In 1729, Jonathan Swift authored a satirical essay with the unwieldy title of A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick. He suggested that the destitute Irish could improve their lot in life by selling their children as food for the rich.
I’m personally glad this was merely a tongue-in-cheek proposal since some of my ancestors immigrated to America from Ireland in the 1800s.
But maybe it’s time for a new “modest proposal” to make our leftist friends happy.
They’re constantly griping about the rich, asserting that the “top 1 percent” or “top 10 percent” are making too much money. Indeed, folks on the left want us to believe that “income inequality” is a big issue and a threat to the country.
So why not update Jonathan Swift’s idea and simply consume all the rich people? Indeed, P.J. O’Rourke actually wrote a book entitled Eat the Rich.
But we don’t really need to feed them to anyone. Just dump their bodies in a mass grave or bury them at sea.
In one fell swoop, income inequality could be dramatically reduced. Sure, those of us left would wind up being equally poor, like in Cuba or North Korea, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs!
But some of you probably think arbitrary executions of rich people is a step too far. After all, it would be unseemly to mimic France’s Reign of Terror or Stalin’s extermination of the Kulaks.
That’s why we should instead look at a watered-down “modest proposal” put forward by David Azerrad of the Heritage Foundation. Here’s some of what he wrote for Real Clear Politics.
…consider the following bold proposal to solve our inequality problem once and for all: exile the top 0.1% of income earners. Round up all 136,080 taxpayers who make more than $2.16 million a year and ship ’em off to whatever country will accept them. Presto. Problem solved. …The 0.1 percenters, whose growing incomes have been fueling the rise in inequality over the past several decades, will have vanished overnight.
Though Azerrad does point out that exile has many of the same economic downsides as execution.
..it will put a serious dent in the government’s finances. Almost one in every five tax dollars that the government collects comes from the 0.1 percent. To make up for the shortfall, we should probably also confiscate all their assets before exiling them. What about the jobs the 0.1 percenters create and the value they add to the economy? …we’d be losing all but twelve of the CEOs from the 300 largest companies in the country. The show business industry would collapse overnight with all the star talent in exile. Gone too would be the best investment bankers, financial consultants, surgeons and lawyers. One third of the NFL’s roster and well over half of the NBA’s roster would also be culled.
Heck, we’re already confiscating some of the assets of rich people who emigrate, so part of Azerrad’s satire is disturbingly close to reality.
But let’s stick with the more farcical parts of his column. To deal with potential loss of tax revenue, Azerrad proposes to have the government sell America’s rich people to other countries.
…we will need to generate more revenue. That could be done rather easily by auctioning off the top-earning Americans to the highest foreign bidder.
That makes sense. There are still a few places in the world – such as Switzerland, Cayman, Hong Kong, Bermuda, etc – where the political class actually understands it is good to have wealth creators.
By the way, Azerrad points out that there will be a tiny little downside to this proposal. Contrary to the fevered assertions of Elizabeth Warren and Paul Krugman, penalizing the rich won’t do anything to help the less fortunate.
Mind you, life prospects will not have improved for a single poor child born into a broken community with failing schools. Or for a single recent college grad crushed by debt and facing dim job prospects. Or for a single family struggling to make ends meet. …It won’t be any easier to start a business or to find a job. Four in 10 children will still be born out of wedlock. Our entitlements will still face unfunded liabilities of almost $50 trillion. …We will however be able to boldly proclaim that we have addressed “the defining challenge of our time.” Our country will in no way be better off. But we will have satiated our lust for equality.
Actually, our country will be far worse off. Jobs, investment, and growth will all collapse.
So while the poor may wind up with a larger share of the pie, the overall size of the pie will be much smaller.
And this is perhaps the moment to stop with the satire and take a more serious look at the issue of income inequality.
I’ve repeatedly argued that the focus should be growth, not redistribution. To cite just one example, it’s better to be a poor person in Singapore than in Jamaica.
But let’s look at what others are saying. Professor Don Boudreaux of George Mason University addresses the issue (or non issue, as he argues) in a column for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
I’ve never worried about income inequality. …Income inequality — like the color of my neighbor’s car or the question of the number of pigeons in Central Park — just never dawns on me as an issue worthy of a moment’s attention.
