13 ms·

If sharing wealth leads to greater wealth, then why is it necessary to try to take wealth (by force)? Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so that t

If sharing wealth leads to greater wealth, then why is it necessary to try to take wealth (by force)? Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so that they can make more? If it is possible to make more wealth by giving up some, why not let people choose whether or not they will share? If you theory holds true, then people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer and the problem will solve itself.

mcguire 7y ago
Because "enlightened self interest" is an oxymoron? By the way, "people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer" is a misstatement of the theory.
jamie_ca 7y ago
Parent's "wealth for all" does not mean "wealth for each." Of course taxing the wealthiest to share with everyone results in the wealthiest having less than they would otherwise, which is why they tend not do do so voluntarily. However, if it makes most people better off, and makes society as a whole better off, then maybe it's worth it for the government to force their most-successful citizens away from their selfish instincts to the betterment of the nation?
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  A lot of these arguments also tend to elide the fact that even under the most "extreme" tax structures in place or being proposed in first-world democracies across the globe, wealthy people are still wealthy even with those taxes. In practice, no one serious is actually talking about forcing Bill Gates to give up all his money so it can be apportioned equally to every American citizen. If Gates had to pay an annual wealth tax of 2%, started with $90B (the most recent estimate of his net worth I can find), and made $2B a year (which is less than the most recent estimate of his annual wealth increase I can find), then after 20 years he would have... $93B. I'm aware libertarians believe it's the principle of the thing, dammit, but I'm truly weary of arguments which boil down to "Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is philosophically indistinguishable from a call for nationalizing all industry."
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    > I'm aware libertarians believe it's the principle of the thing, dammit, but I'm truly weary of arguments which boil down to "Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is philosophically indistinguishable from a call for nationalizing all industry." First, while some wealthy people remain wealthy, I'd guess there's a much larger impact on people who are becoming wealthy than those who are already super-rich. Second, as you said, it's the principle. I've got an objection to seizing people's stuff to then give away to others. There is no reason government should supply anything that is not a pure public good, and it should supply precious few of those, too. Remember that every act the federal government takes is backed up with the threat of death. If you don't comply, a bunch of agents will bust down your door at 3 AM and haul you away (see the disturbing number of paramilitary groups many federal agencies now possess). If you resist, you get killed. This applies to income tax too, by the way. I couldn't care less how much good you think you can do with it, no one gets to take someone else's stuff because he wants to give it to someone he deems more deserving.
    - bandushrew 7y ago
      That is objectively wrong though, isn't it? The government absolutely can, and does, pass laws to legally take anyone's stuff for any reason it likes. If that is your bottom line, then almost every government in almost every country I know of overran it almost immediately. What we are discussing right now is....given that they ca, and do....under what circumstances we want them to do it. Think of it as a reality based discussion.
      - big_chungus 7y ago
        Unfortunately, governments do indeed steal stuff all the time. That's why it needs to be as hyper-local as possible and why citizens should own military-grade arms. I think our arguments are jousting without clashing, so to speak, because I'm making a principled point rather than a pragmatic one.
        bandushrew 7y ago
- blackflame7000 7y ago
  >taxing the wealthiest to share with everyone results in the wealthiest having less than they would otherwise No taxing the wealthiest results in the wealthiest moving their capital investments elsewhere.
