Equality of Outcome vs. Innovation
Wednesday, May 01, 2019
In case anyone was wondering...
No: The recent revelations about Bernie "Millionaires and Billionaires -- I mean Billionaires" Sanders's income haven't helped any prominent leftists see that having more income than someone else isn't a sign of moral turpitude. It's just caused them to imagine that they should impose a national ceiling on income, which they will foist on the public as "free money" for the majority:
Setting aside my usual objection to such proposals as based on theft, get a load of the cluelessness and the presumption here. Who rewards entrepreneurs? Their paying customers. And who the hell is Elizabeth Warren or the fools at Vox to decide how much is "enough" for an individual earning money from such transactions?Not only are millionaires less blameworthy for inequality than billionaires, I'd go even further: A reasonable long-term goal of public policy would be to create fewer billionaires and more millionaires. Where would the additional millionaires come from? Some would come from above, as billion dollar fortunes would be taxed and economic structures reformed. Entrepreneurs would still be amply rewarded for ingenuity and risk-taking, but those rewards would come with two commas, not three. A suitable motto for Elizabeth Warren's proposed wealth tax -- and for the new wave of democratic socialists -- might be, "What if all the billionaires became just multimillionaires?" which is hardly a revolutionary chant. [bold added]
And for the women, once you bypass the glass ceiling, you'll have an income ceiling waiting for you. (Image by Franck V., via Unsplash, license.)
I hope I am not alone in feeling deeply insulted by the very idea. And that's on top of the real obscenity, which is the injustice of telling the next Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos: "Want to improve lives in win-win transactions? Great, but past a certain point, you'll have to do it for free."
-- CAV
4 comments:
Hi Gus,
Isn't it interesting that the share the wealth folks are willing to tell YOU when YOU'VE made enough money, but have zippo to say about the billions plundered from unfortunate victims by their fellow travelers on the road to socialism? I'm thinking Maduro as a recent case along with Chavez's daughter, and any number of Soviet-sponsored African strong men from the past 70 years.
What people don't realize is that Obama's "At a certain point you've made enough money" (which, interestingly enough, apparently doesn't apply to him), becomes, in the words Obamacare co-architect Ezekiel Emanuel, "At a certain point, you've lived long enough." Any guesses as to which institution controlled by whom is going to be making those determinations?
It's no accident that authoritarian regimes target the property of their victims before all else. It reduces their options when the gov't decides that it's time to take their liberty and life as well.
When the advocates of such regimes are stood up against the wall by their former fellow travelers who have now deemed them 'deviants', or the advocates of beheading the rich find themselves facing a mob whose wealth cutoff is a bit south of what those advocates themselves proposed (reflecting their own level of riches) I confess that I won't be shedding any tears for them.
c andrew
C.,
Your last paragraph is the thought I wish just a few of these boors would have, once in a blue moon. But they're too busy fantasizing about being THE dictator to worry about considering other alternatives or outcomes.
Gus
Your last line is the part that has always fascinated me about the mentality of so many of our politicians (Left and Right). They want power for themselves, and give no thought to what the other side would do with it. As I said on Facebook when Trump was elected, had the Left not spent nearly a decade giving Obama as much power as possible Trump would not be such a threat to their way of life. To be fair, the reason Obama was such a threat was that the Right had spent eight years giving Bush as much power as they possibly could.
The Founding Fathers seem to be nearly unique among politicians in that they recognized this danger and tried to avoid it. But you would think that after a few iterations both sides would realize that their opponents will in fact win future elections on occasion.
I blame pragmatism in large part for this widespread phenomenon.
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