September 08, 2003
Enjelani Overflow 3
[The following is a continuation of a conversation that started in this post over at The Last Embassy. The conversation has gotten too unwildy to be contained in a simple post, so I'm migrating some of it over here.]
Some examples for beefeater to consider.
beefeater - My point all along during this long off topic comment thread was a response to your comment: "The issue, therefore, is whether or not "there are institutionalized mechanisms in place to ensure that [the poor] stay impoverished". I don't believe there are (and you don't cite any examples)."
I read this as you saying that institutional evil doesn't exist. I was insisting that it does. Your more recent statement of "If you had instead focused your criticism of "capitalism as currently practiced" on a case where problems arise from a violation of market principles...I'd be with you all the way." sounds like you might be open to admitting that our current system has some flaws. Lets see if we can work with that.
(I still think that the grocery example has more mileage in it, but I'll try to keep that confined to this post.)
The way you made your statement, you seem confident that any injustice in our current system is actually in favor of the poor, not the rich. Lets see if I can prove you wrong, even by your own standards.
(lets go for the low hanging fruit first...)
You have repeatedly insisted that any redistribution of wealth is interference and therefore unjust. You are against progressive taxes for this reason. Well, how do you feel about regressive taxes? If you think that wealth redistribution is unfair in one direction, surly you must think that it is unfair in the other too, right? Alabama has a regressive tax code wherein the poor pay three times the percentage of their income to taxes as do the rich. There is injustice in our current system. Will you support the referendum to reform Alabama's tax code?
(now lets go back to the otherexamples that I gave at the same time as the grocery example.)
The poor lose 10% of their paycheck in just converting their paycheck into cash. They are hardly willing parties in this. Do you count this as just?
How about this? Hospitals sell the same procedure, at different prices, to different buyers. $14,000 if you are poor. $2,500 if you are rich. Same hospital. Same procedure.
Are there "institutionalized mechanisms in place to ensure that [the poor] stay impoverished"? You betcha. Are they unjust? You tell me.
- wink [September 8, 2003 02:29 AM]jim says:
re: "regressive taxation."
It goes even deeper than what you're fearing. I found what I believe is THE libertarian website (can't find it right now though) and it said the following: "taxation is stealing."
Yow! I like to try and stay as open-minded as I can, but that pretty much convinced me right there that libertarianism is, in a word, cuckoo.
beefeater says:
Redistribution occurs when the government provides Bill $10 worth of services but charges him $20 in taxes, in order to provide $20 worth of services to Joe, who pays only $10 in taxes. It is not relevant what fraction these amounts constitute of Bill's and Joe's incomes. One person pays a greater fraction of his income than another to see the same movie or drive the same car. Why is it suddenly an outrage if he pays a greater fraction of his income for government services?
Disparity in hospital charges reflects negotiated volume discounts, which have been beaten to death on the main thread. In the check cashing example, anyone can open a no-minimum-balance account at Wells Fargo for $3.75 a month unless he's an illegal alien (and, of late, even if he is). Anyone who borrows money must honor whatever fees and conditions he agreed to when he borrowed. I can't even understand which of these rules you consider non-interference violations.
wink says:
beefeater - "I can't even understand which of these rules you consider non-interference violations." I'm not saying that any of these are interference. In this thread I'm moving away from that line of reasoning. (I maintain that line in the groceries post.) What I'm trying to demonstrate is that "there are institutionalized mechanisms in place to ensure that [the poor] stay impoverished". They exist and I'm hoping that you would agree that they are bad. Not meley unfortunate, but actively bad. As in oppression. Even if they don't constitute interference. Consider these to be real-world present-day examples of things like my Adolph example in the main thread. The point of these is to demonstrate that 1) real-world evil exists today; and 2) non-interference might not be a good candidate for the sole arbiter of justice.
Back to the examples. Redistribution...
Ah. Sorry. I had misunderstood how you had been seeing redistruibution. I had been assuming that you would be in favor of a flat tax (everyone pays the same percentage of their income). (I figured you would be for that because it would count as a fixed transaction cost to earning money. Every dollar you earn loses x% to the government. Inefficient, but at least even handed.)
