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RE: Do Socialists Even Have Real Arguments?

in #anarchism8 years ago

For the record, I agree with many of your conclusions while not necessarily liking your method of argument. I'm a Finance PhD Student and my undergraduate education was in Economics from a top US university. The argument for re-distribution of wealth is that each additional dollar you get is less meaningful to you compared to the last. For example, imagine two people who both come across a $20 bill on the street simultaneously. One person is a millionaire, the other is homeless. It's pretty clear that $20 would make a bigger difference to the homeless person than the millionaire and would be more eager to get the $20 than the millionaire. So if a legislature wants to maximize happiness, a simple way to do it is to take dollars from the rich and give them to the poor. I have personal beliefs about how working to earn money - as opposed to being given money - affects happiness, but I haven't seen research on that topic. There's also the point that redistributing money costs money, so if the government takes a dollar from a rich person, less than a dollar makes it to the poor. My point is that economics supports a mixed policy bag, not extremely liberal, conservative, libertarian or any other ideology. I do however think that economists are more prone to be libertarian because they understand domino effects and aren't usually swayed by a few isolated negative outcomes.

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That's just a bad utilitarian argument for theft. The point is, and the case against the State is, that there is no means of measuring interpersonal utility; our preferences are ranked ordinally and not cardinally, and so there is no way to measure the "social utility" gained for the "common good" that you speak of. Even if there was, there's then no ethical case for such property expropriation you nicely call "redistribution."