In sum, I am getting tired of ancaps spouting off without a shred of praxeological or empirical support that maximal-capitalism will spur a utopia of :
peace from coercion,
absolute freedom,
guaranteed prosperity,
equality for all,
candy and nuts everyday,
and a home for every puppy dog and kitten.
Rettoper, it’s called marginal utility. Giving a million dollars to Bill Gates doesn’t improve his situation nearly as much as giving a million dollars to the average American. The lower classes always gain more out of increases in wealth than the upper classes do.
Any value statement is worth a second look.
It’s so weird, but sometimes you are right, and I have no idea how you arrived at a solid conclusion.
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All of you guys who think the market is going to equal things out may well be wrong. I believe you’re making all sorts of epistemological errors, imposing your values on your understanding without realizing the boundaries of either.
Taleb’s conception of Extremistan and Mediocristan would probably go a long way to understanding winner take all effects.
This is not correct praxeologically. It is not proper to make inter-personal comparisons of utility like you do here. Diminishing marginal utility tells you that every dollar you give Bill is valued less than the last; it doesn’t go further than this and ‘compare’ with any other person.
I think that taking away the Central bank would definitely reduce income inequality, as well as taking away copyrights.
Banning forced FRB, Getting rid of central/nationalized banking/legal tender would turn banks into money warehouses, and would also allow more individuals to loan out their savings, since the lender of last resort and artificially low interest rates would be gone. Basically, individuals would replace banks, and that would reduce income inequality considerably. After all, the Rothschild family is the richest family in the world because of governments.
I do believe income inequality is partially due to evolution, but I don’t think that it has more than 1/3 to do with it. It’s probably the state 2/3 and nature the other 1/3. Income inequality doesn’t bother me as long as people don’t use government to become rich. That said, I find it ironic when a friend of mine complains about the government taking her parents money while her father works for Bank of America.
Are we talking about income inequality such as that between a brain-surgeon and his secretary?
Are we talking about income inequality such as that between the owner of a business having a shopfront in every major city and between the mom and pop of a local mom-and-pop corner store?
Why do you think this?
Individuals still need to generate savings through underconsumption. None of that is guaranteed under any particular system
You should read the chapter I linked. Inequality is inherent to certain domains.
I read it, although it was difficult to understand. I guess I could just be an idiot though.
But anyway, I think that getting rid of the Central bank would reduce inequality because the banks and the finance industry couldn’t be as rich, and the boom-bust cycle would be minimized. The wealthy tend to do extremely well during a boom and the poor are just getting back on their feet when the next boom starts.
I believe copyrights create inequality because more people would have more money to spend on everything if copyrights were abolished, and the actors, publishers, directors, etc., probably wouldn’t get paid as much. How good their products were would truly determine how much money they made.
I definitely agree with you though, that Inequality is inherent to certain domains, such as an extreme IQ, physical characteristics, place/class of origin, etc., although I personally don’t think that some people are significantly more evolved than others enough to make a huge difference in inequality.
With government or without, there will never be absolute equality, of course, because an egalitarian society isn’t possible no matter what people do–too many loopholes in life. I’m pro-market and anti-state mainly because the state has always been a failure in everything it does and it is simply not just the bigger it is.
And have those been found “throughout human history”?
You either misunderstand what I meant or you’re being deliberately obtuse. For now, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
My point was that the phrase “in sum” is used when one has made several or many points and he wishes to draw a conclusion based on all of them put together. As far as I can tell, you didn’t do that in your previous post. I therefore conclude that your use of the phrase “in sum” is inaccurate at best.
What you’re missing here is an explanation as to why “the majority of global citizens” must always be inherently jealous, envious, greedy, have a misguided sense of fairness, etc. Can you provide an explanation for that?
(Note: I’m being redundant above, as “inherently” implies “always”. The redundancy is for your benefit.)
Here is my theory for income distribution put to numbers.
Multiply a skill distribution (a bell curve) by the linear function of the skill. IQ would work pretty well for this.
Multiply the land value distribution by the by the linear function of the value. I am going to use a bell curve for this too (though this may be in error)
Then multiply these two terms. That will give you the income distribution.
OR
The product of two linear functions will become a quadratic.
The product of two bell curves will be another bell curve with a higher peak.
The product of a bell curve and a quadratic looks like a shark fin moving to the right. This shark fin is the distribution I predict. I am no mathematician so I am sure the math and charting could be improved. The numbers on the Y axis don’t mean anything.
I can’t get the image to show; here is the link.
I wholeheartedly disagree that measuring nominal income is a good way to show inequality. Bill Gates does not eat 1000x the food I do.
The point of the chapter, was that even if we reset the entire world back to equal tomorrow, it would be unequal and systemically so by the end of the following week. Regardless how good Linux may be once Windows had a certain number of users (in many cases, people who were using DOS) its install base created a cascade effect on all later purchases.
