Jacob W Braestrup wrote: > Alypius Skinner wrote > > Thus some sort of > > balance must be struck between compassion for our fellow man and > maintaining > > the incentives for temptation-prone people (who are often the same as > the > > incompetent or semi-competent people) to resist temptation. > > But where do you suppose such a balance is most accurately struck? in a > public market for redistribution - or a private one? > > my money is on te latter > > - jacob braestrup >
All government programs are a form of redistribution. For example, public police and fire protection subsidize the safety of the poor at the expense of the rich (if I may oversimplify the class structure). So the real question is whether the optimal balance would be one of no public redistribution or some public redistribution. If there were no public redistribution, there would be no need for a state, yet if a state did not exist, one would soon emerge because the stateless society would be so obviously suboptimal for an economy beyond the level of the hunter gatherer. For example, when the bloated west Roman state collapsed in western Europe, the life of the average peasant probably improved, but trade also collapsed, which made society in the aggregate poorer. This is an example of swinging from one suboptimal extreme of public redistribution to another. I would certainly argue that the current level of public redistribution is above the optimum rather than below it--probably well above. But I would not argue that the optimum is zero public redistribution. Of course, this question of whether we should have an inherently redistributionist public sector is a different question than whether the public sector should micromanage the private sector. ~Alypius Skinner