Don then speculates about why some people are fixated on inequality.
I wonder: What makes someone worry about income inequality? One personal characteristic that plausibly sparks obsession with inequality is envy. …Another characteristic…that likely gives rise to concerns over income inequality is a mistaken conviction that the amount of wealth in the world is fixed. …A third personal characteristic that prompts anxiety over income inequality is fear that the “have-nots” will rape and pillage society until and unless they get more from the “haves.” …This third characteristic is widespread today. The risk that the “have-nots” in modern First World economies will organize themselves using social media and then grab their electric carving knives to storm the wine bars and day spas of the “haves”.
I think all three hypotheses are correct, though people in the public policy world rarely admit that they’re motivated by envy.
But, for what it’s worth, I think many leftists genuinely think the economy is a fixed pie. And if you have that inaccurate mindset, then extra income or wealth for a rich person – by definition – means less income and wealth for the rest of us. This is why they support class-warfare tax policy.
The challenge, for those of us who believe in economic liberty, is to educate these people about how even small differences in growth can yield remarkable benefits to everyone in society within relatively short periods.
A lot of establishment Republicans, meanwhile, seem to implicitly believe that redistribution is desirable as a tactic to “buy off” the masses. They’ll privately admit the policies are destructive (both to the economy and to poor people), but they think there’s no choice.
When dealing with these people, our challenge is to educate them that big government undermines social capital and makes it far more likely to produce the kind of chaos and social disarray we’ve seen in Europe’s deteriorating welfare states.
P.S. For a humorous explanation of why the redistribution/class-warfare agenda is so destructive, here’s the politically correct version of the fable of the Little Red Hen.
And the socialism-in-the-classroom example, which may or may not be an urban legend, makes a similar point. As does the famous parable about taxes and beer.
P.P.S. I still think Margaret Thatcher has the best explanation of why the left is wrong on inequality. And if you want to see a truly disturbing video of a politician with a different perspective, click here.
[…] income could double and the supposed rate of poverty would stay the same. Or a country could execute all the rich people and the alleged rate of poverty would decline. No wonder the practitioners of this approach often […]
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Our current tax code fosters inequality.
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BTW, did I mention something about innate fear and hatred of more competent people?
How much tax can possibly be collected from the top 0.001%, or even the top 0.1%? And is that going to buy the rest of us anything more than a couple of pizzas each once distributed?
But I see…, it’s not the tax. It’s the conspiracy against the middle class. And where is that conspiracy strongest? In the evil USA, of course! The one country with the wealthiest middle class in the world (*). Indeed the empirical evidence supports it, doesn’t it?
The only conspiracy is that of politicians bamboozling the middle class. But even that is not really a conspiracy. The middle class itself ferrets out those politicians that believe in such things and propels them into high office. That is why avoiding the banana peel of coercive redistribution is so difficult for most nations. Because most people are so innately susceptible to it.
Sitting here at the precipice of a new indefinite era of Euro-like structurally low growth trendlines of 1-2%, Americans are about to discover how serendipitously lucky they had been for the past couple of centuries. But by the time they realize it they will be deadlocked into voting like the French, and Italians and Spaniards and Greeks etc.. So those who think that the American electorate will somehow realize its mistake and pull back… are dreaming. THAT future American electorate will no longer be American, it will have become French. So those Americans who dream of corrective action once the ill effects of compounding low growth start taking root are dreaming the dreams that their isolationist American naiveté has not quite popped yet. Their time is much better spent preparing and working on their escape life boats.
To paraphrase… decline builds slowly, but comes rather suddenly. Don’t get caught without a life raft. Stay mobile.
———————-
(*)… save a few still small number of less class-warfare bickering countries like Singapore, Hong and Switzerland which are beginning to pull quite further ahead. The decline trajectory is already here folks. A growth trendline that is half of world average IS decline.
How about we properly identify “the rich” as distinct from the “middle-class” (which seem to always get lumped into the category of “rich”), and identify HOW the got rich??? – Then, we can follow through with the laws already existent on the books and PROSECUTE the actual thieves who stole their multi-millions/billions through deceptive, dishonest, and unlawful practices?
