I paid a health insurance in exchange of transferring that risk to them and as a result, I have the same right to an IC bed as everyone else. That’s how insurances work, not only health insurance but also liability insurance for example. There is still no contradiction.
So, let me get this right. You pay X to your health insurance per year and you think is ok that you take back or more?
The scenarios are 2:
at the end of the year you might had 0 medical cost, therefor paid money for your premium for no reason ( which are used by the health insurance to pay other costs)
at the end of the year you might have paid 100k medical cost, which exceed how much you paid in premium, and the money comes from somewhere else
So if I pay AHV/IV… ? I am a burden…? but you can be with other people money cause you are afraid of a needle in your arm?
I wanna see one of your amazing answer ignoring stuff and talking about a Lamborghini.
It’s quite obvious - due to demographic pressure combined with democratic elections, anyone who’s productive will be a tax slave of the state in the future. Unless there will be some revolution of the youth against the eldery and the public sector which live at their expense. But being a socialist slave becomes trendy so I doubt in that scenario.
Even if that were true, it doesn’t justifies the redistribution. First, on very basic moral principles it’s unjust to take other people’s stuff away by force just because you don’t like inequality; second, on utilitarian grounds, somebody has to first prove that redistribution (which produces rent-seeking and weakens productive incentives to work, save and invest) will in result produce better economic outcome than non-redistribution (unless our goal is to make everybody poorer); third, if you really have problem with your income and wealth, you can give it away - give a good example before you vote for politicians to rob other people.
Well it is. You do not have control over your genes nor your environment and the decisions that follow from them. So every decision or ability you have or make is outside of your control.
Since you do not have any say about your decisions or abilities and they are responsible for the amount of wealth that you generate, then it follows that you have no say about how much wealth you generate. So it is all luck.
If you learn more about human behavior, you will quickly realize, that the concept of free will makes no sense.
Says who? I don’t think it is unjust. I think not doing it is unjust.
Yes, that is why you don’t redistribute everything but optimize your system for maximizing well being. The utility for money for a person is marginal. 25k per year more will improve well being for a person that earns 25k than it is for a person that earns 100k.
Here is a good simulation on how this would work:
This runs in the problem that it is a tax on good morals.
I think David Mitchell describes that problem quite well here:
Actually, this corresponds a with the discussion we have in another thread. It’s been mentioned that an excess of credit brings down a depression, in which taxes for the rich are raised (we see this happen), debt is being restructured/annulled (don’t think we see this happen yet?) and people cut down on spending (not sure) which all have a deflationary effect, and they are paired with money printing by the central bank (inflationary) to balance it out. (btw I’d love it if you could chip in on that discussion)
You completely ignored the rent-seeking problem (and general account of public choice economics which idescribes how the government really works instead of how we wish it would work in our socialist-utopian visions) and general economic incentives problem. You know that wages depend on the capital accumulation per capita, right? Less capital means less jobs, less incentives to accumulate capital means less capital. Of course, to some extent this can be “optimized” to not produce “too much” perverse incentives (paying people to not work, not save and not invest), but in general, the more redistribution you have, the less efficient economic system will be, and thus the poorer everybody will be. And the comparison of Switzerland and most of other European countries (not speaking of socialist non-European countries) proves the point.
And yet it still makes perfect sense to put criminals in prison. And so it also makes sense to reward productive people with access to more capital. It’s the people who know what to do with capital, that accelerate productivity growth of the entire population. If you take away it from them, you’re doomed to make everyone equal. Equally poor, that is!
I would say that this is a very flimsy grounding in data. Comparing wealth between countries is really hard. Some big expenses(cars for example) may be necessary in one country and not in another.
I have a few key points.
General well being is the ultimate target
The ability to create wealth is 100% luck
Creating wealth should be incentivized
Money has marginal utility for people
The only real thing where I’m leaning out of the window is the first point. The other are either based in science or follow from the first.
What the system of wealth redistribution should look like should be based on good data.
