In line with the results of the poll here, a thread for discussing politics. Incidentally, folks, I think downvoting the option you disagree with in a poll is generally considered poor form.
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
4.) In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.
If anybody thinks the rules should be dropped here, now that we're no longer conducting a test - I already dropped the upvoting/downvoting limits I tried, unsuccessfully, to put in - let me know. The first rule is the only one I think is strictly necessary.
Debiasing attempt: If you haven't yet read Politics is the Mindkiller, you should.
It is well established that the marginal utility of a dollar is higher for poor people than for rich people, so in the short-term, net utility is trivially increased by redistribution even though not everyone's utility is increased. Tossing out all net improvement because some people lose a small amount to support large gains elsewhere seems like poor policy to me.
But I am interested in the longer term, not the shorter term. In the long term, arguing against redistribution is the concern that productive people will be disincentivized to use their talents as much if they can't accumulate more compared to a non-redistributionist scenario. Arguing for redistribution is a concern that the more unequal a society, the less basic cohesion there is with multiple bad long term results: 1) the more force (police, eavesdropping, limitations on political expression) must be used, 2) reduced input into the education of the poorer classes, resulting in less talent developed at higher expense within the society as a whole.
The 2nd point is a little subtle. People tend to sort themselves into what they are good at. If all N people in my society have access to education, I'll have a reasonably close to optimum self-sorting of people into jobs that they are talented at. If instead my society has stratified, and only 10% of families have the resources to educate their children to be doctors, lawyers, and indian chiefs, and the rest wander the streets selling chewing gum to passing tourists and mowing lawns, then I the most productive cadre of my society will be reduced in efficiency since it is drawing its talent from only one-tenth the human resources it would have drawn from in a more equal society.
So my reason for supporting redistribution is to keep the talent pool large so we don't pay an excess in training costs for a more mediocre top layer in our society.
Another argument is that in capitalist societies, someone who made a lot of money probably made it by making products people want, thus increasing general utility. This suggests that he is particularly good at figuring out how to spend money to increase utility, likely better at it then both the redistributers and whoever they're redistributing the money to.