What tends to make for better threads is focusing on the specifics of a specific story, and steering clear of the pull of the nearest generic black holes.
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Once taxed it then belongs to the government, in a very real sense, the tax-payer no longer have access to it. While it no longer belongs to the tax-payer, it does not therefore follow that they did not earn it.
Why do some institutions (property law, contract law) count towards what I truly morally earned but not others (taxation law)?
It doesn't. It rightfully belongs to the poor who need food and healthcare.
Why is it greed for someone to keep what income/wealth/property they've earned while also is not greed to claim that someone else's income/wealth/property is actually owed to another group?
Your contention is that some institutions count as property rights (contract law etc), but taxation law doesn't. I'm telling you the line between them that you draw is drawn purely with ideology.
Taxation law isn't some adjustment that takes place after property law, it is part of property law. $X of tax paid by party A that ends up funding $X of social security payments to party B, literally belongs to party B. It is the property of party B. Not party A. It is not "someone else's" in any way.
In that way there's nothing special about the quote because most people generally recognize private ownership in everyday speech.
Claiming that something is true simply because of law is fairly short sighted. There have been and continue to be unjust laws worldwide.
"That's what the law says" is a lousy moral justification for something. There are plenty of unjust laws or just things that are not laws.
Not sure how 'ideology' is constructing any sort of counter argument to any of Sowell's arguments that I'm aware of.
If you work for me for $15/hr and produce value v where $v <= $15, I won't keep you on.
>> Why did the rich man "earn" it but not the poor man? Why is it "somebody else's" when it's the poor man's money but not when it's the rich man's money?
>> The answer is ideology.
> His comment holds true if you don't assume that every single 'rich' person did not 'earn' their wealth, and only gained due to corruption.
No it doesn't. His comment holds true only if you assume the current economic system that created the rich and poor men is right and just. For instance: the rich man is rich typically because he owns the capital (which can be owned at massive scale) and "earns" its profits. The laborers that operate that capital for him are much poorer than he is, because all they "earn" are wages for their time (which cannot scale). Sure a particular rich man theoretically can loose his shirt (but so can laborers, for different reasons), but the general relationship will remain the same between those groups under the current system.
It's a deeply ideological assumption that the labor that enables profit is entitled to none of it (as such), and the owner (who may have enabled none of it) is entitled to all of it. Admittedly, it's an ideological assumption so fundamental to current society that it can be as hard to see as a mountain you're standing on.
> Not sure how 'ideology' is constructing any sort of counter argument to any of Sowell's arguments that I'm aware of.
I think the point is it's not much of an argument if it's little more than the output of certain ideological assumptions (e.g. assume P therefore P).
There is is no input from people with lower income. It’s an insider group that negotiates and deals with itself.
The notes on political corruption and union stomping over the past 60 years are intriguing, do you have any good references to solid academic sources on these or related topics?
So I fully understand how you think his views are utra-reductionist.
The partial solution for information involves requiring more disclosures, having a smaller government with higher transparence, and (historically impossible) making that information easily available and publicly searchable on the internet. This also tends to help reduce the corruption issue.
A complete solution for either corruption or information transfer seems out of reach at the moment.
The short answer is simply that of all the systems we've tried as humans, capitalism (though imperfect) is the least worst and results in the least human suffering.
My question: an oft repeated refrain, when Marx is touted as a reasonable alternative, is that any time anyone tried his ideas out, it was a total disaster (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Chavez).
I have watched some Wolff on Youtube, as well as other lectures on Marxism, because I'm interested and relatively agnostic on the economic spectrum. But I never see this point (tens of millions dead due to internal issues, in these societies, in the 20th century) refuted with any scholarly heft - do you have any recommendations?
I think Steven Pinker is dead on about why Marx (and other interpretations of far left economic thought such as Chomsky's flavors of anarchism) are dead in the water - they fundamentally misunderstand human nature. I'm looking for someone who sounds as clear as Pinker, that can counter this take. Any suggestions?
I've not read Marx, nor am I a Marxist, but my understanding is that most of his work is a diagnosis of a problem, not a plan for a cure. IIRC, Marx's own "plan" was basically more capitalism harder until it collapses and something ill-defined without its problems emerges from the ashes. Those people you cite (assuming they even wanted to improve anything rather than amass personal power), can probably be thought as a doctor who could correctly diagnose cancer but proposed a incorrect theory for a cure (e.g. something based on the four humors). Their failure to cure cancer doesn't mean the patient didn't have cancer or that cancer can't be cured.
Just to note, also, Chavez is the only person in that list who wasn't a Marxist-Leninist, and it's not helpful to understanding to include him in that list.
But we have no model for what a healthy, capitalism-free society would look like. Every attempt at removing capitalism from the system has led to totalitarian results.
This doesn't prove that capitalism is the best possible system, but it strongly suggests that alternatives are worse.
That's not quite accurate, since capitalism hasn't always existed and markets haven't haven't always been the primary means of exchange. There's also a fairly broad range of capitalist systems with different trade offs. We also don't know if capitalism won't also ultimately lead to totalitarian results.
In these discussions, we also probably need to make a distinction between capitalism and markets. You could perhaps have a society that keeps markets more-or-less as they are but "removes capitalism" by implementing a different relationship between labor and ownership, for instance.
> This doesn't prove that capitalism is the best possible system, but it strongly suggests that alternatives are worse.
I dispute the latter point. It's kinda like saying the failure of the iAPX 432 and Itanium strongly suggests there's no better alternative to the x86 architecture. In this case, I don't think we have much understanding about what's unknown.
A couple things. Chavez is of a different category from the other three just on the amount of death under the other regimes. The question of the results of socialism and capitalism is complex. It's worth reading both historical and economically focused works to get a more nuanced view than the one that you've laid out. For a few suggestions:
On historical critiques of the US-centric perspective:
The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins
The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad
A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn
Economic works:
Competing Economic Theories, Richard Wolff
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, David Harvey
There are more authors (Kliman, Moseley, Shaikh, etc.), but these two would be a good start.
These are works with particular perspectives and should be read as such. If you want competing ideological works, read a standard history book and Hayek, Mises, Friedman, etc.
It is worth noting that both Marx and Engels were in favour of democracy, even going as far as saying that the actual means of production should be democratized. Both would probably be appalled by what became of their theories under Stalin and Mao...
Also, as Marx got older he got less and less political active, there is even a letter where he refused to be seen as a leading figure of the communist movement. Das Kapital is from this later period of his life, and subsequently very scant on noneconomic politics...
Also, I don't know how anybody could say that kind of thing about Marx, specifically Das Kapital, which is what I'm most familiar with. It doesn't delve much into human nature, it's all about modes of production and exchange and labor value.
Taleb leans libertarian on large scales himself.
I am a software engineer. I have a rate of pay that I consider to be more valuable than my labor, for which I will gladly exchange my labor and feel as though I have profited from the transaction. Prospective employers have an amount of labor output that they value more than a rate of pay, for which they will gladly exchange in an attempt to profit from the transaction. We engage in a mutual arrangement, wherein we both walk away having benefitted from the transaction. The fact that the employer has the capacity to profit from my output is not theft. In fact, I would feel absolutely horrible if my employer didn't profit from me at all, because I ALWAYS profit from them.
I can assure you that the Harvard and Yale educated professor that's written textbooks on the subject knows how markets work. He might be heterodox in his adherence to marxist economics, but he fully understands the orthodox position, almost certainly in more detail than you or I ever will.
Similarly, saying that Kurt Wise doesn't understand geology and paleontology when he has a PhD in the field and has contributed good science is pretty absurd.
Dismissing their claims lie in other arguments.