10 The Perfect Tax, Deconstructed Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values and the Meaning of Life by Steven E. Landsburg - #fiscoefficientefiscooppressivo #criticaarawls:elautoritàcentrale? #ildeficitdelle12generazioni #contrrawls:perchènonredistribuiretuttoinafrica? #ipotesigrabbing #controrawls:simpatiaebellezza? #controrawls:immanentismooplatonismo? #ilsensodiequitàdibuffett #redistribuzionecomeassicurazione #controrawls:ilsentimentoolimpico #talentoecorpo #furtoestupro #genioemerito #ilpoteredellanalogia
contro rawls (il potere dell'analogia):
- autorità centrale
- analogia ripugnante: redistribuire all'estero
- analogia ripugnante: il sentimento olimpico
- analogia ripugnante: trattare la bellezza, la simpatia ecc. come il talento nel business
- filosofia: colo il platonista puo' concepire l'esperimento dei non nati; non invece l'immanentista
- ipotesi alternativa e credibile: grabbing
continua
10 The Perfect Tax, DeconstructedRead more at location 1453
Note: Il problema di una tassa efficiente: nn disincentiva il politico avido e spendaccione visto che nn rischia di uccidere la sua gallina dalle uova d'oro. I fallimenti della politica si moltiplica... Paradosso: la tassa inefficiente affossa l'economia. La tassa efficiente nn pone limiti alla politica implicando la tirannia. Soluzioni 1) nessuna tassa (x redistribuzione) 2) un compromesso (tassa mista)... Le tasse - sia quelle efficienti che quelle inefficienti - richiedono un' autorità centrale, e qui sorgono altre preoccopazioni... Critica a Rawls: nel suo contratto nn si accenna alle istituzioni ma da chi è tenuto a far rispettare un contratto dipende il contenuto del contratto stesso. Es. nessun codice fiscale pone limiti alla tassazione ma qs è la prima cosa che richiediamo nel c. di Rawls... Redistribuzione e ambientalusmo. I verdi ci chiedono sacrifici x le generazioni future. Ma qs è chiedere ai poveri x dare ai ricchi. Tra una dozzina di generazioni l'americano medio guadagnerà quanto Bill Gates... Quando si tagliano le tasse si leva il solito allarme: il deficit sarà a carico dei ns nipoti. Ma nessuno obbliga qs. gufi a scaricare alcunchè sui suoi nipoti: risparmi e lasci eredità cospicue... Redistribuzione: 1) se fatta con tasse inefficienti è inefficiente 2) se fatta con tasse efficienti è oppressiva e legittima la schiavitù (che ci ripugna) 3) nessuno ci crede realmente (altrimenti aiuteremmo l'africa) 4) nessuno ci crede realmente altrimenti appianerebbe anche le altre diseguaglianze (pensa alla sfortuna di chi nasce poco attraente e si accoppia raramente) 5) la teoria della ridistr. come furto sofisticato spiega molto... L'unica cosa che spiega la rid. e la tassazione prog. è il tentativo di legittimare un furto. Ma xchè molti ricchi sposano la causa?... Se il ricco considera doveroso ridistribuire potrebbe firmare un assegno al Ministero. Dire: "nn lo faccio se nn lo fai anche tu" nn sembra una buona ragione... Pragmatismo: "aiutiamo i poveri o si ribelleranno". Una simile soluzione ha conseguenze spiacevoli: "aiutiamo i brutti o si ribelleranno"… Xchè nn tutte le diseguaglianze ci sensibilizzano? La teoria del "grabbing" risponde bene a qs domanda... Il sesso forzato dei bello coi brutti offende la ns. dignità. Non tolleriamo lo stupro e poco importa se il brutto è stato sfortunato. La mia bellezza la sentiamo nostra e ci sentiamo lesi nella ns dignità se stuprati al fine di riequilibrare le fortune. Lo stesso dicasi x il furto di proprietà... Altro argomento. Nordhaus: l'innovatore cattura il 3% della ricchezza che crea. Non vi sembra che abbia così adempiuto alle sue eventuali obbligazioni sociali?… Edit
The problem with an efficient tax system is that it provides no built-in brake on the government’s avarice.Read more at location 1460
An inefficient tax is too costly because it invites malingering; an efficient tax is too dangerous because it invites taxation.Read more at location 1474
Or we might cobble together a compromise: Maybe we could construct some variation of the trait tax that is imperfectly efficientRead more at location 1477
inefficient tax system is not by itself sufficient to prevent the rise of tyranny; ask anyone who’s old enough to remember the Soviet Union.Read more at location 1480
any tax—it will always require a tax collector.Read more at location 1482
Hopenhayn and Kahn have told us that we’d accept redistribution, but we’d reject a package that combines redistribution with inefficiency. What I’m suggesting here is that what we’re actually offered is a somewhat different package, but an equally unattractive one: a package that combines redistribution with a lot of centralized authority.Read more at location 1490
If there’s one thing an unborn soul would want to insure against, it’s being born in the wrong country—Cuba or Albania or Mali instead of Canada or Luxembourg or the United Arab Emirates. The U.S. tax code does exactly nothing to provide that kind of insurance.Read more at location 1495
The best forecast, then, is that your descendants will have to wait more than a few generations, but not more than a few dozen, to achieve a Gates-like living standard. So each time the Sierra Club impedes economic development to preserve some specimen of natural beauty, it is asking people who live like you and me to sacrifice for the enjoyment of future generations who will live like Bill Gates.Read more at location 1521