  - Rury 7y ago
    If that's the case, then why don't we see capital always rushing to countries that have the lowest tax rates? Last I checked Japan has lots of capital investment, a large economy, a substantial wealthy class, and yet a high tax rate...
  - dTal 7y ago
    This seems like an easily solvable problem, frankly. Gazillionaires don't tend to want to live in the tax havens they store their gazillions in because (surprise) they tend to be shitholes. So you just tax the movement of money in and out of the country - money is pointless if you can't spend it. The reason this isn't done isn't because it's hard, it's because the foxes are running the chicken coop.
- GreenJelloShot 7y ago
  > However, if it makes most people better off, and makes society as a whole better off, then maybe it's worth it for the government to force their most-successful citizens away from their selfish instincts to the betterment of the nation? So basically it's ok to sacrifice the minority, as long as it benefits the majority, huh?
  - ric2b 7y ago
    Not much of a sacrifice when it's just a higher tax rate.
theothermkn 7y ago
> ...then why is it necessary to try to take wealth (by force)? Ah. "[B]y force." The marker of the arrested mind of the libertarian. > Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so that they can make more? Because there is such a thing as a local maxima, as opposed to absolute maximum. The giving up of wealth by an inordinately rich person may not make that inordinately rich person any richer. This is exactly the basis of what is so adolescently derided as "by force," which actually means "by a law that I don't like." At a higher level, the silliness of the "by force" objection is rooted in the reification or idealization of "the market." The market isn't real: It's a game that is played with laws and money, one that we participate in, at least initially, so that we may improve our (local) wellness. In short, we can't climb out of the muck in an every-person-for-themself struggle, so we regularize exchange with money. Every "free exchange" in a market entails the (regularized) threat of force through law. And the benefit of the market obtains not from "freedom," but from "regularization." The basis of taxation is that it regularizes the extraction of wealth for the common good, to raise all local minima. Taxation appeals to justice, a just apportioning of the common spoils of the market game, rather than a notion of absolute freedom or legal pacifism, the latter being especially empty once one realizes that the market itself is a constructed game whose mechanism is the regularization of force. Put simply, winners can take much without there being any injustice at all in ensuring they don't take all or practically all.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  > The marker of the arrested mind of the libertarian. Personal insults are against site rules, and that comment comes mighty close.
  - dTal 7y ago
    It's against a class of belief, not an individual, and it's harsh but accurate; libertarianism represents a frustratingly truncated thought process.
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      But you applied it to what GreenJelloShot said. Now it's against an individual, or at least an individual's statement.
lsiebert 7y ago
People don't always make the rational choice for long term benefits when there are short term gains to be had. Individuals, thanks to bounded rationality, tend to seek satisfactory solutions, not optimal ones. It takes coordinated effort to find optimal solutions. Another way to think of it is, that by benefiting from public goods (roads, law enforcement, health regulations) already in existence you and your family have already entered into a social contract with the government, which acts as a representative of the collective will of all people towards a more perfect union, and in which payment is due for the benefits you have obtained. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
- GreenJelloShot 7y ago
  > People don't always make the rational choice for long term benefits when there are short term gains to be had. Individuals, thanks to bounded rationality, tend to seek satisfactory solutions, not optimal ones. It takes coordinated effort to find optimal solutions. Translation: People are stupid and need to be forced to do the right thing. (Where the "right thing" is defined by the current people in charge.)
bena 7y ago
