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Kindly comments on Politics Discussion Thread August 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Well, there's also the people you take money away from to consider. For instance, we could pick a really rich person and take away all their money and distribute it to a hundred poor people. This might suck for the rich person, but the poor people would all be really happy about it.
But this is a lot like the doctor who kills a healthy person off the street to donate their organs to his patients, and I thought we all agreed not to do that.
We could try to convince the rich person to give away a lot of their money.
For instance, one of GiveWell's standout organizations is GiveDirectly which simply transfers money from donors to poor recipients in the developing world (specifically, Kenya). "The recipient uses the transfer to pursue their own goals."
Sort of! But argument by analogy is just not very good when the thing itself is plenty comprehensible to all involved. It can neglect the subtleties of both the situation and our desires, and also people are bad at keeping hypotheticals and reality separate on the intuition level.
All I'm saying is that we can't say "just look at how much money is being distributed". Obviously the situation I suggest is very different from one in which two rich people lose half their money.
Way to set up a straw man and then steal his kidneys!
If a general argument is made, then it can be refuted by any specific counter-example.