The Sierra Club’s agenda is to take from the relatively poor (us) and give to the relatively richRead more at location 1524
The conservationists are not alone in their pathological concern for future generations; the same impulse has launched an epidemic of hysteria over federal deficits.Read more at location 1532
I have news for them: nobody can force you to live well at your grandchildren’s expense. If you think your lifestyle is too extravagant, all you have to do is spend less and bequeath the savings to your grandchildren.Read more at location 1534
redistribution is unacceptably costly, in terms of both efficiency and the centralization of power.Read more at location 1549
Second, nobody seems actually to believe the philosophical case for redistribution anyway.Read more at location 1551
If we think we’re fulfilling an insurance contract, why don’t we recognize that most of the beneficiaries live outside the United States?Read more at location 1552
If that’s not based on a philosophically coherent belief in redistribution, then what is based on?Read more at location 1555
The most obvious answer is that it’s strictly a “might makes right,” “you’ve got it; we’re taking it” kind of thing.Read more at location 1556
But that doesn’t explain the preferences of the many voters near the top of the income distribution who support higher taxesRead more at location 1558
If you really want to pay higher taxes, what’s stopping you?Read more at location 1560
To do otherwise is to say that you’re willing to stop stealing, but only if everybody else does. That position is logically defensible, but it’s pretty unappealing. It’s unappealing precisely because it violates the symmetry principle. It treats your stealing as less important than everybody else’s.Read more at location 1564
justifies redistribution on purely practical grounds—something like “If we don’t give to the poor, their neighborhoods will breed crime or pestilence.”Read more at location 1585
Try this variant: It is “fair” that attractive people should be coerced into granting occasional sexual favors, because without such a system, those same attractive people would be more often victimized by rape.Read more at location 1596
If it is intrinsically fair to subsidize with cash those who are born without the skills to earn a decent income, is it also intrinsically fair to subsidize with sex those who are born without the skills to attract desirable partners?Read more at location 1600
Note: ALTRO PARADOSSO ANTI RAWLS. PLATONICI O IMMANENTISTI? SE IMMANENTISTI L ESPERIMENTO DI RAWLS È IMPOSSIBILE Edit
we’d insure ourselves against bad luck in both lotteries. While you were waiting in line for your appearance and personality assignments, you might happily have signed a contract requiring attractive people—whoever they turn out to be—to feign interest in their unattractive neighbors.Read more at location 1603
Yes, attractiveness is a matter of luck. Yes, that luck is distributed unequally. Yes, we’d all have preferred a more equal distribution if we’d been asked in advance. Yes, it is possible, through coercion, to improve life for the least fortunate at the expense of their more advantaged neighbors.Read more at location 1606
But does anyone doubt that such coercion would be hideously wrong? Maybe we can learn something by thinking about why it’s wrong.Read more at location 1608
we each have a sense that the ones we’ve been given are ours. They belong to us. Dignity is the pride of ownership.Read more at location 1613
To take a man’s property, you must destroy his dignity.Read more at location 1616
the knowledge that our bodies belong to us.Read more at location 1618
Both rape and theft offend our dignity because they violate the rights of ownership. If you balk at one, you must balk at the other. And in the end, redistribution is theft. That really is why we don’t allow children to forcibly redistribute toys on the playground.Read more at location 1622
suspect—though I do not know—that something very similar would happen if we could identify the top 1% of the population in terms of gumption, and exclude them from participation in economic activity.Read more at location 1644
If my guess is right, then people like my young woman friend owe almost all of their prosperity to a very small number of scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. And it seems to me that we ought to account for that debt when we calculate social obligations.Read more at location 1646
In 1953, an economist named John Harsanyi invented the metaphor of social obligations as the fulfillment of pre-birth contracts. In 1971, the influential philosopher John Rawls used those contracts—contracts signed behind the “veil of ignorance” that shields us from knowledge of the particular traits we’ll be born with—as the cornerstone of his Theory of Justice, which has dominated the philosophical literature on justice since it appeared.Read more at location 1655
I want her to know that shocking analogies are a great weapon against false platitudes. I have in mind the analogies between sex and income that I used above.Read more at location 1664
Note: POTERE DELL ANALOGIA
