Political & Elections

If you take a step back and look at it what is amazing is that we’re even having this discussion.

It takes such a massive denial of the facts, and of history, and of human nature, to even seriously consider the possibility that still more redistribution might be a good thing that one can’t help but wonder as to the mental capacity of those who cling to the idea.

It’s been tried, in myriad ways, through the centuries, and all it has ever done is make life worse, and markedly so, every time, everywhere.

And yet, people still advocate it with a straight face. This defies comprehension.

The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.

In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s.

How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth -- and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.
…
Fidel Castro's confiscatory policies drove successful Cubans to flee to Florida, often leaving much of their physical wealth behind. But poverty-stricken refugees rose to prosperity again in Florida, while the wealth they left behind in Cuba did not prevent the people there from being poverty stricken under Castro. The lasting wealth the refugees took with them was their human capital.
…
Barack Obama can endlessly proclaim his slogan of "Forward," but what he is proposing is going backwards to policies that have failed repeatedly in countries around the world.

Yet, to many people who cannot be bothered to stop and think, redistribution sounds good. From: The Fallacy of Redistribution

The phrase above in bold describes fundamental human nature. It’s only natural that that’s what will happen, and at all levels, not just among “the rich.” The knowledge that the more you make – the more wealth you create – the more of it the government is going to confiscate is heartbreaking.

The knowledge that the more of your own blood, sweat, tears, heart, and soul you pour into making life better for yourself and for your family on the chance that that effort will achieve your objective, the more the government will swoop in and just take it from you is demoralizing. It is soul crushing.

Redistribution is probably the best single DISincentive of wealth production that can be devised.

You probably could not design a better way to crush the spirit of a people and pound them into hopeless, defeated, submission of their will and energy and spirit, if that was your objective, than redistribution of wealth.

How can redistributionists not see that? How can seemingly intelligent people be so utterly blind as to not grasp this simple, basic, fact about humanity; about human nature?

The problem could actually be worse than Sowell suggests in the final sentence of the quote above. His presumption that redistributionists actually can stop and think may be a false premise.

The human mind is not a blank slate at birth. We are born with hundreds of millions of years of experience built into our psyche by natural selection. Each of us is equipped with an innate set of social threat detectors; intuitive senses that allow us to distinguish between helpful and hurtful individual and group social behavior; instinctive feelings to like or dislike, approach or avoid, fight or flee certain ways the people around us act.

These social threat detectors are not only the tools of our subconscious intuition; they are also the tools of our conscious “reason.” They are the cognitive mechanisms, the mental algorithms, we use to consciously process and assess the things we see happening in the world around us.

Statistically speaking, in the aggregate, on average, liberal subconscious intuition and conscious reason employ about half of the social threat detectors. The liberal mind is heavily predisposed toward employing the threat detectors that are focused on the organism of the individual human, and just as heavily predisposed to ignore, and even to openly reject as “bad,” the threat detectors that are focused on the living, breathing, organism of groups of humans. The conservative mind is predisposed to see both organisms – the individual and the society - equally.

I think nobody will deny that it is also true that liberals have a much greater tendency to be redistributionists than conservatives.
Get the connection?

The tunnel vision style fixation of the liberal mind on “care” of the individual fails to intuitively perceive or rationally “reason” in a way that allows it to grasp the cause and effect relationship between redistributive policies and what happens to the community. Communist Russia couldn’t see it, Castro’s Cuba couldn’t see it, and liberal Westerners can’t see it. Why? Because none of them are playing with the full deck of social threat detectors that natural selection has given to us. This is why, when faced with the facts of the failure of redistribution in those countries and here (e.g., the so-called “stimulus”) their typical response is, “Well we just didn’t do it right,” or “We didn’t do enough of it.” The possibility that the policies themselves might in fact be counter productive is simply not within the realm of possibilities of the conscious and subconscious cognitive capacities of a mind which employs only about half of the lessons millions of years of evolution have taught it.






-- Edited by winchester on Thursday 20th of September 2012 10:57:12 AM

Honestly longprime the eliminating mortgage deduction would kill our economy right now.

We need to get back on track. Yrs and yrs ago credit card interest rates were tax deductible. We can get there, but we need to get out of this recession first.

1 in 6 jobs are tied to the housing industry. We need to get that industry sustainable before we hit the buying/renting perspective.

Samurai,

We use the long form too. That is my point.

Redistributing wealth is one thing, it sounds honorable, but when you have the option, do you do the long form to keep money in your pocket or do you do the short and hand over money to the govt for them to spend?


I agree it is foolish to leave money on the table. I am just saying to those behind Obama's premise. be honest...did you file taxes so your family paid less? If so why?

You are saying Obama is correct with the premise the govt needs to help the less fortunate, but if you do long you proved that your family took priority. Nothing wrong with that at all. Just don't throw stones at people who placed their family first.

Seriously, if you say you did a long form when you own a home and defend Obama's position, IMPHO you are a hypocrite. You used the system for your needs. You could have done a short form and paid more taxes to support govt programs. You didn't, thus don't give lectures about helping the unfortunate.

Look in the mirror before you judge.

Most of us use the long form do it because we can. It is foolish to leave money on table if it's available. I will take every tax deduction I can, long as I can, until they change the law. I am not going to lie about my numbers, though. For most of the last many years, whatever we would get back from federal ended up going to state tax coffers. Even running my own business hasn't been a boon to help all that much. We end up owing state or federal every year...and have for as many years as I can remember, even when we had extended unemployment.