I want to zoom in from the big picture and look at something more local. Let's say you're like me and you're a well-paid knowledge worker in, say, San Francisco, and lets further suppose that your industry is creating an incredible stratification of wealth in a very small, volatile space.
And let's say you're like the OP, and you're feeling a little bit guilty that you're putting people out of work, and making it harder for people to meet their own basic needs in other ways.
Instead of arguing that we should all pay more taxes, tax yourself. Tip heavier. Shop local (and pay local taxes, and the local markup for the local minimum wage) instead of using your Amazon Prime membership. Consider taking on roommates and paying a higher proportion of the rent.
It's called Noblesse Oblige. It used to be a thing. It ought to be again.
why are geographically proximate people of more moral worth? It gets worse when you take the marginal utility of money into account. Capitalism has this wonderful feature where industry goes and sets up shop wherever people have it worst off because their labor is the cheapest. This infrastructure improves the crappy areas until it is no longer the worst, repeat. The world has thus been ratcheting itself out of extreme poverty since the industrial revolution.
> why are geographically proximate people of more moral worth?
This seems to be the implicit assumption whenever certain segments of the political class bemoan jobs being "shipped overseas". On a local/national scale, inequality does increase as unskilled workers face international competition. But on a global scale, inequality actually decreases as those living in the world's poorest countries see their incomes go up.
In this case at least, a likely explanation for why geographically proximate workers are deemed more worthy is that they are part of the relevant political constituency and the foreign workers are not.
The idea of politics at a local level, rather than having a single top down international government is that assuming everyone has good government then everyone's needs are advocated for equally.
So it's not so much that other workers are less worthy, it is that they should have their own representative to argue for them. If my representative is spending his/her time advocating for someone else then I am getting an unfair deal.
This is apparent in Britain over the EU debate as many believe that membership of the EU is preventing British politicians from considering the best interests of Britain whilst others advocate that EU membership is necessary for Britain to have any say at all.
But you miss the important point. It's easy to do what you think is right (at least when it comes to spending money that you have), but what's the use of it if others keep behaving in the ways you consider wrong? The whole point of it is to control other people so that they would behave right too! And if you don't have to persuade them but actually can force them to comply using the threat of violence - even better! What enlightened and liberal person wouldn't want everybody to act as he likes under the threat of violence?
I guess you're being sarcastic? I'm not really sure. What you're describing is the reason I'm not a "liberal", but I also think it's bullshit that so many of San Francisco's service workers have to live on the other side of the Bay when there's so much money in this city.
Due to space constraints, someone needs to commute for an hour. What's wrong with the person having a lower hourly productivity being the one stuck with the commute?
> What's wrong with the person having a lower hourly productivity being the one stuck with the commute?
The productivity of labor is not determined by wages. Period.
What is right with the person having a lower hourly wage being the one stuck with the commute? What is wrong with the person with the higher hourly wage being the one stuck with the commute?
Due to space constraints, what argument is there for preferential treatment of those already economically better off? It is far less of a hit on your pocketbook to shoulder the expensive commute than it is on someone making 50% of your wages. Perhaps the social expectation should be that the more money an agent makes, the greater his social responsibility to give up conveniences to those making less to better balance the equation?
There is far more reason to be found in those with higher wages being 'stuck with the commute' and living in less convenient areas than there is in an elitist notion that one ought to have the benefit of both higher wages and maximum convenience. Unless, of course, higher hourly wages also bestow upon the bearer an inherent right to misanthropy and rejection of a social obligation to produce greater equality across humankind.
Who's to say that a teacher, policeman or civil administrator has a lower hourly productivity than some rails coder working on a social mobile startup? Heck, dishwashers work harder than we do.
That opens up a debate about skills scarcity, which I can see, but calling public service jobs 'less productive' just because we get to vote (indirectly) on their paychecks seems a bit circular to me.
Not sure what this has to do with San Francisco service workers. I personally wouldn't want to live in SF, even though I visit from time to time - I think the city government should be committed to the mental hospital, but SF people are apparently fine with it, so who I am to tell them.
And yes, I was sarcastic and I meant the topicstarting post which exhibits classic liberal cliche of "why don't we just take all the wealth and redistribute it and everybody would have enough money". If the author is under 20, it's completely excusable, he just needs to do some reading and thinking, but if it's not - it's a problem. Unfortunately, quite a common one.
No I am not - the poster explicitly cited confiscatory taxes and redistribution as his proposed solution to the perceived problems. I don't care about what grows on the outside of his head, but on the inside it's exactly as I described, I didn't invent it - he told it himself by his own words (all while he did strawman the political opponents by falsely claiming Republicans did not oppose raising his taxes, which many of them did).
The person you replied to didn't mention taxes except as a metaphor 'tax yourself', talking about tipping well.
