Three years ago, I shared a cartoon that succinctly summarized the problem with socialism and the welfare state.
It’s the same lesson that we also get from Thomas Sowell, which is that redistribution over time creates an ever-larger number of dependents financed by ever-higher taxes on workers.
Or, as this Wizard-of-Id parody and this Little-Red-Hen parody make clear, why work hard if you can get things for free?
Now I have a different way of illustrating the problem with socialism. Here’s a very clever tweet from Young Americans Against Socialism.
Very clever and amusing.
I will add this short video to my collection of socialism humor, but it actually makes a very serious point.
Socialists and other redistributionists want equality of outcomes, but they don’t think about the unintended consequences of such an approach.
Some people will be lured into sloth and dependency, for instance, while others – particularly those with greater ability and/or greater work ethic – will choose to be less productive (especially because they also get hit with higher tax burdens to finance all the handouts).
Bastiat wrote that the failure to consider the “unseen” was the defining quality of a bad economist.
And since we’re on that topic, here’s an example of Crazy Bernie failing to appreciate that actions have unintended consequences.
A perfect metaphor for what would happen to the economy if some of his policies were imposed on the economy.
Except Bernie would still have his comfortable life. It’s the rest of us who would suffer.
[…] The athletic Bernie. […]
both personal and economic freedoms are curtailed by socialism… our current social structure is being prepped by various institutions for something other than personal liberty and free market capitalism… we can expect efforts to modify our constitution for governance outside of our current constitutional mandates… yep… the socialists want to scrap civil liberties… ditch the electoral college… and “fundamentally transform the United States of America” into a majoritarian socialist democracy… with all of the control mechanisms of a “woke” Stalinist state…
hope I am wrong……………….
“The Dangerous Stalinism of the “Woke” Hard-Left”
by Alan M. Dershowitz
August 31, 2019 at 5:00 am
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14794/the-dangerous-stalinism-of-the-woke-hard-left
I would point out that we currently spend $2T on the federal safety-net. A little less than that on the standard deduction and other tax deductions and the progressivism in the tax code.
Many of these change the way people act.
Contrast that against a flat tax, which would cut compliance time by more than half of the current 7-8 billion manhours. AND, a separately delivered UBI (I prefer to call it a CItizens’ Basic Income – unconditional basic income for citizens only) at the Federal Poverty Level. (Legal immigrants and minor would get a tax credit up to the amount of the CBI.)
We can agree on the flat tax part.
The CBI would replace some of the federal safety-net and all tax preferences.
The GDP would rise 2%, from the 2 million highly productive people no longer wasting their time complying with the tax code.
For low incomers no change in support (since they would lose the equivalent of the CBI from safety-net benefits), for mid-incomers some net improvement, for high incomers some increase in taxes, that would be made up by the increase in GDP, resulting in more income. WIN-WIN
It would allow people to act on the merits, not on the tax or benefit consequences.
State benefits would be adjusted by the politics of the state, and we would see what works.
currently all food sold in Germany has a Value Added Tax of 7%… the socialist politicians there seem intent on increasing their VAT tax on meat to 19%… the thinking is the extra tax will assist in the climate change battle… and improve the overall welfare of domestic animals… “The agriculture spokesperson from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) was open to the plans. Under one condition:
“Such a tax can be a constructive proposal,” said Albert Stegemann. “However, the additional tax revenue should be used to support livestock farmers to help them restructure.”
yeah right………
just today a woman asked the elderly bern if he would support such a tax in the United States if he were elected……………………he didn’t answer… he just smiled……………………