Dakota Beacon

Behold the progressive wise man who claims that confiscating rich people's money is justified because rich people gather wealth through "the power of luck" and "owe" a "debt" to "society."

For insight into this dumb argument, I reproduce here for your amusement a chunk of a recent commentary by Jonathan Cohn on The New Republic website. Cohn writes:

According to the Republicans and many of their supporters, allowing tax rates on upper incomes to rise would punish the rich for their success, taking away money that the rich have earned. But this argument suffers from two key flaws.

One is that it fails to account for the power of luck. Almost by definition, people who are successful have benefited from some measure of good fortune. That fortune can take the form of obvious, material advantages--like access to advanced technology and good schools. Or it can take the form of more subtle, but still important, assets for moving forward in life--like good health or loving parents.

Yes, a good work ethic will take you far. And I know many well-educated professionals convinced that nobody works as hard as they do. (I’ve been known to indulge the thought myself.) But I’ve met many people at the bottom of the income ladder who work just as hard, for far less reward. Between 1980 and 2005, the richest 1 percent of Americans got more than four-fifths of the country's income gains. Does anybody seriously believe that the other 99 percent didn't deserve to take home a much larger share?

The other, albeit related, flaw in the conservative argument is that it fails to acknowledge the debt wealthy people owe to society. As Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly argue in their 2008 book, Unjust Desserts, the proverbial self-made man is not exactly self-made. He (or she) is benefiting from the accomplishments of past generations, not to mention the support of public institutions (like the National Science Foundation) and services (like schools) that foster innovation and lead to greater productivity.

As Alperovtiz and Daly wrote in an excerpt

Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest men in the nation, is worth over $60 billion. Does he "deserve" all this money? Why? Did he work so much harder than everyone else? Did he create something so extraordinary that no one else could have created? Ask Buffett himself and he will tell you that personally he thinks that "society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned."

But if this is true, doesn't society deserve a very significant share of what he has received?

You can take this argument too far, obviously. (For some intelligent criticism of Unjust Desserts, see here and here.) Then again, nobody is suggesting the rich to give up all the extra money they make. All anybody is asking is that the rich pay more in taxes--in effect, that they reinvest in society by a little more than they do now.

How much more? I'm honestly not sure. But restoring tax levels to what they were before the Bush tax cuts seems like a safe place to start.

After suffering through statistics and opinions loosely related to each other to impersonate an argument, let's assume that all of Cohn's assumptions and pontifications are valid and ask two questions.

1) In the line of "reasoning," was there anything resembling a cogent, convincing justification for relieving a high earner of his or her earnings and redistributing those earnings to low earners?

2) Were there compelling grounds for believing that when high earners' money is taken away and handed to unemployed people that more jobs are created than if that money were left under the control of the high earners to decide what to do with it?

No matter what progressive does the "arguing," the illogic for income redistribution reduces to condescending preachiness. That preachiness is based on high-and-mighty "moral" positions, positions which have little basis in morality but are filled with feel-good, wealth-destroying ideology. It's amazing that Cohn flat-out acknowledged the progressive modus operandi by titling his piece, "Moral Arguments for Soaking the Rich."

The height of arrogance occurs when one cannot even recognize one's own arrogance. For the typical progressive, arrogance comes naturally and flows effortlessly.

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© 2010 Chuck Rogér