N has read an article in the journal of his professional association where the authors have allowed their ideology to interfere with the sacred process of statistical modeling. So now, instead of lying on the beach, he is stuck in the hotel room writing a passionate rebuttal to the article.

I will post the rebuttal later on. Don’t worry, you will like it because it has to do with teenage sex.

Juan Cole has a new article up where he suggests that the state should provide a uniform yearly income of $75,000 to everybody in order to make people happy and not depressed. (I’m still on the beach, still can’t link, please find the article on your own.)

Zygmunt Bauman also suggests in his 2011 book on culture that without a radical redistribution of wealth the existing social and economic problems will not be resolved.

When I read such pronouncements, I always wonder if their authors are really dumb or simply pretend to be dumb.

There is absolutely no way that Juan Cole and Zygmunt Bauman don’t know that a radical redistribution of wealth always leads to the same result. Namely, within just one generation the society where the redistribution took place becomes a lot more stratified socially and economically than it had been before the redistribution. And the more radical the redistribution, the more galling is the resulting stratification. Even if you not only take away all of the wealth of the ruling class but actually slaughter that class including the children. Even if an embargo precludes the entrance of any new wealth into the country. Even if the country where the redistribution occurs is desperately poor / quite wealthy / of moderate wealth to begin with. Even when a fixed income that Cole dreams about is introduced and defectors from that vision of income are punished by death.

Cole and Bauman must surely know all this because there are mountains of historical evidence demonstrating that this is always the result of a radical redistribution of wealth. (Mind you, we are talking about a radical redistribution, not about somebody paying 10% more in tax). As for the evidence that such a redistribution will make everybody happy and not depressed, it doesn’t exist.

Cole and Bauman avoid addressing the pesky issue of history that has proven their dream to be a piece of arrant idiocy more times than should have been necessary to convince even the most stubborn believers. The only argument this camp of trenchant worshippers of redistribution ever offers is racist and xenophobic in the extreme. The redistribution, they say, was simply not conducted right by those bumbling stupid creatures who uselessly inhabit the worthless part of the world that lies outside the US borders.  Now if the mighty Americans were to do it, they would show the world how to redistribute correctly and non-depressively.

The only little glitch with this plan is that its cost is always (again, that annoying evidence) a mountain of dead bodies. Cole and Bauman, in spite of all the verbiage they regale us with, don’t really notice non-Anglo corpses, which is why they consistently forget to mention this little issue.

The reason why this discourse of redistribution is so dangerous is that it precludes us from developing and discussing any real and workable program of action. “Well, since there can be no real redistribution, it’s all useless anyway,” one progressive thinker after another sighs impotently. As a result, we are stuck with repeating the same old useless fantasies that, for a century, have been beguiling people into massacring each other by the million only to end up with a much more stratified society than before.