This 0.1% pays hardly any real amount of taxes (as the so-called “conservatives” would have us all believe), because they are typically the ones shelving most of their net wealth through various trusts, foundations, and other tax-free organizations for the purposes of political-lobbying for higher taxes and unemployment of the rest of us. The so-called 0.1% (or, more accurately, 0.001%) are the ones who actually control the systems around the world, and use it, unlawfully, to imprison the rest of us into their global-control-systems.
Let’s actually go after the REAL criminals! The middle-class earners are the ones who pay the heftiest amount of taxes, fees, and other governMENTAL-confiscation schemes. The “ultra-wealthy” are where we should be looking. We do not have a real “free market” because of these robber-barons. It’s tragic that the middle-class gets blamed for all of the economic ills, yet it is they who pay the bulk of the taxes and once were responsible for creating over 70% of the job openings.
So instead of them finally splitting as in Ayn Rand’s novel, we just kick them out.
and speaking of income inequality… president Obama spent $3,672,798.60 on travel expenses for his annual Hawaiian Christmas vacation…
The average American family spent $4,580 on Christmas in 2014…
draw your own conclusions…
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/03/10/when-it-comes-to-your-money-nothing-is-too-good-for-the-obamas/
I ain’t scared… I like rich people… in fact… they are generally smart… and productive… they innovate… create jobs… and in most cases make the lives of the people around them better… what’s to be afraid of? we should be recruiting more of them… socialism… multiculturalism… and profound stupidity have just about destroyed Europe… when the day of reckoning finally comes… and the Germans tell the E.U. to go to hell… Europe’s wealthy will be looking to re-settle… I think they should come to north America… and bring their energy… creativity… industry… and money with them…
we can turn north America into a gated community…
it’ll be fun…………
For whatever its worth, I’ll add what in my view is another important, perhaps underestimated, perhaps unmentionable, or simply overlooked component of preoccupation with inequality and class warfare:
FEAR OF PEOPLE WHO ARE SMARTER OR SIMPLY MORE COMPETENT THAN YOU ARE
The average person fears people who are smarter than he is. He fears that the smarter person is up to something against him. Something of a higher evil intelligence that he cannot even discover, identify, and, of course much less understand; but “they’re there somewhere unseen lurking and scheming sophisticated incomprehensible sophisticated contraptions to take advantage of ME””.
That is actually the main human nature fuel of movements like anti-Semitism, but the same dynamics play more generally in class warfare psychology. “They’re up to something and I’m not even in a position to know what”. Hence the average voter-lemming is in great anxiety to somehow control and constrain people who are smarter than he is, in any way possible — and even then he “knows” he’ll STILL be in jeopardy since he cannot understand the more competent mind – or what it’s up to.
This incomprehensible unknown creates a varying degree of anxiety in most people. The powerful (and intelligent in his own way) politician that offers to unite the fears of the many weak and challenged to restrain the strong “and who knows up to what”, becomes his natural friend.
I don’t know for sure if this fear is justified or how irrationally overblown it may be in the general public’s mind. But the best solution to this anxiety is turn smart people loose against each other in a creative competitive freer market – not try to constrain them in a shoebox made by mediocre. The politician that promises to put the more intelligent and more competent in their place essentially becomes the voter lemming’s friend into decline.
It is the motivation of those unrestrained more exceptional people who will help you maintain your 52k/year “wretched” median American family income and allow you to remain in the world’s top 1%. (*)
Otherwise you decline and find out where the true world middle class level is…
——————————-
(*)http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2082385/We-1–You-need-34k-income-global-elite–half-worlds-richest-live-U-S.html
“…The top one per cent [worldwide] comprises anyone with an income over $34,000 after tax…”
“…Even the poorest people in many developed countries are wealthy by global standards – for example, the poorest five per cent of Americans earn on average the same as the richest five per cent of Indians…“
The true average middle class is very..very.. far down. Americans seem poised to join them. Not by becoming poorer, but by failing to grow as fast as the rest of the world while they bicker on how to divide the current pie.
P.S. I do not know for a fact whether all the figures in the article are correct. But whatever they are, reality is much different than most American class-warriors realize when one considers how lucky they are on a worldwide scale. Yet, they have mounted a full scale attack on the uniquely notorious American ideas of Cowboy Capitalism. It will not end well.
I do understand inequality and I do understand envy. To a large extent, we all judge things in relative terms.
