Redistribution of Wealth

If I confused individual and corporate tax rates under FDR, then I apologize. However, for purposes of this debate, the difference is quite inconsequential, as the issue at hand is whether, as a moral matter, wealth ought to be redistributed; and whether, furthermore, as a matter of pure economics, such redistribution could be achieved without destroying or even significantly undermining incentive, innovation, and other essential ingredients of a healthy free-market economy. If I misunderstand the parameters of this debate as you see them, then please correct me now. In the meantime, let me first rebut the arguments you've put forward and then make a few in support of my own position. You yourself point out that, under FDR, individual tax rates for the uber wealthy were around 90%. Yet, a few sentences later, you warn that: "If a large corporation or ***a taxpayer*** had to pay 90% of their income to the government, profitable ventures would be less likely to occur" (emphasis mine). Obviously, the uber wealthy comprise taxpyers. Yet, under the last 8-10 years of the FDR administration, the American economy generally and new American enterprises in particular positively THRIVED! Now, how can that be if in fact, as you suggest, such exorbitant taxes on the rich (whether corporations or individuals) tend strongly to discourage profitable ventures? Was this period in American history simply an anomaly of sorts? Moving on, now, to your numbered, more formal arguments: C1: High Taxes Are Immoral. "Equivalent earnings"? Equivalent to what, and how, exactly, is that equivalency measured? You use the phrase "excessive taxes" without defining the word "excessive" as used in this context. Is 1% excessive? How about 2%? 5%? Who decides what constitutes excessive taxation, and upon what basis? Some would argue that ANY tax is unjustified in principle and therefore excessive, while most concede that at least some taxes in some amount are both morally acceptable and practically necessary for a free society to flourish. You seem to acknowledge as much when you admit, a line or two later, that "a slight degree of taxation is indeed justified." Okay, great. Now, define "slight." And justified how? You're making all sorts of assumptions here without clearly spelling them out or telling us the bases upon which they're supposed to plausibly rest. Please do so in your next entry. Also, why do you say that, if a government overtaxes its citizens (whatever that comes to), it does so for "its [own] selfish purposes"? What if the government spent all of that revenue to build houses for the homeless or schools for the uneducated or hospitals for sick veterans of war? How could any of those purposes possibly, reasonably be described as "selfish"? I don't get it. And as for this "robbery" concept, what's THAT all about? How is it that, say, a 7% tax might be perfectly warranted (by some standard or another) but a 7.1% tax would constitute robbery? How does a tax go from wholesome and proper to flat-out theft in the space of one-tenth of a percent? Absurd. But, if taxes are not inherently excessive and yet some level of taxation is tantamount to robbery, then that is precisely the case. C2: High Taxes Are Shortsighted. *Yawn.* Heard it all before. Empirical studies and known facts simply don't bear it out. And even if they did, let's consider a most relevant analogy. Suppose you have eight kids playing in an oversized sandbox. The biggest kid currently possess 90% of the toys, much to the dismay of the other seven kids. When they complain about this and demand a more equal distribution of the toys, the big bully announces, "Fine, if you're going to insist on it, then I'll give some of my toys away. But if I have to do that, then I'll take the rest of my toys to another sandbox and play with a different group of kids, kids who won't be so insistent that I share my toys with them. And then you'll lose all the benefits of my being here, not the least of which is that I let you keep the other 10% of the toys, which are in fact the shiniest and most valuable toys in the whole wide world." Clearly, nobody would regard the attitude of this de facto despot (read: Giant Corporation) as mature, reasonable, fair, decent, compassionate, or morally praiseworthy. On the contrary, we'd nearly all regard it as immature, unreasonable, unfair, indecent, selfish, and morally abhorrent. As downright bratty, petulant, petty, and crass, to be more specific. Likewise for a corporation which decides, essentially, to punish American workers and the economy as a whole by moving its operations to a "sandbox" friendlier to its executives' purely self-interested ambitions, their sheer, unadulterated, unapologetic avarice, even when it comes at the expense of decent wages for those without whom their brilliant ideas would be utterly worthless and cutting-edge products or services impossible to manufacture or provide. Now for my own arguments: I. Redstributing Wealth is a Moral Imperative. I'll here simply quote a summary of Peter Singer's argument for wealth redistribution from his essay "Rich and Poor": "suffering and death caused by lack of food, shelter, or medical care are bad if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it 'Sacrifice' here means without causing anything else comparably bad to happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral good, comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent for example: if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This may ruin my clothes but that would be insignificant while the death of the child would be very bad we can reduce avoidable death and suffering by giving to famine relief etc. and the cost of doing so is a morally insignificant reduction in our standard of living This argument applies both to immediate emergency famine relief and long term development aid. therefore we ought to give to famine relief etc." [1] It should be quite apparent how this argument could be tenably extended to wealth redistribution even within developed, relatively affluent nations such as the U.S. in which, despite their enormous concentrations of wealth in relation to poorer countries, there are nevertheless huge gaps in lifestyle, diet, access to quality affordable health care, life expectancy, infant mortality rate, happiness quotient, etc. between the rich and poor (i.e., those who make millions or even billions per year vs. those who make minuscule fractions of such sums per year, say $20-30,000/year). Anticipating likely objections: "Singer's argument is clear, and when you consider the drowning child example, pretty seductive. But it does impose very high obligations on those of us who live in comparatively rich countries, and it may be just too demanding. It limits our freedom to act Singer demands that we must always make the morally best choice, nothing less will do. This vastly reduces our freedom to make our own life choices as self-governing moral beings It may require us to act against our best interests It fails to recognise our own intrinsic moral value as persons But perhaps we could impose limits to this - accepting that our own moral value means we should not sacrifice the interests of ourselves or those closest to us in order to aid others so long, of course, as we do not behave selfishly It requires us not to favour those closest to us It requires us not to favour other moral concerns we may have i.e. not things that would benefit us, but other altruistic moral objectives we may want to fulfil but then why should my moral concerns be more important than any others? Singer adds 'neither our distance from a preventable evil nor the number of other people who, in respect to that evil, are in the same situation as we are, lessens our obligation to mitigate or prevent that evil.' Should I treat people further away differently? No: It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbour's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. The fact that a person is physically near to us, so that we have personal contact with him, may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that we ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further away. But there are millions of other people who could help - so why should I? One may feel less guilty about doing nothing if one can point to others, similarly placed, who have also done nothing. Yet this can make no real difference to our moral obligations. For example: Am I am less obliged to pull the drowning child out of the pond if on looking around I see other people, no further away than I am, who have also noticed the child but are doing nothing? Do people in rich nations have a duty to give to the poor? The philosopher Thomas Pogge argues that there are two very clear reasons why they do: Western colonisation and enslavement of poor countries is at least partly responsible for the conditions of the global poor The conduct of richer nations imposes and supports unjust global structures and systems that harm the global poor when alternatives that would do less harm are possible [Rich countries] enjoy crushing economic, political, and military dominance over a world in which effective enslavement and genocide continue unabated. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2008"[2] Having run out of space, I'll save my ancillary arguments for a later round, if such even prove necessary. The moral argument, outlined above, is by far and away the most important. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk... [2] http://www.bbc.co.uk...