The Left's New Theory Of Everything That Inequality Is Bad By Brackenworld February 20, 2014
Chris Bertram is professor of Social and Political Philosophy at Bristol, he tweets as @crookedfootball and blogs at Crooked Timber. In Today’s post he argues that “Squeezing the rich is good, even when it raises no money“. Essentially his argument boils down to the left’s new theory of everything – that inequality is bad. This may, or may not be the case. But the argument that punishing the wealthy ends up hurting the poor, by shrinking the pie, is not even considered as valid. There are so many near lies, distortions and pure hate for people who do things an academic political philosopher doesn’t understand, that the article is worth looking at in more detail. However, the feature of the discussion I want to write about is the assumption, generally taken as decisive by the commentariat, TV interviews and the like, that if such a tax would raise little or no money then that should count against it decisively. On this view taxes are an unfortunate necessity, required to finance state expenditure and to be minimized whereever possible: a tax that raises no money is therefore pointless, imposing needless pain for no benefit. The art of taxation wrote Jean Baptiste Colbert, is “maximum pluck for minimum hiss”. The top rate of income tax has been set at 40% for a generation. The rich are willing to pay 40% in a way they’re not willing to pay 50%. Thus rich people who might have settled in England to do business, settle instead in Spain where the weather’s better, or Geneva, or Monaco. At a stroke you’ve deprived the exchequer of £100,000 because you’ve asked for another £12k. For very little extra pluck, a 50p rate probably does in the long run, see the economy smaller than it might have been, and causes a great deal of hiss. No-one is better off.
But this view is just plain wrong, for several reasons. First, in a complex society structured by all kinds of institutional rules, the idea that people have full liberal property rights in their pre-tax income is unwarranted. They participate in a cooperative venture with others in society subject to certain conditions, and those conditions include one that part of “their income” already belongs to the wider society, via the state. This point, hated by libertarians, defeats the widespread view that people are having “their money” take off them: it wasn’t theirs to start with. Though I think such an argument, with some caveats, is correct, it is a second and third consideration that I’d want to rely on here. This view seems dangerously close to the totalitarian view that all your money is the state’s except that which they let you keep. This man is a professor of Political philosophy. Be afraid. Be very afraid. The second consideration is that inequality is deadly for democracy, and for the equal political status of citizens. Because the power and influence high earners derive from their income threatens such status equality, there is a strong public interest in constraining it, even if doing so raises no money at all. It isn’t just that the rich come to own media outlets or that politicians are swayed by their donations to parties, it is also that the prominence their cash gives them gets them listened to and taken seriously by opinion formers. Their experience matters and shapes public policy, that of an unemployed teenager in the North East doesn’t: we need to shift the balance of voice in favour of the unemployed teenager and against the City trader. Inequality is sometimes “deadly for democracy”, because it’s often a symptom of extractive political institutions – much of Africa for EG. However that is not the case in the UK. Most people who get rich enough to pay the 45p band are not politically connected. They’re just business people. Where there is a problem, it lies in the quangocrats and state apparatchiks walking through revolving doors on huge salaries with apparently no oversight. Even worse, many of these are superannuated, (mostly labour) politicians, conducting a gramscian march through the institutions. I agree here, in the crony capitalist, and quango state, we could do with some pay restraint. In any case, the UK is not particularly unequal. Remove London, and it’s international mega-rich, the UK is a pretty bog standard north-European welfare state whose inequality is relieved by direct transfers at least as much as it is in Germany. I fail to see how chasing the International Mega rich who choose to pay a lot of tax here, makes anyone better off. Third, income inequality makes life worse for the rest of us in real terms. Economists are supposed to believe that utility (whatever that is) matters intrinsically and money only matters instrumentally. But right-wing economists often seem to forget this as soon as they are asked to comment on tax policy and inequality, arguing as if their theorems apply to cash and not to utility. If we’re dealing in cash terms, then a tax that makes some people worse off and nobody better off looks bad, and looks Pareto inferior. But it isn’t necessarily Pareto inferior if we focus on well-being: making some cash poorer may make some others better off, a Pareto incomparable outcome. Here’s one way how: if those on high incomes have too much, they can outbid the rest of us for goods that are intrinsically in limited supply or where supply can’t be quickly increased.
