Dear Friends,
It seems to me that the real measure of the justice in a society, both hypothetical and existing, is to measure the level of class mobility in that society. Other devices and accepted wisdom, used now, like the gap between the rich and poor, should be discarded as the sophist notions they are. I believe that if we moved to a more accurate means of measuring the justice of a society, from a spurious one to a actual measure, our lives would be greatly improved.
There are several means already in use by economists to measure class mobility, they are all functional and so the choice is up to the observer. I would suggest a good way to rectify the disparate measures is to aggregate them into one number that takes all the existing measures into account. The method is already available but it is mostly disregarded.
The unbiased media constantly bring up the spurious notion of the gap between rich and poor. They never mention that the way it is measured differs from country to country. For example, in France government dole is taken into consideration but in the USA it is not. This makes the two measures entirely incompatible and useless. But they are cited in the press all the time. Erroneously as it turns out.
But what makes the sophist measure of the “gap” spurious is that it is a means to diminish class mobility and thus restrain true justice from a society. The “gap” is often cited as a reason for this or that income tax. The new or increased tax supposedly will address some inequity in society on the face of it. The real reason the truly rich like to raise taxes is that higher taxes are levied on the entrepreneurs not the truly rich. As a result, taxes, especially income taxes, are friction to class mobility.
Because income taxes are on income not capital gains. Capital gains is levied on the truly wealthy who’s income is almost entirely from capital gains. This puts the likes of Warren Buffet, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller, among others, in the fifteen percent bracket, while the people who mow their lawns are taxed at twenty eight percent.
That is what is so laughable about Warren Buffet claiming he doesn’t pay enough tax, he doesn’t want taxes raised on him, he wants taxes raised on us. No one is holding him back from paying more taxes. The law only comes after you if you don’t pay enough. But he is smart enough to know that income taxes are a drag on class mobility. Those that are trying to get rich are taxed to death but those that are rich are protected.
Which is the argument of Joseph Schumpeter, that the entrenched wealthy seek to close the door to others lest they themselves move down the societal ladder. A worry of De Tocqueville‘s. But if you think of it, isn’t that the definition of a meritocracy? That those who’s personal virtue, (in the modern, capitalist sense of a virtuous person), raises them above the rest of us to become wealthy. While the corrupt and decadent wealthy fall from the heights their parents or grand parents placed them.
Is it really a good use of governmental power to keep certain people wealthy, generation after generation, at the expense of the whole of society? Does it make sense to wield the power of government to stifle economic growth because it threatens the powerful? No, those that wield government to the ends of oligarchs, are simply despicable. Those that are despicable use sophistry and spurious logic as their favorite tools and can be recognized by the tools they use.
Nothing is done better in the dark, from juggling chainsaws to Indy car racing, (that’s why cars have headlights),darkness is a deterrent to quality work. Using a defective measure for anything is similar to working in the dark. Self imposed dark but no less dark. So when we find that a measure we are using is defective it is in our collective interests to improve it or replace it with a better one and move out of the darkness into the light. In our case, to toss out the trite metaphor of the “gap” and replace it with a true measure of social justice, class mobility. If that is done it will be obvious what countries are just and how just they actually are socially or otherwise…
