DanielLC comments on How should negative externalities be handled? (Warning: politics) - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (131)
This has more to do with failure to enforce anti-trust laws in a meaningful way, though. In the case of Oil and most major cartels, these are not natural monopolies: they are monopolies built and maintained with the express help of various world states, which is a somewhat different matter.
Economics is not a zero sum game. I doubt I'm going to find myself competing for a promotion with a Saudi prince. Rich people do not harm the poor with their wealth: they simply may not help (aside from, say, putting their money into banks and loaning it out to less wealthy people).
Knowledge is certainly not a zero sum game! Besides, if you genuinely want everyone to have an identical education, you can't simply provide public education - you must also outlaw private schools, home schooling, and any sort of parental involvement in education: after all, why should the child of a college professor have an unfair advantage over the child of a ditch digger? That hardly seems fair.
My perspective here is colored because my public school experience was more or less entirely catastrophic, and I am predominately self-educated. If we were to force everyone to be educated at only modern public school levels, it would be an economic and cultural disaster of hard-to-register proportion.
Large charities also have the 'legitimacy of public action.' Also, if you think the government won't use its propagandizing power to preserve the status quo that benefits it, you've never sat through the pledge of allegiance.
Significant status differences in a society are correlated with all kinds of adverse outcomes. One causal hypothesis (with quite a bit of compelling evidence backing it) is that a lot of this has to do with the neuroendocrinological stress response triggered by the perception that others are higher status than oneself.
I don't know if I'd classify this as rich people harming poor people, but (if accurate) it is an example of entrenched social inequality harming poor (and other low-status) people.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II, Chapter 10
Change the "good" to "better" and it would be more accurate.