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Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Nothing Comes From Nothing

What I said was that all governments, by their very nature, are socialist to some degree, but some are more socialist than others. In saying that governments confiscate and redistribute wealth, I left out an important part. They don't necessarily redistribute the confiscated wealth directly to individuals, some of it is used for public works projects like roads and bridges. In a manner of speaking, it's the same only different. They take our money and build a road that everybody can use, no matter how much tax they paid into the system. A pure libertarian would say that they shouldn't even do that, but I disagree. Private property is worthless if the owner can't access it, and  public roads are the most efficient means to provide that access. If all roads were private, people would have to pay tolls to use them, and the cost of the tolls would be added to every product that is transported on them, which is not all that different from the taxes we pay now, except that the government cannot arbitrarily deny access to public roads like a private road owner could. So not all socialism is a bad thing but, of course, not everybody agrees about how much is too much.

Social Security is certainly an expression of socialism, but it has worked surprisingly well, up till now. People have been predicting that the fund would go bankrupt for a long time, and it hasn't happened yet. I think there is general agreement, however, that, if present trends continue, the system will run out of money sooner or later. When that happens, they are going to have to do something, either modify the system or scrap it altogether and start all over again with something different. Maybe they will come up with something like Obamacare, where everybody is required to invest part of their earnings in some kind of private pension plan. If they do, it will likely be the Democrats who push for it, even though, like Obamacare, it will be a sweetheart deal for the big investment companies. So much for the Republicans being the party of big business.

Your restaurant analogy has one thing wrong with it: In real life, we don't all contribute equally to the system. If everybody in the restaurant paid a different amount of money for their meal, and they all got the same meal, would that be fair? Of course, in real life, everybody does not have the ability to contribute equally to the system, so it would be unreasonable to expect them to. An idea about that just now popped into my head, but it could be kind of a long story, so I'll save it for tomorrow.

Wealth is not created out of nothing. Money is created out of nothing, but money is not wealth, it just represents wealth. If they create more money than there is wealth for it to represent, the money is  devalued, which is commonly called "inflation". Transfer is not the same thing as creation. If you take a dollar from one guy and give it to another guy, they still only have one dollar between the two of them.

When you talk about fair distribution of wealth, it implies that it is somebody's job to distribute it. In a hypothetical state of nature, there is no distribution. All the stuff is out there and it's everybody's job to go get it for himself. Unfortunately, some people try to get more than their fair share by taking it away from somebody who has already went out and gotten it for himself. To remedy that, "governments were instituted among men". On the other hand, if everybody goes out and gets what they want for themselves, what do you do about the people who lack the skill or opportunity to do so? If you just let them starve to death, you are depriving the system of people who, although they are lousy hunter-gatherers, might be good craftsmen, inventors, or nurturers of your children. Although it is unreasonable to expect everybody to contribute the same amount of meat to the communal cooking pot, there might be some way to assign equivalent value to the contributions of the people who made the pot, and the people who stir the pot and keep the fire going while the rest of us are out hunting and gathering more food.

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