As a Dane, I think everyone who complains about taxes should get shot in the ass. I gave half my paycheck away in taxes.
Mostly to pay for free healthcare and education, but everyone complains about the 2% of it that goes to helping other nations.
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"Free" healthcare and education
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Exactly. It's called "Free Healthcare" and "Free Education", though, it's not a silly mistake of mine. Or roughly translated from Danish to English, the correct term for it would be "Governmental funding" - which mean "You pay us half your money because you MAY need to use some of our services".
The election just wrapped up in the Great White North, so I'm sure the neighbourly political rivalries will be winding down soon up here.
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They're disingenuous terms. The implication is that the costing has been removed, when in fact it's just been moved. Nothing is free.
Free might be difficult to achieve, but it is entirely dishonest to suggest that how much something costs is a static thing and that all you ever do is shift the price. The difference between good economic policy and bad economic policy is that the former does make things all around more accessible. For instance, I don't think there would be much rising interest in single payer in the US if the cost of healthcare wasn't so out of control. If paying some more in taxes saves the average person from a crippling debt that they can't avoid later on, it's better for everybody all around.
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Free isn't difficult to achieve, it is mathematically impossible to achieve. If a good or service was being provided at no charge there would be no incentive to provide it bevause there would be no possibility of generating a profit. When the left talks about 'free' services, they mean that the person using them doesn't necessarily have to pay at the point of use.
The difference between good economic policy and bad economic policy is that the former is good for the economy and the latter is not. If the objective of a policy or particular piece of legislation is to shift wealth around one way or another, it isn't economic policy to begin with, just the government playing Robin Hood.
Free is achievable when there is no value on an object because it takes no effort to obtain it. It's irrelevant to this conversation I know, but I couldn't say free doesn't exist at all because... well, it does. A single blade of grass won't cost you shit. Just pluck it from the ground. Likewise, what might be free in the distant future is hard to guess. But again, that's irrelevant.
Anyway, all of that aside, redistribution is a type economic policy. It's only robin hood if the entire purpose is to be nice (which isn't entirely without value if we figure the purpose of society is to improve our collective lot, but that's a digression), there are other reasons you might want to pursue redistribution. Wealth isn't created entirely by the work of one individual; if you start a small business, it's success is based on more than just your personal gumption and know-how. As the saying goes, no man is an island. Everything we do is within the context of the society we live in. Business success relies on a work force that has access to the education it needs to achieve whatever needs to be achieved, and the quality of life necessary for them to be productive workers. And also, whatever you produce requires some sort of consumer base, whether tangentially or directly. So for wealth to be created, you want the most effective consumer base you can get, and the most effective work force you can get. We recognized this way back near the turn of the century when the government began to intervene in workers conditions, or during the Great Depression when the brooding evil of the welfare state came into being as a protection against the pancake-collapse that was the pre-welfare depressions.
Now, I'm not saying we need to completely level it out. Like, I am perfect OK with the concept of people being stinking rich. It doesn't bother me at all because in reality I am not jealous, I'm just afraid. I know enough history that I can say, when a society ends up with such an overtly dangerous misdistribution of wealth, and when the lower classes start getting forced out of the system, dangerous shit starts happening. There are too many Americans who only need one more recession to fall down the ladder. You can only say "You guys are just jealous" before it starts to sound like "Let them eat cake", and I really really don't want to know what will happen if the United States has a major revolution. It's fun to talk about, but it is dangerous, and the end result could be any number of ugly things.
We still have a democracy right now. The American system is amazing as far as things go, and I don't want to see it go away. If stability means higher taxes, so be it.
There is a mathematical difference between something possessing no value whatsoever and something possessing a value that is merely very small. The value of a commodity is determined by supply and demand. There is next to no demand for a single blade of glass and quite a substantial supply, so naturally the value of a single blade of grass is something so tiny that it isn't worth fretting over. Inflation has caused this "next-to-worthless" value to be higher than ever. Nickels and pennies are so worthless that people don't even pick them up off the street when they see them. Similarly to the blade of grass, however, they still have value. Their value is just so small that it isn't worth taking. BUT, still not valueless, and this can be displayed when we increase scale. If you had millions of pennies instead of one, you'd have something with some appreciable value to it. Same as if you had millions of blades of grass. Maybe you could sell it as animal feed or kindling; again, very close to worthless is not the same as worthless. Nothing is free.
What we're arguing over here is how to define our terms. I don't consider any and all government intervention in the economy to be economic policy. My reasoning for that is that everything ever done by any government ever had some barring on the economy, so if we define 'economic policy' in such a broad way it ceases to have any significant meaning. Redistribution is not economic policy to me, then, but social policy. The primary intention of redistribution is not economic stimulus, but reverting a (real or imagined) wrongdoing against society.
Wealth inequality in the United States isn't caused by capitalism. Joe the Plumber has nothing to do with that wealth pyramid. Capitalism does not result in absolute equality of outcome, obviously, and I would argue that equality of outcome isn't even really something society should strive for, but that's besides the point. The main cause of wealth inequality in the U.S. is in fact something made possible only because of the state: fractional-reserve banking. The state allows private financial institutions to invent billions upon billions of new dollars every year, which are both fraudulently added to their own pockets and also tack onto inflation, making everyone poorer. Their reasoning for this is that it allows banks to loan multiple times more than they otherwise could, making credit incredibly cheap (and thereby throwing millions of Americans into greater and greater debt). The credit didn't cost anything to create, though, so the people who created it become obscenely wealthy. The deadliest harm inherent with this practice, though, is that over time the economy becomes so dependent on the cheap credit banks can offer that the state feels the need to bail them out at every economic downturn, when the market would otherwise purge them. If the U.S. wants to lower inequality, government should get the hell out of the U.S. economy. You could also try to solve the problem by taking some of this fraudulently (but legally) gained wealth directly from the people obtaining it, through taxes, but that's essentially putting a band-aid on a tumour.
Okay, I agree with the essence of this. I would love to see corporate welfare go away. I don't know if I've ever met a person who supported the entire 'too big to fail' concept anyway. That being said, I am no convinced that this will stabilize conditions on the ground. If the end result of a total government/wealth divide (if such a thing is even feasible) is the violently cyclical economic system we used to see in the 19th and early 20th century... I don't want to spend any of my life living in a Hooverville. I'd take a recession that means some time on unemployment over a depression that means some time on the streets any day.
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Recessions are a natural part of the business cycle that have the benefit of 'cutting waste', i.e. removing inefficiency. Their severity, how much they impact the average Joe, is determined by exactly how much waste there is to be cut. If only a few enterprises have become inefficient, only a few enterprises will be cut. If the state has intervened (through bailouts) to allow entire industries that have become inefficient to artificially stay afloat, the recession hits harder, because more enterprises are inefficient. This means that subsequent bailouts become more and more costly over time, because the enterprises they're sustaining are becoming less and less efficient. This also has the trend of encouraging more enterprises to become inefficient, or rather, discouraging the opposite. Why minimize risk when the government will just step in and save your ass if anything bad happens? It's a feedback loop, one that makes inequality worse and worse over time, makes recessions hit harder and harder every time, and makes the economy increasingly inefficient.
The government doesn't necessarily need to entirely remove itself from the economy. Just stop legalizing fraud in the finance sector and stop bailing out businesses that really should fail, and everything will be so much better off in the long run.
