New study/experiment. Uber conservatives now get a diagnosis?

[orthodoc]

Originally Posted by DanaC

I think the distinction lies in the way that system is balanced/weighted. Though it is progressive, it is not progressive enough (for myself, as a Marxist Chicken Little). I personally favour a more distributive approach to taxation.

In other words, redistribute wealth so that no one has more than Dana? I notice that communist sympathizers tend to think that their level of wealth and living is just about 'right'. Are you willing to work harder than you do now, wherever the central planners send you, at whatever job they decree for you, and live in a cardboard box? By the standards of many countries, you are 'too rich'. You could always send them all your income and live on the street, if you believe in your principles. The problem arises when you want to force everyone else to do the same.

It's also about intent. Is the intent just to bring in enough revenue to run the country (with the allowance made for differencnes in income and therefore percentage of the burden), or is the intent to try and bring about a more equitable society?

Here's where the rubber meets the road. Progressive taxation isn't enough for you; but how do you define a 'more equitable society'? You're talking about a massive seizure of wealth and assets with a view to making unequal things equal (Aristotle didn't approve of this). The problem is that a) such a seizure of property and the product of individual labor will require violence, since no intelligent person will voluntarily give everything they have produced to people who haven't made it and can't continue to produce it; and b) the fact is that, while we're all equal in terms of being born with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we're not all the same. The guy who started a company and developed it into a huge, profitable enterprise is not exchangeable with the guy who mops the floors. They both do important work, but put the floor-mopping guy in charge and you get what happened in the Soviet Union.

As an aside, although you insist that the Soviet Union isn't an example of Marxism in practice, Marx did view revolution as necessary to his program. Solzhenitsyn and Rand, who were far more intimately familiar with Soviet Marxism than you ever can have been, knew they were living under Marxism and that Marxism requires violence and oppression. How can you say you're a Marxist, and then claim that an essential part of Marx's program was a 'mistake'? The 'mistake' is inherent in his philosophy.

Obviously, I realise that not everyone agrees that this would be the effect of redistributive taxation, or even that this is something that should be 'socially engineered' in that way.

Very true. Social engineering is a euphemism for central control and oppression. You can't redistribute all the wealth in a country to be 'nice' to one group of people without doing violence to another group. All the talk about democracy is a sham.