I see, he wants stuff that a political philospher would once have been able to afford, but can’t now. He seems ignorant of the fact that, in general, markets are better at relieving scarcity than making the rich poorer. If I’m further away from being able to buy a house near to where I work, because house prices are raised in an auction I can’t compete in, then I’m worse off even if my income stays flat. Reducing the purchasing power of the wealthy is therefore good for me (unless I got hold of a house early and can earn windfall gains from the auction). And similarly for many other goods. I see. It’s the nice big house he can’t afford that he’s envious of, the poor dear. But house builders cannot respond to demand, because the permits to build are not being issued to cope with population growth. So prices rise. Contrast with Germany, where building is encouraged – house prices haven’t risen relative to incomes. This is a market failure which can be laid directly at the door of the state, and particularly, the left’s beloved councils. The answer is not to drag down the rich, but to ensure greater supply. And markets do this better than any other mechanism. Unrestrained income for the wealthy also means that they can commit more of their resources to ensuring that their offspring make it to the top in the next generation, thereby harming the opportunities for the rest of society. State education is rubbish. That is not the fault of those who can afford to escape it. But the education establishment of which Professor Bertram is part, opposes any market mechanisms which may drive up standards in state education. I could go on and enumerate more mechanisms whereby squeezing high earners is good, even if it raises no money, but the general point should be clear. It should give Labour reasons to go on the offensive (“class war”); it certainly gives the commentariat reason to stop making their stupid talking point. They won’t, of course. The real reason for this attitude is that the incomes of political science professors haven’t kept up with people like business owners, bankers, corporate lawyers and the like. This is pure envy by members of a profession which feels undervalued. And it demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of who the payers of the top rate of tax are: there are a number of city traders in there, sure, but the majority are business owners, many of whom will have financed their company with a mortgage, risking their house on their business. As business owners, they often have options to pay themselves in a number of ways – dividends, capital returns, income etc… prudent tax-planning is not avoidance, but this is why the 50p doesn’t raise as much as left-wing academics, who comprehend nothing but PAYE wages, think it should. This hostility to wealth creators (whoever they are) is simply a lack of understanding, and worse, the sneering of a profession whose people were once able to afford the houses now snapped up by people involved in mere trade. This left-wing politics of envy, so common amongst academics is pure bitterness from a profession which no longer commands the respect (and money) they think they’re due. It doesn’t help the poor to tax the rich so much they seek means to pay less tax. For the means by which the rich pay less tax shrink the pie for everyone. The reason Marxism is doomed to end up murderously totalitarian is that everyone imagines themselves as the planner, not the man condemned to the salt mines to fulfil the plan. The professor of Political Philosophy at Bristol university has not grasped this simple point.
Why Would The FCC Ask Newsrooms About Their Story Selection Process? By Jesse Walker February 20, 2014
For the last 10 days, FCC-watchers have been abuzz about the commission's upcoming attempt to "identify and understand the critical information needs of the American public." Anxieties about the study have been afoot for a while, but the recent furor began on February 10, when Ajit Pai, a Republican commissioner at the agency, published an op-ed attacking the idea in The Wall Street Journal. Warning that the effort was the "first step down" the "dangerous path" of "newsroom policing," Pai made his case against the study: With its "Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs," or CIN, the agency plans to send researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring. The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about "the process by which stories are selected" and how often stations cover "critical information needs," along with "perceived station bias" and "perceived responsiveness to underserved populations." How does the FCC plan to dig up all that information? First, the agency selected eight categories of "critical information" such as the "environment" and "economic opportunities," that it believes local newscasters should cover. It plans to ask station managers, news directors, journalists, television anchors and on-air reporters to tell the government about their "news philosophy" and how the station ensures that the community gets critical information. The FCC also wants to wade into office politics. One question for reporters is: "Have you ever suggested coverage of what you consider a story with critical information for your customers that was rejected by management?" Follow-up questions ask for specifics about how editorial discretion is
exercised, as well as the reasoning behind the decisions. Pai's piece doesn't mention it, but the commission also plans to look at newspaper and Internet content, areas that are outside the FCC's regulatory dominion. The agency quickly started dropping hints that it would be changing course. On February 12, Adweek reported that the CIN "may now be on hold," adding: "At the very least, the controversial sections of the study will be revisited under new chairman Tom Wheeler and incorporated into a new draft." This evidently was too vague to be reassuring, as worries about the plan have only intensified since then. The most bizarre thing about all this may be the disconnect between the study's content and the reason the FCC says it's doing it. The commission is supposed to report to Congress on "regulations prescribed to eliminate market entry barriers for entrepreneurs and other small businesses" and "proposals to eliminate statutory barriers to market entry by those entities." Somehow that requirement led to the CIN. Now, if the study shows that existing stations are ignoring important news, I suppose I can see how that would help make the case for allowing more stations on the air. But it's hard to see how a probe of the media's story selection practices is going to identify any actual barriers to creating those new stations. If you read the commission's research plan—I've embedded a copy at the end of this post —you'll find some pro forma references to finding "potential barriers to entry" but not much in the way of explaining how the questions Pai cited are going to do that. The good news is that I don't see overt signs of a different regulatory agenda in the plan's pages. The thing is written in the tone of someone who wants to understand what stories are being covered and where people turn for news, not someone with a preset remedy for the problems she might uncover. If this were a proposal at a department of sociology instead of a federal agency, it would be unobjectionable, even welcome. But because it's a federal agency—worse yet, an agency that decides whether the stations it's studying will have their broadcast licenses renewed—we have a case here of regulators probing people's speech and then being in a position to use its findings against them. What's most worrisome about this research plan may be the way its authors never pause to consider whether it's appropriate for the FCC to be asking about such things in the first place. (The closest it comes is when it notes that some of its questions might be seen as "sensitive." But it treats that as a barrier to getting sources to open up, not a reason to reconsider the project.) Nor is there any awareness of the idea that the government shouldn't be in the role of deciding what news is important. (Presumably we all agree that we need to know about, say, upcoming weather emergencies. But when you start asking reporters about the stories their editors spiked, you're bound to enter dicier territory.) Evidently, the Federal Communications Commission is so accustomed to seeing itself in the information management business that it takes these things for granted. But then, why shouldn't it? It's been regulating speech for decades now. Start worrying about this stuff, and you might start asking whether the First Amendment, properly understood, actually allows the FCC to issue licenses based on what people say or don't say on the air. And that isn't a conversation the commission will ever be eager to have. The research plan is embedded below. http://reason.com/blog/2014/02/20/why-would-the-fcc-ask-newsrooms-about-th
INFOWARS.COM BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND