March 6, 2006

Nice pithy (without the lisp) essay from Cato on inequality.  

Cut to the chase: there are many dimensions of inequality, and we need to escape a Flatland tinkering mentality, and have a foundational discussion on which dimensions of inequality to address, and whether to force equality or act "as if" for many purposes.

We have no right to distribute mates unfairly, and no right to distribute mates fairly either. Mates are not ours to distribute. What about inequalities? Presumably, the same point applies. Unless an inequality (of talent, say) is ours to arrange, theories about what would be fair are moot. A truly foundational theory about how inequalities ought to be arranged would not start by imagining us coming to a bargaining table with a right to distribute what other people have produced. A truly foundational theory would start by acknowledging that there is a prior moral question about which inequalities are ours to arrange.

So let's look with fresh eyes, and work on cultivating sharing with what is ours to share.

Thoroughly intelligent, just when I was privately fulminating against the blogosphere. Though this is only incidentally the blogosphere, more alternative publishing, then on the other hand, it is...

Via InstaGlenn.

I suppose the redistributionist argument that would attempt to vitiate the above call to foundational scrutiny goes this way:

Everything is subject to redistribution because either

• the disadvantaged on the downside comparison had the means of production stolen from them somewhere back along the line, or they would have as much or more;

or

• once the product of talent or industry exists, it is cut off from what produced it and enters an amorphous public pot (thereby overlooking the humongous "but-for" incentive impact of enjoying the fruit of one's efforts).

The first demands serious evidence and policy discussion, including whether there may not be a tradeoff freely made between competing goods (leisure vs. challenge and income). The second has already manifested in the form of various impoverished and coercion-mad (meaning guns and secret police and stripping of competing social goods) political systems that fell of their own weight, and can be evaluated post mortem as not a desirable model.

The discussion of redistribution needs to be soon, smart, and moral, inasmuch as a variety of neural and physical-modification strategies are headed down the pike, and may be used negatively as well as positively to narrow perceived gaps. Or, in homage to the invisible-to-redistributionism Law of Unintended Consequences, apparent physical and neural enhancement could boomerang.

Maybe we want to take the inequality ratios as given, build even more mobility bridges and kindness interconnections, and wander off to Constantinople and tend the antique roots of our own gardens, for those so enamoured with European thinking.

Comments

[Robert (New Victorian)]

"The discussion of redistribution needs to be soon, smart, and moral, inasmuch as a variety of neural and physical-modification strategies are headed down the pike, and may be used negatively as well as positively to narrow perceived gaps."

Absolutely spot on. Especially life-extension tech. It will be expensive and scarce at first, and demand will be at almost any price. We'd better think about this NOW.