Egalitarianism ends up functioning as an anti-human communism where the idea is to not just be anti-authority but also anti-tradition. It is the leveling of society, with the notion that it is better to burn everything down (and restrain its regrowth) than to evolve it to something more enlightened.
We’re not meant to be equal, and just by existing and interacting, even if we were all born equal, would ultimately end up unequal for the very domain dependent reasons Taleb draws attention to.
I don’t know if the gap between the rich and the poor would be greater or lesser. But I know that different people would be rich than today. Even without confiscations (which I support) the oligarchs would not stay rich for long.
I care.I care about there being poverty and I think there’s reasons to defend the desire to minimise large disparities in wealth-that’s not to say there evil because well they aren’t.However I tend to think there wouldn’t be such large disparties of wealth as we see now because I blame the state for the current wealth gap.
while I agree that statist monetary policies may create economic inequalities – doesnt confirm your assertion that profit driven policies will foster economic equality
My argument doesn’t center around statist policies versus profit driven policies, the two are not mutually exclusive, my argument is purely based on the mechanics of inflation under any kind of Federal Reserve System. It’s more like the gold standard vs. fiat money standard. You are correct in that ancap does not necessarily imply lower economic inequality in all sectors, but you are ignoring the prerequisite of a gold standard for anarchocapitalism to even function**.** The wealthiest people in the world are able to exploit the tendency, no necessity, of fiat monetary bases to expand at parabolic rates. The ability to leverage dollars before their inflationary effects are felt in the economy is the key that gives the wealthiest capitalists in today’s society the ability to expand their wealth at accelerating rates versus every body else. I am making no value judgements, this is simply the way it is. While there is evidence to support this conclusion, my assertions thusfar are extrapolated from the framework Mises laid out in Human Action.
Admittedly I am rather new to the praxeological method so I may be cutting a few corners, but at any rate I’m here to learn, so my premises are as follows:
Inflation hurts the wealthy less than the Average Joe because the wealthy can and do invest their capital productively, thereby protecting their wealth by growing it at a higher rate than inflation.
Those who are able to spend “new” dollars in the economy first benefit more as the inflationary effects of new money entering the system haven’t yet debased their value.
New money enters the system through debt, it is leveraged into existance. Compounding interest dictates that the rate of credit expansion must eventually outstrip the real growth rate of an economy lest more debt is payed off than is issued and deflation sets in.
1 and 2 are not possible under sound money. A gold monetary aggregate (gold monetary base, gold-backed fiduciary media) cannot expand exponentially as fiat must.
Therefore, under a gold standard as necessitated by ancap, the wealthy are not able to exploit exponential credit expansion at the expense of the average Joe’s purchasing power. As per premise 4, under a gold standard there would be perpetual deflation, upon which you cannot leverage like you can on fiat today, removing the “cash cow” that has thusfar been the primary culprit in widening the economic inequality gap. The mechanics of a gold standard preclude the possibility of the equality gap ever being as large as it is today because growth would be real, more linear, and more equally apportioned across sectors while at the same time not permitting the pyramiding of leverage atop large principles that allows the wealthy of today to acquire real resources with paper money loaned on a whim into existence.
(I just realized I have conflated income inequality which centers around wages, dividends etc, and economic inequality, which centers around net worth. My argument is with regards to the latter.)
To me, it seems that increased freedom would actually increase the variance in nominal income. Those who so chose would be free to live what they believe to be an aesthetically pleasing life of large amounts of leisure and subsistence income. At the other extreme, the ambitious and talented would be free to amass huge fortunes immune from confiscatory taxation and regulation. There’s no reason to expect that increasing individual liberty would increase uniformity. Rather the opposite seems more likely. And that’s not a bad thing because, since we assume that all decisions would be voluntary, we know that subjective personal utility is being maximized.
Uhm … excuse me?
Trust me, I care about poverty too. I’d love for there to be no one in poverty. But the thing is, “income inequality” and “poverty” are in no way the same thing. It’s an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Look at it this way: if people who say they’re concerned about income inequality are really concerned about people living in poverty, why don’t they just say that? In fact, there are some people for whom any income inequality is seen as offensive – regardless of whether anyone involved is impoverished.
FTFY
Uhm … excuse me?
-liberty student
Care to elaborate at all? You have travelled far more through these digital halls than I and I have found many of your posts quite enlightening so I would typically defer to your knowledge but here you’ve offered none.
My reasoning: While I understand the market may very well choose something other than gold as its money one of the hallmarks of economic history is humanity’s continued reliance on gold as a preserver of wealth, as is today becoming obvious once more. Furthermore, I have yet to see any alternatives that could replace gold as a medium of intermediate exchange that do not require some form of institutional coercion which, as I am sure you are well aware, is fundamentally incompatible with the anarcho-capitalist sentiment.
