What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values, and the Meaning of Life . When you go into a voting booth, your chances of affecting the outcome are essentially zero. There's just no real reason for most people to give a lot of thought to moral issues in a public context. People think harder about right and wrong when raising their own children, where they have more of a stake and influence. That particular wrong conclusion has its root in people's tendency to take things like technology for granted and not to think through the extent to which we rely on other people for improvements in living standards, technologies, and the quality and quantity of goods available to us.
People take for granted the interactions they have with others.
When they imagine cutting population, it's always all those people they don't care about who they imagine disappearing. But of course those they care about and depend on would be among those who went. You discuss how a colleague's mathematical equations made you think hard about your view that progressive taxation is a bad thing. One must not be fooled into thinking something is more objective than it is just because it's expressed as an equation. But it's easy to make arguments in English that sound consistent and are still inconsistent in subtle ways.