PPR: A Tale of Two Caucuses

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I think it would be interesting if we did a mock congress right here in Politics, Philosophy, and Religion. We could deliberate on and then vote for or against resolutions to express the will of this chamber. To start, we'd break participants into two opposing caucuses:

• The Tax-and-Spend Caucus
  
  • Believe the government should tax, regulate, and control all forms of behavior and endeavor
  • Crush innovation and competitiveness
  • Possible genocidal tendencies
  • Collectivism
• The Liberty Caucus
  
  • Believe in freedom
  • "Freedom isn't free," necessitating various wars of necessity
  • Liberty comes from God and thus only believers are entitled to it
  • Self-reliance, responsibility, and individualism
  • Bourgeois respectability and consumerism

Better way to caucus up PPR:

Liberty can be bought Caucus

- Rightl-libertarians, who seek a society where effective self-ownership is impossible for propertyless persons
- Believe children should be "free" (i.e. pressured by their poor parents) to work.
- Believe in toll roads.
- Believe people's houses should burn down if they don't pay a subscription fee to the Privatized Fire Department in advance.

Consistently wrong Caucus

- Would have believed slavery, bans on interracial marriage, criminalized divorce, and criminalized homosexuality are good ideas had the overton window not shifted.
- Pretend not to be racist, 20 years in the future they'll admit that they were racist then but today's code-word covered up prejudice isn't racism!
- Think the poor are lazy and subhuman.
- Want to (metaphorically) turn the opiate of masses into the cocaine of the masses

Sane Caucus

-Believe in equality of liberty
- Believe in the granting of effective self-ownership for propertyless persons
- Support efforts to lower the Gini index

Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coeff ... inequality.

The surest way of minimizing the Gini measure of inequality is for everyone to earn the same amount of money. Does that sound good to you? It does not sound good to me.

ruveyn

The problem isn't everyone making the same. The problem is the disparity between the highs and the lows and the effect that has on prices.

What is the big deal with racists on this forum?

Why isn't zero disparity wonderful, then?

ruveyn

There really aren't very many racists on this forum although we tend to notice them when they come here, but if any do arrive, I assume they'd caucus with the Liberals (i.e., the Liberty Caucus). Those who strongly believe in racial equality, enforced through the State, would caucus with the Authoritarians (i.e., the Tax-and-Spend Caucus).

There's no reward or motivation. There needs to be disparity but there also needs to be moderation in it to preserve the value of money for everyone else. you could scrape off a few billion off the multi-millionaires and billionaires of the country and fund all the necessary programs for actual societal growth and they would still be able to live lives of achievement and privilege and you would see an increase in the value of the money as the more educated started to innovate more and can live healthier lives. The reward tier needs to be there for achievement but it shouldn't be to the point where everyone else suffers inflation at their hoarding.

I didn't say minimize it to zero. Something near (perhaps a bit higher) than Sweden's level of inequality would suffice.

Mostly Ska's point about motivation, but also complete equality is impossible for logistical reasons. Even when I considered myself a socialist (once upon a time) I was never in favor of complete equality. In fact, if you visit the website of America's Socialist Party you will find that even they don't support zero disparity, and they are about as radical as you can get. The idea is that massive inequalities, with a few obscenely wealthy individuals lording it over the starving masses, is a very bad thing, and so extreme inequalities should be reduced. There are very few on the American right who truly object to this principle, and there are even fewer on the left who argue for zero disparity. Thus the argument is merely about how much the government should be involved in reducing the gap between rich and poor, with liberals arguing for a smaller gap and conservatives arguing for a bigger gap.

I think the goal shouldn't be to minimize the Gini index by income alone. The ratio of effort expended per dollar of income is the ideal measure to equalize. It seems pretty obvious to me that people who have excessive wealth don't expend nearly as much effort per dollar of income earned than those who live on subsistence wages. People born into a wealthy enough family don't have to work at all. They can simply live off inheritance and investment instruments without doing a shred of real work. This is a fact the Social Darwinists like to sweep under the rug.

Even if you did away with money and property inheritance you could not undo the difference in quality of parenting. Think of John Stuart Mill. He could speak Greek at five years old because his father saw to it that he was schooled properly. Preventing inheritance will not make that difference in quality go away.

The Gini index is bogus to the extent that unquantifiable intangibles really and truly make a difference.

ruveyn

I'd rather not given that he was born into a family of means. His father was an economist, political theorist, philosopher, and historian.

The point I am making is this. Even if the elder Mills estate were confiscated J.S.Mill would have had the advantage of a superior education. There are cultural aspects to life that do not reduce to money and property (not that there is anything wrong with money or property, mind you).

ruveyn

I think the goal shouldn't be to minimize the Gini index by income alone. The ratio of effort expended per dollar of income is the ideal measure to equalize. It seems pretty obvious to me that people who have excessive wealth don't expend nearly as much effort per dollar of income earned than those who live on subsistence wages. People born into a wealthy enough family don't have to work at all. They can simply live off inheritance and investment instruments without doing a shred of real work. This is a fact the Social Darwinists like to sweep under the rug.[/quote]

I have the solution! It was suggested by Kurt Vonegut in his short novel -Harrison Bergeron-.

What we need is the Handicapper General.

ruveyn