Continuing the oddity...

[Ted King]

The next part of the argument I'm trying to formulate is about the distribution of wealth/income in the U.S. and how that relates to the concept of "merit" in accumulation of wealth/income. Here are questions I want to address in the argument. I'd like to hear people's responses to the questions, but also like to hear people's opinions about the questions themselves. I imagine that at the least they will need to be reworked to some degree and your responses will help inform me of factors I haven't considered yet in shaping the reformulation of the questions (or just trashing the questions and the argument altogether).

1. Should wealth/income be distributed exclusively based on what one earns (deserves or merits) as a result of their own labor?

---> 1a. What about inherited wealth? Can you inherit the merit?



2. Does the present regulated free market system function to distribute income by merit alone? (This question is only about the free market system of distribution, not other "actors" like government distribution of wealth/income.)

---> 2.a If you think it does not, in what ways does it fail to distribute income only by merit?

[cbelt3]

Quite simply I will respond that the human definition of "Fair" is "My People Get More". Every attempt at some redistribution of wealth falls into that trap and fails.

[mattkime]

>>Quite simply I will respond that the human definition of "Fair" is "My People Get More". Every attempt at some redistribution of wealth falls into that trap and fails.

thats an awfully negative take on human morality.

couldn't nearly any change to the tax code be considered "redistribution of wealth"?

[cbelt3]

Matt . Realistic if you look throughout history .

And .. Yes.

[Bill in NC]

Ultimately whose definition of "merit" do you accept?

Gangsta rap seems to have a lot of "merit" if you measure its success via the revenue it generates.

[Dennis S]

As to number 2, a portion of the richest people have always tried to get even richer at the expense of everyone else. Look at "The Grapes of Wrath." Watch old westerns. The history books are full of these stories. At different times, they are very successful in their aims, always with the government is enlisted in their cause. The government could be thwarted for a time if a certain segment of voters were not so gullible and ignorant. This is one of those times.

[Ted King]

cbelt3 wrote:
Quite simply I will respond that the human definition of "Fair" is "My People Get More". Every attempt at some redistribution of wealth falls into that trap and fails.

I would say that the way many bankers have rigged the economic system is a successful attempt to redistribute wealth to themselves. Do they also fall into the same trap?

[Ted King]

Bill in NC wrote:
Ultimately whose definition of "merit" do you accept?

That is an excellent question. Yet, it seems that the assumption most of us operate under most of the time is that if you followed the law and made some money - no matter how much - you merited that income. How do we know the "system" came up with merited amount of income if we can't define the parameters that determine what is merited? Some people are tempted to answer that the "judge" of what compensation is merited is determined by our free market. But that just assumes that the market determines merit. What is the rationale for that position?

[Ted King]

Maybe it's something in the air, but this weekend two of the bloggers I read regularly both had postings about distribution of income that fit somewhat into the nature of the questions I asked above:

Kevin Drum riffs on a posting by Matthew Yglesias:

Original Matthew Yglesias posting here:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013...ncome.html

Drum:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/20...rules-game

[ Yglesias:]
It takes an awful lot of politics to get an advanced capitalist economy up and running and generating wealth....You go through the trouble of creating advanced industrial capitalism because that's a good way to create a lot of goods and services. But the creation of goods and services would be pointless unless it served the larger cause of human welfare. Collecting taxes and giving stuff to people is every bit as much a part of advancing that cause as creating the set of institutions that allows for the wealth-creation in the first place.

The specifics of how best to do this all are (to say the least) contentious and not amenable to resolution by blog-length noodling. But the intuition that there's some coherent account of what the "market distribution" would be absent public policy is mistaken. You have policy choices all the way down.

Matt's argument is a common one, and I've seen it made dozens of times in various ways. What's more, it's an argument with a lot of force. It really is true that income distribution depends on the rules of the game, and it can favor the rich or the poor depending on who sets up the rules. There are practical limits to how much you can muck with the rules and keep your economy humming along, but within these limits there's nothing inherently natural about one set of rules vs. another.

So here's the thing to noodle on. Despite having seen this argument made dozens of times, and despite its obvious force, I've never really seen it made in a way that's very persuasive at a gut level. Conservatives have done a very good job of convincing the public that rules which favor the rich really are the most natural ones, and you fiddle with them at your peril. Liberals, conversely, haven't done a very good job of convincing the public that a different, less business and wealth-centric set of rules, would be equally natural, and would benefit more people.

What they say seems to hinge quite a bit on this claim:
"It takes an awful lot of politics to get an advanced capitalist economy up and running and generating wealth....You go through the trouble of creating advanced industrial capitalism because that's a good way to create a lot of goods and services. But the creation of goods and services would be pointless unless it served the larger cause of human welfare."
[I think it's important to keep in mind the full context for that quote - so as to more fully understand its intended implications.]

I think that claim is true, but I suspect that some or many conservatives would disagree (libertarians would almost surely disagree). I think that a discussion on this claim could be fruitful.