Looking at the 10 years following the great recession it looks like this is what happened (although those redistributions were more explicitly directed towards the top of the pyramid upfront) but look at at how inequality statistics have moved since that event. It certainly doesn't seem to have favored those who are financially disenfranchised in our society.
The problem is the nature of society permanatly skews these events in the favor of the the people who have the most existing resources to figure out how to game the system.
If you want a much more in depth breakdown of how that happens structurally, read Hayeks the road to serfdom as I mentioned above.
But not all politicians and lawyers are serving the financial elites, whenever there's a stereotype or claim made I would like to see how this compares to Nordic countries.
In addition almost every major first would country has a socialist healthcare system, just not the US.
At any rate, this has always been my issue as well. People decry the capitalist system and when you ask why, they point to humans behaving badly. Well, no matter what economic system we have, we'll have that problem. There is no lack of corruption and self-dealing in non-capitalist systems.
Do that often enough and you’ll find people quite willing to give this “socialism” thing a chance.
You're reading into my words to say things that simply aren't there.
Second, I think you're being unfair to anm89 in another way as well. His post I could just as easily take as saying that this is an illustration of how it goes when you try to reform the system (such as, say, introduce socialism).
Now, you could argue that socialism isn't relevant at all to the article. And you'd be right. Why socialism as opposed to labor reform, or UBI, or tax reform, or whatever? But the reason to pick socialism out of that list is the current relevance. Bernie Sanders was explicitly socialist, and he came rather close to the Democratic nomination.
The more complicated systems that are created, the more there is to gamify.
I'm advocating for more limited government. A simple clear rule set is much harder to gamify. This is an equalizer, not the reverse in my opinion.
2. Are we better off by optimizing for minimal political manipulation over anything else? For hyperbolic examples: in complete anarchy, we'd have zero system manipulation, and yet I would unhappily die in The Purge. Likewise, in some Roaring '20s capitalistic caricature, I might have my small business destroyed by a monopoly, or die a child laboring away in unsafe conditions. Optimizing for being manipulatable seems far less palatable than living in modern day Denmark or something.
1) Yes this could be true in some cases but a lot of the way in which the "haves" exploit these kind of systems is by throwing man hours of attorneys and accountants at them because the rules are super verbose and complicated and so you hire profesional loop hole finders. If I simple piece of legislation is obviously exploitable, that will be more obvious from the get go and will less heavily favor the peoe who can pay the loophole finders.
Also you cant exploit things that don't exist.
2) no, I agree you have to draw your line in the sand somewhere. I'm not an anarchist. I could take your argument in the same direction to absurdity as well. If redistribution solves all problems, let's create comittees to redistribute on a person to person basis until we reach a fair utopia.
We don't do that because we acknowledge that the cost benefit of doing that gets hyperbolically negative at a certain point. What I'm advocating is that the line where that happens is actually much earlier, and that the last 10 years have shown that we are already on the wrong side of that line and that our approach to legislating away complex issues can at best handout money to certain interest in a fairly dumb way, and those groups are always going to be the ones that have a say in the legislation process via lobbying or direct involvement.
So no, I'm not arguing against child labor laws, I'm arguing against complicated redistribution programs. Nothing less, nothing more
To me, it also looks like you're putting words in his mouth that are very much not his position...
Any definitional gymnastics here are yours
It seems like the whole world is chomping at the bit to enact more socialism but do you think it's homeless people and cashiers that are defining the rules of the system and legislation? Of course not, it's lawyers and politicians. So are you really naive enough to believe that they write perfectly fair legislation that doesn't favor their interests at all?
Friedrich Hayek nailed this on the head almost 100 years ago. The problem with socialism isn't that its not an admirable goal, it's that even if you want it, by nature you aren't going to get the version of it that you wanted, you are going to get the version of it the a bunch of politically connected insiders design and while they may not be totally self serving, they are usually going to figure out how to be on the winning end of the game.
Crass said it well: "But no one ever changed the church by pulling down a steeple
And you'll never change the system by bombing number ten
Systems just aren't made of bricks they're mostly made of people"
The systems you get are the ones the people who design them make. Thinking otherwise is foolish. The people who should be the most scared of redistribution systems like this are the ones who want to look out for the interests of the little guys.