Should Government Stay Out of Social Policy Altogether?

[Tsyal Makto]

Originally Posted by Banefull

I don't see how this is possible. On a mass scale, no one is going to agree to give up their possessions. If it came down a vote, the losing side would be forced to do so (that upper 49% of the population).

I will use the United States as an example. If you took the entire GDP of the United States and distributed it amongst all of its inhabitants equally, then each person would have around $46,000. A typical starting engineer makes around $50,000 his or her first year. If everyone had the exact same amount of capital, then this figure would drop significantly over time. Businesses need hundreds of thousands, millions, or even billions to run. Without concentrated pockets of wealth, investment plummets and everyone finds themselves with less than they had before wealth re-distribution.

Now don't get me wrong we need social programs to provide aid, but wealth redistribution on such a scale goes too far.

Don't take it to extremes. No sane leader would redistribute wealth to the point where everyone had the exact same amount of money, that would be economic/political suicide. However, we need to work towards reducing the income disparity in the United States, which is reaching the highest level that any industrialized nation currently has. Obviously the businesses need money to run, but the people that run those businesses don't need to be taking home the obscenely high wages that they currently are getting. In fact, in many cases, their own greed ends up hurting their own businesses in the end (think bank bailout). Currently 1 in 5 people in the US are living below the poverty line, and 1 in 7 children, while at the same time some on Wall Streeters and other "haves" are taking home, personally, billions of dollars a year (that's personal income, not profit within the company) without giving back, and without paying their fair share of taxes. Obviously something is wrong here.

The US needs to work towards the system Europe has. Everyone gets to keep what they make, but those that should be paying more in taxes (the rich, who use more resources and services) do, and that money is used to help those who don't have the means to help themselves. Plus, in the US, progressive taxation would help pay down the national debt, because keeping our current system of upper-class tax cuts would add another $3 trillion to it.

This supply-side ideology of tax cuts for the rich has been an utter failure (go take a gander at the laissez faire paradise of Somalia). Hell, even Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, believed in progressive taxation. Europe kept the Keynesian, demand-side economic system, and while it has it's own share of problems, it is in better shape overall than the US. The thing seems to be that Americans have an irrational fear of anything government related when it comes to economics.