Precisely, that was my point. Even if we have no free will and everything is biologically determined, it still pays off to punish crime and reward virtue (hard work, thrift and investing), as the general externalities (spill-over effects) of these actions make the social fabric efficient (not matter whether rewards are “deserved” or not). Making equal criminals and saints on practical grounds would just produce a chaos in worst case or unsustainable economy in the best case, not even speaking of ethical implications of such policies.
OK and since it’s all luck (and I think I can even agree with you on a fundamental level), then we should make it up to all those unlucky ones and punish the lucky one, yes? Can you confirm, please?
I guess becoming a murderer or a pedophile as a result of the deterministic universal alignment of atoms is pretty unlucky, wouldn’t you say? I guess we should thus compensate all the murderers and pedophiles for their very unhappy lives? I mean, this logic follows from what you’re saying.
The rich and successful people should be disregarded, as they don’t own their success, it’s just a happy coincidence. They should not be championed, but rather despised for holding onto capital and “letting others starve”. Right? …
I completely agree. But we shouldn’t put them in prison as a punishment. It is either to enable them to resocialize or to separate them from society if that is not possible.
Similarly the system should incentivize wealth creation. I’m sure that it is possible to figure out how the tax rate influences the wealth creation of individuals. We should base the system on such data.
We are constrained by resources and the ability of humans to create wealth. If we had infinite wealth, then it would make sense to make such people happy as well. Even if that is a very hard pill to swallow.
I think this is much easier to see with pedophiles as I think nowadays most people agree that you don’t have any control over your sexual orientation. This has also the benefit of reducing the harm that pedophiles do as most pedophiles don’t ever lay hand on a child. Treating them as humans and offering them help will increase the proportion that doesn’t act on their desires.
Well, we can fly them to Mars I don’t know what other option there is, death penalty?
Yes. Human beings, even if deterministic, respond to incentives, positive and negative reinforcement. We have morals and ethics. I believe that punitive taxation will lead to fewer people working hard. And massive capital redistribution will lead to ineffective capital allocation, which will lower productivity. This is what life was in Poland in the 80s.
I think the narrative put forward by socialists is very negative and destructive. Human beings have their innate psychology and cannot be molded into homo sovieticus. We want to be better than others etc.
And going back to the problem of rent-seeking and how realistic it is to hope for the transfers to not be captured by organized interests. Here’s a good account of this problem in US:
Such an examination yields a striking fact: most government transfers are not from the rich to the poor. Instead, government takes from the relatively unorganized (e.g., consumers and general taxpayers) and gives to the relatively organized (groups politically organized around common interests, such as the elderly, sugar farmers, and steel producers). The most important factor in determining the pattern of redistribution appears to be political influence, not poverty. Of the $1.07 trillion in federal transfers in 2000, only about 29 percent, or $312 billion, was means tested (earmarked for the poor) (Rector 2001, p. 2). The other 71 percent—about $758 billion in 2000—was distributed with little attention to need.
Take Social Security, for example. The net worth per family of the elderly is about twice that of families in general. Yet, Social Security payments transferred $406 billion in 2003 to the elderly, regardless of their wealth. Also, qualifying for Medicare requires only that one be sixty-five or older. Because this age group’s poverty rate is quite low (only 10.4 percent in 2002), most of the more than $280 billion in annual Medicare benefits go to the nonpoor.
I’d agree on that but I doubt it is possible to “figure out” these numbers. Hayek explained that perfectly in his classic essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society”:
What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic. That is, the answer to the question of what is the best use of the available means is implicit in our assumptions. The conditions which the solution of this optimum problem must satisfy have been fully worked out and can be stated best in mathematical form: put at their briefest, they are that the marginal rates of substitution between any two commodities or factors must be the same in all their different uses.
This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces. And the economic calculus which we have developed to solve this logical problem, though an important step toward the solution of the economic problem of society, does not yet provide an answer to it. The reason for this is that the “data” from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society “given” to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given.
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
Long story short: you can’t calculate something with data that is not fully given and is changing all the time. Society is too complex phenomena to put it in a mathematical equation.
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I don’t know what other option there is, death penalty?