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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3204 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 16, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I recently read this article, which seems to have awoken some latent bleeding heart in me. As a result, it’s got me thinking about wealth redistribution, whence the following questions:

  • What are some of the best “utilitarian” arguments against greater wealth redistribution in America? (When I say “utilitarian”, I don’t actually mean calculating out the utils involved— but I do mean arguments other than moral ones like “people ought be able to retain the results of their labor” (which argument I am particularly sympathetic to around tax season).) What are estimates of the argmax of the Laffer curve? Is there an inverse relationship between “innovation” and income tax rate that might explain why America is far more of a tech hub than Sweden? That sort of argument is what I would be looking for.
  • Are there any low-overhead charities out there where you can mostly-directly send money to poorer people? Preferably with options to filter by criteria such as number of kids, marital status, etc.

I understand that this post betrays a real naïveté in both economic knowledge and worldly experience— so I’ll admit that I’m a decent bit embarrassed about making it, but I figure that a Small-Scale Question Sunday thread is the best place to ask this.

One of the primary problems is that you can't redistribute "wealth", you can only redistribute money, land and status to a limited degree.

The big secondary problem is that most wealth doesn't exist in any real form. It's all valuation and market incentives, which means a lot of people's aggregated opinions about how much something is worth, and it could be worth that, or it could be worth nothing.

Elizabeth Holmes had a company worth 4.5 billion at one point, but the real value was negative. None of that money existed. No one ever drew a dime of that money in wages, or spent it on anything. It was theoretical money, theoretical wealth, just the opinions of some upper-crust shitheels who got conned by a blonde chick. Numbers in a computer. None of this shit exists, the mortgages, the stocks, the bonds, the Nikei, Wall Street, etc. It's all opinion and social convention.

Tertiary problem, if you redistribute money, the elites will just inflate the money supply and all will be for nothing.

Land and status are more promising, but both are zero-sum games and thus require harsh trade-offs. We focus on redistribution of money ("wealth") because it is theoretically boundless, and any elite losses can be inflated away easily.

There is only one way to actually redistribute wealth, and that is for a different elite to take the possessions and positions of the current elite by force. This doesn't help the common people, but it isn't meant to.

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