The rush to portray anybody to the economic left of Ayn Rand as a communist is the reason we won't see reasonable tax reform cleaning up deductions and all that, something that both Obama and Republicans say they support. The second Obama proposes something, it's communism, and there's no possibility for working with him.
The commenter did. I, however, highlighted the difference in his (commenters) approach with the approach of the author of the topic article, who advocates confiscatory taxes - because he's not content with doing something he thinks is right, he wants everybody to be forced to do the same.
As it often happens, first thing you do protesting stigmatization is stigmatize and paint me, protesting confiscatory taxes, as somebody who rushes "to portray anybody to the economic left of Ayn Rand as a communist" - despite the fact that I never said or implied anything of the sort.
The reason, however, why we don't see reasonable tax reform is, first, that current situation is hugely profitable for people in power - if you have power to grant tax exemptions, you will soon have a lot of friends who need tax exemptions, and these people tend to have a lot of money. If you make tax code simple and logical, you lose the power to regulate people's behavior (see how it comes back to where we started?) and you lose the influence and the friends with money. That's why we have hundreds of "deductions", "credits", etc. - because the government wants to control people, and when it can't do it by force of direct coercion, it does it by force of taxation. See the recent example of Obamacare - the fix to mandate the participation in the scheme is to do it through punitive taxation.
The second reason why we don't see reasonable tax reform is that for certain part of US political spectrum, "reasonable" means applying punitive and confiscatory tax levels on people that they do not like. You can not approach reasonable solution if you come in with hidden agenda and try to enact social-engineering agenda under the guise of economic policy.
The third reason why we don't see reasonable tax reform is that many view "tax reform" as a magic bullet that would allow us to get a free ride out of over-commitment on welfare obligations that our economy is unable to support. There's a widespread view that there's a huge amounts of "wealth" hidden by capitalists somewhere and if only we could tap into that hidden treasure all nearly broke welfare programs would suddenly become viable and sustainable in the long term. Unfortunately, this magic stash does not exist and tax reform would not fix the problem of welfare overcommitment.
>>>> The second Obama proposes something, it's communism, and there's no possibility for working with him.
This is pure organic bullshit. The problem with so many Obama proposals it's not that it is "communism" but that it stems from misguided idea that the economy needs more government-driven redistribution and that such redistribution makes everybody better off. Communists shared that idea too, but the problem is not in the communists, nobody cares too much what they think as they are largely irrelevant by now, the problem is that the idea is wrong.
Because if your whole idea of what civilization is, is a bunch of bullshit rules enforced under the threat of violence, then I find it hard to imagine you're anything but an anarchist. Or a petulant child. Or both.
I'm working on a longer answer to satisfy the people who think there's a zero-sum game between whether my neighbors get evicted or whether there are enough mosquito nets for African children, but I want to take a stab at it:
I care more about the immediate social fabric I live in than the relative poverty of people in other places. It's because I think that other social problems are merely symptoms of a mindset that allows people to think of themselves as seperate from the social fabric where they live.
I believe the way we solve the problem laid out in the OP is by creating resilient local communities that can take care of their own needs with minimal resource input, and I believe that geographic arbitrage and global division of labor have created many of the problems that responses to this post have suggested my money is better spent alleviating.
I further believe that when we solve social problems in our own commuities, we create templates for action that can be used by others, and that this is more efficient than using charity to impose solutions for social problems from without.
Lastly, I think anybody who thinks of themselves as an island, disconnected from the people and place immediately surrounding them, is delusional.
Tip heavier. Shop local (and pay local taxes, and the
local markup for the local minimum wage) instead of
using your Amazon Prime membership. Consider taking on
roommates and paying a higher proportion of the rent.
These are all ways that you can spend money to help people, and as someone who is rich (globally speaking) this is a good approach. But if you care about how far your giving goes [1] then you can do better via carefully evaluated charities like GiveDirectly [2] or the AMF [3].
Why would you shop local? That just biases in favour of people who already live in high wage San Francisco vs, say, poor labourers in China or Vietnam.
Similar to the roommate. That's just helping one random guy.
That's all fine. But there are better uses for your money to help humanity. Give to Doctors without Borders, or so.
Idea on the roommate thing that I've always found works well: add everyone's income in the house together, determine Each's percentage of the household income, and divvy up bills accordingly.
And let's say you're like the OP, and you're feeling a little bit guilty that you're putting people out of work, and making it harder for people to meet their own basic needs in other ways.
Instead of arguing that we should all pay more taxes, tax yourself. Tip heavier. Shop local (and pay local taxes, and the local markup for the local minimum wage) instead of using your Amazon Prime membership. Consider taking on roommates and paying a higher proportion of the rent.
It's called Noblesse Oblige. It used to be a thing. It ought to be again.