Let's say that you could somehow increase your wealth by 1% each day. If you have $100, tomorrow you will have $101. Then $102.01. And so on and so forth. At the end of the year, you'll have $3778.34 Now let's say that if you give $50 to someone else, you can both increase your wealth by 1.1% each day. At the end, both of you will have $2711.08. Individually less, but collectively more. That's the issue: individually less. While you may get some benefit from the collective betterment of society, it still requires sacrificing some portion of your potential maximum wealth.
- blackflame7000 7y ago
  Ok now do year 2 and see how that $50 turned into a net loss of $146,998.73
  - bena 7y ago
    You realize you have to double that, right? It's $146,998.73 for each person. No matter how you slice it, 1.1% is greater than 1%. We're still working with $100 initially. And if you're talking about one person's unrealized gain, we've already addressed that. Individually, we may make less, but collectively, we make more. The idea is that since fortune is largely based on luck and then exploiting that luck, we could be leaving a lot of progress on the table. A landlord who makes their wealth simply by charging rent isn't really doing anything to advance anything. He just happened to own the right bit of land at the right time. So if we tax him and then use those taxes to provide for those who did not have the same breaks, we may be enabling someone to actually create something that advances technology or science or medicine. I mean, "individually less, collectively more" also explains why the individual doesn't want to voluntarily give up anything.
bosswipe 7y ago
Everybody gains from the wealth created by something like a city park, whether they contribute or not. So there's a game theoretic problem that prevents reaching the wealth maxima without public collaboration. For example you might end up with a strip mall that produces more wealth for a few people but less overall wealth for the whole community then the park because surrounding land values don't benefit as much.
mytherin 7y ago
Prisoner's dilemma. A single wealthy person giving up their wealth will not have a large enough effect on society to actually change anything. It will only make them worse off (as they now have less wealth). From the perspective of a single person, hoarding as much wealth as possible is a local optimum. When all wealthy people get together and divide their wealth, this enables education, housing, preventative health care, etc for poorer people in society. This will in turn lead to reduced crime, reduced homelessness, reduced illness and a much more productive society as a whole. This will then in turn generate more money for them. This is a global optimum that will make everybody better off, including the rich, but it is not easy to achieve. It requires long-term vision, which is difficult in a world driven by quarterly reports and four year election cycles.
- abfan1127 7y ago
  there seem to be a ton of assumptions in this comment.
  - machello13 7y ago
    I don't think you can talk about this stuff without resorting to unsubstantiated beliefs about the way the world works.
  - dTal 7y ago
    At least they put some effort into it. As it is, your comment contributes nothing. What assumptions, and why are they wrong?
    - abfan1127 7y ago
      That's actually a really valid point. I got interrupted by work. I'll see what I can do.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Assumptions are testable, e.g. using game models. Such as Monopoly. If you want as more accurate model, you can make one, e.g. mock markets. You can even evaluate then using various programmed strategies. The problem is if your assumptions are completely invalid. Macroeconomy tends to use a few of those, especially based on workings of debt cycle. An almost correct descriptive model which when used as proscriptive causes ruin. Likewise pure supply-demand models fail when applied in the real world.
rorykoehler 7y ago
Delayed gratification is one of many reasons. If exercise leads to greater health, then why is it necessary to try to encourage people exercise? Why don't people willingly exercise so that they can be healthy?
- GreenJelloShot 7y ago
  There is a difference between "encouraging" and "forcing". Should we force people to exercise?
  - rorykoehler 7y ago
    No but we should force people to pay taxes due to the same underlying human trait. If you don't exercise you hurt mostly yourself. If you don't pay taxes you are a burden on society.

mcguire 7y ago

Because "enlightened self interest" is an oxymoron? By the way, "people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer" is a misstatement of the theory.

jamie_ca 7y ago

Parent's "wealth for all" does not mean "wealth for each." Of course taxing the wealthiest to share with everyone results in the wealthiest having less than they would otherwise, which is why they tend not do do so voluntarily. However, if it makes most people better off, and makes society as a whole better off, then maybe it's worth it for the government to force their most-successful citizens away from their selfish instincts to the betterment of the nation?

chipotle_coyote 7y ago
A lot of these arguments also tend to elide the fact that even under the most "extreme" tax structures in place or being proposed in first-world democracies across the globe, wealthy people are still wealthy even with those taxes. In practice, no one serious is actually talking about forcing Bill Gates to give up all his money so it can be apportioned equally to every American citizen. If Gates had to pay an annual wealth tax of 2%, started with $90B (the most recent estimate of his net worth I can find), and made $2B a year (which is less than the most recent estimate of his annual wealth increase I can find), then after 20 years he would have... $93B. I'm aware libertarians believe it's the principle of the thing, dammit, but I'm truly weary of arguments which boil down to "Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is philosophically indistinguishable from a call for nationalizing all industry."
- big_chungus 7y ago
  > I'm aware libertarians believe it's the principle of the thing, dammit, but I'm truly weary of arguments which boil down to "Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is philosophically indistinguishable from a call for nationalizing all industry." First, while some wealthy people remain wealthy, I'd guess there's a much larger impact on people who are becoming wealthy than those who are already super-rich. Second, as you said, it's the principle. I've got an objection to seizing people's stuff to then give away to others. There is no reason government should supply anything that is not a pure public good, and it should supply precious few of those, too. Remember that every act the federal government takes is backed up with the threat of death. If you don't comply, a bunch of agents will bust down your door at 3 AM and haul you away (see the disturbing number of paramilitary groups many federal agencies now possess). If you resist, you get killed. This applies to income tax too, by the way. I couldn't care less how much good you think you can do with it, no one gets to take someone else's stuff because he wants to give it to someone he deems more deserving.
  - bandushrew 7y ago
    That is objectively wrong though, isn't it? The government absolutely can, and does, pass laws to legally take anyone's stuff for any reason it likes. If that is your bottom line, then almost every government in almost every country I know of overran it almost immediately. What we are discussing right now is....given that they ca, and do....under what circumstances we want them to do it. Think of it as a reality based discussion.
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      Unfortunately, governments do indeed steal stuff all the time. That's why it needs to be as hyper-local as possible and why citizens should own military-grade arms. I think our arguments are jousting without clashing, so to speak, because I'm making a principled point rather than a pragmatic one.
      - bandushrew 7y ago
blackflame7000 7y ago
>taxing the wealthiest to share with everyone results in the wealthiest having less than they would otherwise No taxing the wealthiest results in the wealthiest moving their capital investments elsewhere.
- Rury 7y ago
  If that's the case, then why don't we see capital always rushing to countries that have the lowest tax rates? Last I checked Japan has lots of capital investment, a large economy, a substantial wealthy class, and yet a high tax rate...
- dTal 7y ago
  This seems like an easily solvable problem, frankly. Gazillionaires don't tend to want to live in the tax havens they store their gazillions in because (surprise) they tend to be shitholes. So you just tax the movement of money in and out of the country - money is pointless if you can't spend it. The reason this isn't done isn't because it's hard, it's because the foxes are running the chicken coop.
GreenJelloShot 7y ago
> However, if it makes most people better off, and makes society as a whole better off, then maybe it's worth it for the government to force their most-successful citizens away from their selfish instincts to the betterment of the nation? So basically it's ok to sacrifice the minority, as long as it benefits the majority, huh?
- ric2b 7y ago
  Not much of a sacrifice when it's just a higher tax rate.

theothermkn 7y ago

> ...then why is it necessary to try to take wealth (by force)? Ah. "[B]y force." The marker of the arrested mind of the libertarian. > Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so that they can make more? Because there is such a thing as a local maxima, as opposed to absolute maximum. The giving up of wealth by an inordinately rich person may not make that inordinately rich person any richer. This is exactly the basis of what is so adolescently derided as "by force," which actually means "by a law that I don't like." At a higher level, the silliness of the "by force" objection is rooted in the reification or idealization of "the market." The market isn't real: It's a game that is played with laws and money, one that we participate in, at least initially, so that we may improve our (local) wellness. In short, we can't climb out of the muck in an every-person-for-themself struggle, so we regularize exchange with money. Every "free exchange" in a market entails the (regularized) threat of force through law. And the benefit of the market obtains not from "freedom," but from "regularization." The basis of taxation is that it regularizes the extraction of wealth for the common good, to raise all local minima. Taxation appeals to justice, a just apportioning of the common spoils of the market game, rather than a notion of absolute freedom or legal pacifism, the latter being especially empty once one realizes that the market itself is a constructed game whose mechanism is the regularization of force. Put simply, winners can take much without there being any injustice at all in ensuring they don't take all or practically all.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
> The marker of the arrested mind of the libertarian. Personal insults are against site rules, and that comment comes mighty close.
- dTal 7y ago
  It's against a class of belief, not an individual, and it's harsh but accurate; libertarianism represents a frustratingly truncated thought process.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    But you applied it to what GreenJelloShot said. Now it's against an individual, or at least an individual's statement.

lsiebert 7y ago

People don't always make the rational choice for long term benefits when there are short term gains to be had. Individuals, thanks to bounded rationality, tend to seek satisfactory solutions, not optimal ones. It takes coordinated effort to find optimal solutions. Another way to think of it is, that by benefiting from public goods (roads, law enforcement, health regulations) already in existence you and your family have already entered into a social contract with the government, which acts as a representative of the collective will of all people towards a more perfect union, and in which payment is due for the benefits you have obtained. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract

GreenJelloShot 7y ago
> People don't always make the rational choice for long term benefits when there are short term gains to be had. Individuals, thanks to bounded rationality, tend to seek satisfactory solutions, not optimal ones. It takes coordinated effort to find optimal solutions. Translation: People are stupid and need to be forced to do the right thing. (Where the "right thing" is defined by the current people in charge.)

bena 7y ago

Let's say that you could somehow increase your wealth by 1% each day. If you have $100, tomorrow you will have $101. Then $102.01. And so on and so forth. At the end of the year, you'll have $3778.34 Now let's say that if you give $50 to someone else, you can both increase your wealth by 1.1% each day. At the end, both of you will have $2711.08. Individually less, but collectively more. That's the issue: individually less. While you may get some benefit from the collective betterment of society, it still requires sacrificing some portion of your potential maximum wealth.

blackflame7000 7y ago
Ok now do year 2 and see how that $50 turned into a net loss of $146,998.73
- bena 7y ago
  You realize you have to double that, right? It's $146,998.73 for each person. No matter how you slice it, 1.1% is greater than 1%. We're still working with $100 initially. And if you're talking about one person's unrealized gain, we've already addressed that. Individually, we may make less, but collectively, we make more. The idea is that since fortune is largely based on luck and then exploiting that luck, we could be leaving a lot of progress on the table. A landlord who makes their wealth simply by charging rent isn't really doing anything to advance anything. He just happened to own the right bit of land at the right time. So if we tax him and then use those taxes to provide for those who did not have the same breaks, we may be enabling someone to actually create something that advances technology or science or medicine. I mean, "individually less, collectively more" also explains why the individual doesn't want to voluntarily give up anything.

bosswipe 7y ago

Everybody gains from the wealth created by something like a city park, whether they contribute or not. So there's a game theoretic problem that prevents reaching the wealth maxima without public collaboration. For example you might end up with a strip mall that produces more wealth for a few people but less overall wealth for the whole community then the park because surrounding land values don't benefit as much.

mytherin 7y ago

Prisoner's dilemma. A single wealthy person giving up their wealth will not have a large enough effect on society to actually change anything. It will only make them worse off (as they now have less wealth). From the perspective of a single person, hoarding as much wealth as possible is a local optimum. When all wealthy people get together and divide their wealth, this enables education, housing, preventative health care, etc for poorer people in society. This will in turn lead to reduced crime, reduced homelessness, reduced illness and a much more productive society as a whole. This will then in turn generate more money for them. This is a global optimum that will make everybody better off, including the rich, but it is not easy to achieve. It requires long-term vision, which is difficult in a world driven by quarterly reports and four year election cycles.

abfan1127 7y ago
there seem to be a ton of assumptions in this comment.
- machello13 7y ago
  I don't think you can talk about this stuff without resorting to unsubstantiated beliefs about the way the world works.
- dTal 7y ago
  At least they put some effort into it. As it is, your comment contributes nothing. What assumptions, and why are they wrong?
  - abfan1127 7y ago
    That's actually a really valid point. I got interrupted by work. I'll see what I can do.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Assumptions are testable, e.g. using game models. Such as Monopoly. If you want as more accurate model, you can make one, e.g. mock markets. You can even evaluate then using various programmed strategies. The problem is if your assumptions are completely invalid. Macroeconomy tends to use a few of those, especially based on workings of debt cycle. An almost correct descriptive model which when used as proscriptive causes ruin. Likewise pure supply-demand models fail when applied in the real world.

rorykoehler 7y ago

Delayed gratification is one of many reasons. If exercise leads to greater health, then why is it necessary to try to encourage people exercise? Why don't people willingly exercise so that they can be healthy?

GreenJelloShot 7y ago
There is a difference between "encouraging" and "forcing". Should we force people to exercise?
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  No but we should force people to pay taxes due to the same underlying human trait. If you don't exercise you hurt mostly yourself. If you don't pay taxes you are a burden on society.