Turns out that you want a pay-per-use system of public services. (You are closer to what jim was saying than I had thought.) Different reasoning altogether. Kinda wierd to my mind. Pay-per-use pretty much violates the whole spirit of "public". Seems to me that you don't want public services, but rather private services (maybe government run, but still essentially private).
My whole example of regressive/flat/progressive taxes will obviously hold no sway over someone who thanks that the whole tax structure should be overhauled (or done away with completely?).
At least I now know where you stand. I'll drop example one as we won't be able to do anything more than talk past each other on. Instead I'll continue this part of the discussion by asking if you think that "public" spaces and services should exist at all. Are "public" services immoral because they consitute redstribution? Should "public" services be pay-per-use? If so, then in what way do they still fall under the category of "public"?
Moving on to the hospital example...
You claim that "Disparity in hospital charges reflects negotiated volume discounts". While bulk pricing has indeed been discussed to death in the main thread, this isn't really a case of bulk pricing. Bulk pricing is indeed what is happening with the differences in insurance prices. But we aren't talking about insurance pricing. We're talking about hospital procedure pricing. This isn't a rant against the insurance companies. This is a rant against the hospitals.
If the person with better insurance were getting 10 procedures done instead of one, it would be bulk pricing. But in this case, the person with good insurance is getting the same procedure in the same quantities as the person with no insurance. The only difference is when you get to the billing office after your procedure is done. They look up what kind of insurance you have and bill you based on that. They bill you less if you have good insurance. And they bill you most if you have none.
(The fact that insurance pays for some or all of the hospital bill is irrelevant to me. The way I see it is that the person getting the procedure pays for the whole procedure through their insurance payments [if that wasn't the case, then the insurance companies are losing money...which they clearly are not].)
Same procedure, same quantities, same hospital. Different insurance. Different prices.
Unjust? I think so. It probably doesn't count as interference to you. (Whatever else it is, it cerainly is an "institutional mechanism ensuring that the poor remain impoverished".) But it does map pretty closely to the Adolph example in the main thread. If it doesn't seem unjust to you, then please tell me why. (Besides a mere parroting that "there's no interference, therefore it is just". I know you think that...but tell me how this even pretends to be in the spirit of, well, anything besides exploitation and oppression.) I don't even see a compelling market reason for this kind of behavior. Much less any sort of ethical reason.
Moving on to check cashing...
If it were really as simple as opening a no-minimum-balance $3.75 a month checking account, then the whole industry of check cashing would not exist. I don't know why those who rely on check cashing do not open such accounts. I suspect that they cannot. Otherwise they most probably would. Maybe the banks have some requirements that we as non-poor people have never even noticed. At any rate, the poor don't have those bank accounts. So they lose 10% of their earning for, what seems to me, no service at all.
I'm not sure if anyone is at fault here. But it is a problem (i.e. institutionalized mechanism blah blah blah). It could be solved pretty easily if all employers gave their employees the option of getting paid in cash. As it stands right now, the employers may as well be paying the poor workers in euros. Sure the paycheck is money (just as euros are money), but having to pay what amounts to an exchange rate just to use the money seems wrong to me.
Again, this is an "institutionalized mechanisms in place to ensure that [the poor] stay impoverished". I'm sure that it is not intentional. The company heads are probably not thinking "how can we screw our poorest workers?". They are just doing what is easiest. Cutting checks for all employees is easiest and probably didn't inconvenience anybody when the policy was first put into effect at the founding of the company. But the policy screwing people now. Unjust? Or merely unfortunate?
beefeater says:
Ah... I think I now understand what you are getting at. You bring up situations that admittedly do not involve interference, to see if I'm prepared to dismiss them as "unfortunate". So far, I am. That is to say, I prefer a non-interfering System in which these things happen, to a System that uses interference to avoid them. Why is non-interference so imperative? I tried to address that on your other thread.