Were that not the case we would all be ecstatic as we all are in the wealthiest 0.1% of all humans who ever lived on earth through the ages – and, to boot, have at our disposal things that have been unavailable to 99.9% of all past humans who ever lived on the planet.
But there’s a problem with attempting to coercively suppress inequality: The voter-lemming can either
(a) stop being envious of the mansion in his neighborhood and remain citizen of a most prosperous nation in the world, or he can
(b) go after his neighbor with the mansion and have his entire country slide down the world prosperity rankings — so that his children eventually find themselves middle income people in a middle income country – see Argentina and other once top of the world ranking countries that slid down into mediocrity. The decline will be again in relative terms. The pie will not shrink. But when your country’s pie grows along a 2% trendline (what the US seems to be headed for as US voters try to emulate their European inequality suppressing model continent) while the other pies of the world grow by 4% on average, every year chips away yet another 2%. It does not take long for a compounding exponent to pound you down into decline.
Growth deficits compared to the world average take no prisoners.
This is something American voter lemmings will have to figure out for themselves – if they ever get to think that far.
Of course, the easy and numbing solution for the voter lemming will be to believe snakeskin salesmen of the likes of Paul Krugman: You can have both top worldwide prosperity and equality.
Hence, the decline that is already underway (2% US growth trendline vs 4% world average) will continue. America’s share of world GDP is thus on a permanent decline trajectory. The pie gets bigger, but other pies in the world are growing even faster. The envy crowd will get to see what real resentment is once they slide down the worldwide rankings into the true middle class: World average middle income. No again the pie will not shrink. But others will catch up and surpass. Today’s luxuries are tomorrow’s staples. Today’s hippie berated luxuries become tomorrow’s “human rights” the lack thereof defines the wretched life of the future.
ObamAmerica’s retreat on the world stage is not just ideology. It is also the inescapable hard reality that a country cannot keep dominating the world as its share of world GDP shrinks – regardless of whether Obama and his followers realize it in these exact terms.
The American progresive’s solution: Mimic the rest of the world into statism.
The crux of the delusional vicious cycle into suicide.
When your growth rate trails the world average, nothing is sustainable. Not even ideology…
Typical conservative balderdash.
What’s wrong with allowing people to perform to their talents and capabilities, and get fair pay for it?
Every person on Earth getting $10,000? That would be 70,000,000,000,000, considerably less than annual income.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
More typical conservative screwing up: You don’t have a clue what working people really do, or what it’s worth.
You assume that a working economy “redistributes” income. In reality, a working economy makes value, and creates income. It’s not rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship; it’s building more ships to carry more people.
Why are conservatives so hell-bent on making humans worthless?
Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s take the wealth of the world and divide it equally. Everyone loses what they have and receives $10,000 in value. Since only a small part of the world’s wealth is in consumables, you might be the lucky winner of 10% of a 3 ton punch press used to make car radiators, located in Detroit.
No one could trade what they receive or use their property to earn income, because that would unbalance the whole world. If you have a talent, you cannot use it, because that would be unfair. If you have currency, you can’t buy anything, since that would improve your situation. Can you imagine someone with $10,000 in food being willing to part with any of it?
After a little time goes by, the consumables will be consumed and capital assets deteriorated. Those who ate the food will call for a new distribution, since they now have nothing, and they point out that the skinny guy still owns part of a punch press.
[…] I wonder: What makes someone worry about income inequality? One personal characteristic that plausibly sparks obsession with inequality is envy. …Another characteristic…that likely gives rise to concerns over income inequality is a mistaken conviction that the amount of wealth in the world is fixed. …A third personal characteristic that prompts anxiety over income inequality is fear that the “have-nots” will rape and pillage society until and unless they get more from the “haves.” …This third characteristic is widespread today. The risk that the “have-nots” in modern First World economies will organize themselves using social media and then grab their WAIT, THERE’S MORE… […]
Reblogged this on Brian By Experience.
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Why not, instead, raise wages of workers to match the increases in productivity they’ve produced over the past 20 years, so that they might share in the wealth they produce?
Why not pay workers fairly for the work they do? Wouldn’t that be a lot more equitable, satisfactory, and moral? Everyone dies eventually. Why rush things? Why rush death for anyone?