wealth in a society which comes through cooperation in a market economy. An example is that while the share of income going to the top 1 percent increased since the 1970 again as described by the Gini Index, At the same time the real disposable income increased by between 170 and over 200 percent (Brian Nolan and Stefan Thewissen in" Income inequality and growth of living standards across the income distribution in the USA" as well as the equivalent study for Australia). Therefore everyone even though there is an increasing difference, Has overall more income. This is as I have explained what we strive for. Same can be seen in the development of the development of per capita GDP. Also the opposite effect can be seen in the study by Nolan and Thewissen on Greece as they plotted the Gini Index over the income and showed that while the Gini dropped the income fell, Meaning less inequality coinciding with worse living conditions. We see therefore that as I have said it isn"t the inequality that is the problem but the lower income and in addition that there is no problem with inequality if there is enough income. Therefore over the time of increasing inequality everyone still got better of then before. We see that poverty doesn"t come from inequality or not enough equality of outcome, But that the reduction of poverty comes from an increase of economic power and overall income which is acquired by increasing economic growth and thereby also social spending. It also refutes your assumption that unequal societies are scared by inequality resulting in worse conditions. There is no actual link between the inequality of a country and the conditions in that country. There is a connection though between healthcare expenditure and GDP and also between healthcare expenditure and the overall health as symbolized in life expectancy as seen in the World development indicators of the world bank. The same holds true for happiness as seen in the happiness inequality that is directly linked and decreases with economic growth shown by Clark, Fleche and Senik based on the world happiness report. This goes also into your next paragraph. I am well aware that inequality reduction and the increase of income and overall economic power are not mutually exclusive in their effect, But as I have shown we have good and reliable date that increasing income and also overall wealth increase had an impact on it. What can also be seen is that inequality is not a direct factor that could predict functionality of your society or the living conditions of its citizens. It can be but it doesn"t have to. It is mainly seen in the increase in living standards accompanied by the increase of inequality as shown by Nolan and Thewissen. This therefore is correlation and not causation. It would really help to get some numbers and statistics that show the causation or even correlation. I have to disagree with you that GDP is that terrible a measure of standard of living as it correlates quite well with all important factors of a high standard of living. This is easily seen in the fact that different measures of income are similar to the one taking GDP per capita as its basis. It is logical as all income is build from this Product (Paul Krugman). We have also a correlation between the human development index that is also a big component of standard of living with the GDP and this even over time as published by Prados de la Escosura. Now while GDP actually is while obviously not perfect a good correlation, You totally disregard all other criterion such as education and democracy but also nutrition and happiness that all show correlation both to GDP and also the standard of living and wealth in the society. And now I want to make clear what equality of outcome means. It doesn"t mean that you invest somewhat into everyone in order to diffuse extreme differences or to provide them with the chances for a better future. It doesn"t even mean a fully build system of social services. It means the striving for equalizing the product one has of ones work to a radical extend. It means redistributing so that after different work of objectively different value the later income is close together to equivalent. Let"s even assume that it only means similar outcomes, It still has nothing to do with increasing social spending a little. Now on the other hand equality of opportunity does exactly what you claim we need equality of outcome for : adjusting for "unfair advantage just because of their situation at birth". This is exactly the objective of equal opportunity. It also entails that a certain degree of social spending and a social safety net as only in this way people have similar opportunities in a society. On top of that it also allows for later social spending but not to achieve equality but from a humanitarian standpoint of seeing other participants of society as important. All of this is equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome. We have seen that inequality is not as important a factor as my opponent wants to make us believe and also that inequality has nowhere close the predictive power over living conditions that was claimed. Furthermore we have seen that the main problem of inequality at birth that my opponents rightfully sees as an issue that is combated by equality of opportunity and not of outcome and we have also seen that there can be very unequal societies and also societies that have rising inequality while also having better standards of living and also increasing standards of living. This all brings me to my position that the main purpose of government is not to assure a later equal outcome for everyone but to decrease poverty in the meaning of increasing wealth and income. This holds both true for all of society and for the individual. This is achieved by focusing mainly on increasing the overall wealth and not by ensuring the current wealth and redistributing it. It goes along with allowing equal opportunity, But is, Because of both the entailing economic problems of equal societies with less completion and the lack of an actual causation between inequality and standard of living, Not equivalent to working for equal outcome. The best way of increasing everyone"s standard of living is by increasing overall wealth making its distribution less important. In a metaphor it is better to bake a bigger cake by allowing unequal but not unfair distribution than sticking with a small cake and equally distributing it, As even those with a thin slice of the big cake have more than with an equal and slice of the small one.