Redistributing the wealth

I'm sick of hearing of people up in arms about this "redistributing the wealth" business.  It's complete nonsense.  There's a couple of reasons for this.

First is practical.  Obama doesn't plan to raise taxes to outrageously high levels.  They will put things back somewhere around what they were in the Clinton years.  And let's be honest—nobody was shouting about socialism then.  In fact, everybody seemed to be doing pretty well.

Second of all, the point of a progressive tax is that the rich pay proportionally more—and this makes sense.  We are all supposed to contribute equally to society, but what exactly do we mean by "equally"?  At the extreme right of the scale, "equal" means percent, or even dollar amount.  But these don't really take into account the nonlinear nature of money.  A better system is an equal burden.  20% of the income of someone who makes $30,000 dollars per year is a much more significant burden than 20% for someone making $3 million per year; this is because there is a certain absolute minimum amount of money that a person needs to survive.  The cost per dollar of losing any of this income is much greater than the cost per dollar of losing some of a large income, and the ratio far exceeds the ratio of incomes (that's is the nonlinearity part).  We therefore scale the tax percentage to equalize the sum of the costs.  This is why we have tax brackets: we linearize this cost function over each interval (of course, we cap the percentage at a certain point).

Lastly (and this is most important), when discussing "redistribution of wealth", people almost always are pointing to systems where the haves are giving to the have-nots.  But this is not the only wealth-redistribution scheme.  The best examples are perhaps feudal societies, indentured servitude, and sharecropping; all of these systems unfairly transferred the fruits of labor from the workers to the owners due to legal or economic leverage.

Some people respond with "it's a free market!"  But this isn't really an excuse.  I am for Pareto efficient markets, but the number of deregulated markets that approach this is negligible.  Basically, the more deregulation you have, the more the rich are able to gain economic leverage over the middle and working classes, in effect causing a redistribution of wealth upwards.  Over the past 8 years, the economy has grown significantly, but median income has not kept pace: the wealth is being generated by the middle class, but being kept by the investor (or executive) class.  To promote fairness (because that's what this is about, right?  Joe the Plumber doesn't want Obama taking his hard-earned money away, and so shouldn't he be against that for everybody?), the two big ways to decrease this imbalance of power is regulation (which can actually improve the efficiency of markets when done correctly), and increasing the tax burden on the rich.  What they unfairly take through economic means, the government unfairly takes back through taxation.

Presumptuousness

It frustrates me when people are presumptuous with their opinions. The particular impetus is the financial bailout.  I was having a discussion about it after the last presidential debate (during which we talked about the candidates avoiding giving direct answers to questions), and a couple of people asked me if I supported the bailout or not.  I told them that I thought some sort of bailout was probably necessary, I didn't have the information to make a good judgment on the specific bailout proposal.  They accused me of avoiding the question.

But many people have very strong opinions about the bailout.  Some of them are justified; for example, libertarians are against government intervention on principle.  But most of them are based on ideas about what the bailout does and what effect it is intended to have.  That itself is a very complicated economic topic, but people go further.  They proclaim that it won't work because of one reason or another.

None of these people are qualified to make those kinds of judgments.  It's part of that "Joe Sixpack" mentality that Sarah Palin embodies: that average people are wise and qualified to take on complex topics, by golly.  This is patently false.  National issues, especially financial ones, are incredibly intricate and take years of study to understand.  This is why there are people who are paid to figure this stuff out.

Arm-chair quarterbacking in inappropriate ways is rampant.  Government is probably number one—the idea of a representative democracy is that you pay people to study the issues and decide because the factors are far too many for the average person to reasonably understand given their free time (not to mention the average level of intelligence).  But that doesn't stop people from asserting their ill-informed opinions strongly.

Is there an answer to this?  A culture of science, perhaps.  Presumptuousness stems from a love of certainty, and science is the antidote to certainty.