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People also don't like it because it in effect means the government is competing against you for property using your own money. I.e. if the government buys up

People also don't like it because it in effect means the government is competing against you for property using your own money. I.e. if the government buys up 10% of the posh neighborhood to add cheap housing, the number of posh units goes down 10% and you paid for the taxes to make that happen. So you're paying taxes to give someone else the thing you want, and make it harder for you to get that thing in the future. Then you hear about some corruption scandal where the government was overpaying... I think American culture has a weird fetish for fairness. We'll do something that makes everyone worse off because at least it's distributed evenly. Admitting that success has a large luck component would mean admitting that the system isn't and cannot be made fair, and I just don't think that's an idea people can tolerate. How does our justice system function if it admits that defendants in bad situations are there because they're unlucky instead of bad people? How do we justify income inequality if we admit those at the top were lucky and that it would be a different set of people in an alternate universe? Basically our whole society is built on the idea that the system is fair and everyone is where they deserve to be because of choices they've made.

bloppe 3y ago
Fairness is not the same thing as equality, and most people appreciate that.
- everforward 3y ago
  I don't mean equality, I'm talking about the basic kind of fairness that I would hope we can all agree on. Some children are going to grow up in abusive or neglectful homes, which isn't fair to them. Some portion of them are going to do poorly in school, which isn't really their fault, they're children. Those children then become adults who have to enter the workforce or try to get into college and be basically ranked in a lineup against everyone else, including people who had loving and supportive parents that bought them tutoring and what not. Where do we suddenly cross the line into being fair? Repeat that situation across a variety of different attributes. Sure everybody has to meet the same bar, but that doesn't imply the same odds of meeting it, or work to get there, or risk incurred to try. Is it fair to not build ramps on buildings because people in wheelchairs have equal access to the stairs? Is it fair to not give poor defendants attorneys because they have equal access to the market of lawyers? I don't think equality of outcomes is desirable because of externalities, but I do think it's worth closing the gap between the haves and have nots out of deference to the inherent unfairness in the system. I don't care for the extremes of income inequality we've arrived at under the guise of the system being perfectly or mostly fair.
tmnvix 3y ago
> the government is competing against you for property using your own money Unless you somehow have an income source that doesn't rely on any taxpayer funded infrastructure whatsoever, it's a bit disingenuous to call it 'your own money'. As an example, if your city pays for a big new park on your block and this increases the value of your property, is that increase really yours? The whole issue of taxation is so much more complicated than '100% of my income is mine and any tax is essentially theft'. Much better to argue about taxation in terms of fairness in my opinion. In terms of fairness, property owners do much better out of the whole equation than it might first seem as every public improvement amounts to a tax refund in the form of increased property value. The poor might get obvious refunds or entitlements, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are not equivalent. In the above circumstance, the people with the most legitimate gripe are people paying a decent amount of income tax while owning no property and so missing out on both types of 'refund'.
int_19h 3y ago
> I think American culture has a weird fetish for fairness. We'll do something that makes everyone worse off because at least it's distributed evenly. When you phrase it like that, it's not really an American-specific thing. I remember reading about ethological studies on very young children - not in US! - where they would be given a bunch of candy to distribute in various contrived situations. One of those was picking between something like "you get 1 candy and the other kid gets 1 candy" vs "you get 2 candies and the other kid gets 4 candies", and similar arrangements in larger groups. What they found is that there's a very strong bias towards fairness, meaning that kids were pretty consistently willing to end up with less candy themselves if that means that another kid would not get an unfair share. Which, if you think about it, is not an unreasonable trait to evolve in a social species.

bloppe 3y ago

Fairness is not the same thing as equality, and most people appreciate that.

everforward 3y ago
I don't mean equality, I'm talking about the basic kind of fairness that I would hope we can all agree on. Some children are going to grow up in abusive or neglectful homes, which isn't fair to them. Some portion of them are going to do poorly in school, which isn't really their fault, they're children. Those children then become adults who have to enter the workforce or try to get into college and be basically ranked in a lineup against everyone else, including people who had loving and supportive parents that bought them tutoring and what not. Where do we suddenly cross the line into being fair? Repeat that situation across a variety of different attributes. Sure everybody has to meet the same bar, but that doesn't imply the same odds of meeting it, or work to get there, or risk incurred to try. Is it fair to not build ramps on buildings because people in wheelchairs have equal access to the stairs? Is it fair to not give poor defendants attorneys because they have equal access to the market of lawyers? I don't think equality of outcomes is desirable because of externalities, but I do think it's worth closing the gap between the haves and have nots out of deference to the inherent unfairness in the system. I don't care for the extremes of income inequality we've arrived at under the guise of the system being perfectly or mostly fair.

tmnvix 3y ago

> the government is competing against you for property using your own money Unless you somehow have an income source that doesn't rely on any taxpayer funded infrastructure whatsoever, it's a bit disingenuous to call it 'your own money'. As an example, if your city pays for a big new park on your block and this increases the value of your property, is that increase really yours? The whole issue of taxation is so much more complicated than '100% of my income is mine and any tax is essentially theft'. Much better to argue about taxation in terms of fairness in my opinion. In terms of fairness, property owners do much better out of the whole equation than it might first seem as every public improvement amounts to a tax refund in the form of increased property value. The poor might get obvious refunds or entitlements, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are not equivalent. In the above circumstance, the people with the most legitimate gripe are people paying a decent amount of income tax while owning no property and so missing out on both types of 'refund'.

int_19h 3y ago

> I think American culture has a weird fetish for fairness. We'll do something that makes everyone worse off because at least it's distributed evenly. When you phrase it like that, it's not really an American-specific thing. I remember reading about ethological studies on very young children - not in US! - where they would be given a bunch of candy to distribute in various contrived situations. One of those was picking between something like "you get 1 candy and the other kid gets 1 candy" vs "you get 2 candies and the other kid gets 4 candies", and similar arrangements in larger groups. What they found is that there's a very strong bias towards fairness, meaning that kids were pretty consistently willing to end up with less candy themselves if that means that another kid would not get an unfair share. Which, if you think about it, is not an unreasonable trait to evolve in a social species.