Which is the justification of much of what democracies do. But there are two problems: (a) I am not aware of how to compare “utility” between people. And (b) if you do that, in the long run, people will not try to acquire such wealth, because they may fear that, once they acquire it, people will just take it away. That is, it will mess up the incentives to acquire wealth. Whenever you make keeping wealth less secure, you make creating wealth less attractive. (And we know that, when you create wealth, in a “free market”, you are serving other people, not just yourself; that is, we know that, in creating wealth, you are creating wealth not only for yourself but also for other people.) So redistribution seems not to be in the long term interests of people; that is, redistribution of wealth does not seem to be in the interests of people who have a long “time horizon” and understand what I am saying, that redistribution destroys the incentives to build wealth for yourself and others, in the long term.
But then the question is this, how do we judge whether a “time horizon” is correct or not? What if people know that they will be worse off in the future, but want to go ahead and do these things anyway, because their time preference is so high? How can we say that these people are “incorrect”? How do we choose whose time preference is “correct” and whose is not?
Well, the only people that are relevant to this discussion are the people who both (a) have high time preferences and (b) because of that, want to redistribute wealth to themselves through the processes of a democracy, through petty theft, or whatever. If the people with the high time preferences just smoke weed constantly or something because of it and do not commit any sorts of crimes, they are not relevant; for, because they are not commiting any sorts of crimes, they are only a part of society as far as they are producing things for other people and getting things in return, which, of course, is what society is. Who we are talking about are people who both (a) have high time preferences to the extent that they barely care about the future and (b) threaten the security of property rights. (Notice that most criminals are people that we would characterize as having high time preferences.)
So how can we feel justified in beating these people into submission because they possess a higher time preference than us? Well, I think that saying it that way is misleading. For we do not directly care about the fact that they have a high time preference. What we directly care about is how they threaten the security of property rights because of that. So the real line of questioning is this:
I explore those questions in the rest of the post that I just quoted above and those that I link to in it.