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.
Clarissa's Blog 
Yep. That pretty much summarizes it. I think people like to earn their wealth and have a chance at working to the top. Plenty of people who literally had no money that had to work hard to get where they are today. I think creating more wealth and making it easier for people at the bottom to make it to the top would be a far better way to address the poverty issue and getting rid of any unnecessary barriers, whatever they may be.
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Wealth redistribution is one of the worst things conservatives accuse of progressives, so I’m always surprised to see progressives actually supporting it. I want to think it’s a strawman argument.
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But supporters or redistribution are progressive.
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I didn’t look for the article, but it is clear that moral idealism can never be economics. No, no, I mean it SHOULD BE clear. What you are describing is the typical moral leftists’ proclamation — “I will hit the economics problem with my moral discourse. Oh, wait a second, I can’t do that.”
So they end up simply siding with regimes that LOOK LIKE they embody liberal liberation fantasies, but turn out to be rather more complex, because, hey, reality is complex. So, they say, “Oh, Mugabe’s great, an anti-colonial marvel. Oh, wait, he’s not good, a despot.” If they’d taken the whole picture into account to begin with, they would not be flipflopping quite so much. But moral leftism is always going to face trouble with its worst enemy — reality.
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I have heard ideas for a minimal pension in order to reduce the benefits management bureocracy but to give away seventy five grand for nothing is ridiculous that will immediately devaluate the value of money to practically nothing setting us back to square one.
I would have understood the move as moralistic but for happiness? happiness is all about having a bit more money than your friends 🙂
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For such a public intellectual Cole kind of strikes me as kind of a lightweight. I can’t think of anything really insightful he’s written (oth I spend almost all my time not reading him so I might have missed an interesting point or two).
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I detest his articles, too. I have no idea what makes him so famous. He makes one extremely careless statement after another.
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Just to clarify, there are lots of academic heavyweights who engage in impeccable scholarship that doesn’t lend itself to public punditry and Cole might well be that. But that just makes the public role he’s looking for seem all the more incongruous….
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What was the population of the US? 300+ million?
Conservatively, 300,000,000×75,000=22,500,000,000,000 or 22.5 trillion dollars.
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Yes, a mere trifle and then nobody will be depressed ever again! 🙂
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Everyone would have 75K and nothing at all to buy with it. There would be nobody growing food or working. You couldn’t hire someone to give you a massage, even.
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Cole took the number $75,000 from some study that demonstrates that making more than that doesn’t contribute much to one’s happiness. One needs to make an enormous leap of logic from there to a suggestion that everybody should be given this amount to be happy.
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The actual quote is even worse than what you say: ” Good public policy would strive to give everyone in the US that $75,000 basic level of well-being, if what we wanted was more happy people.” http://www.juancole.com/2013/05/symbolizes-barracuda-capitalism.html
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And this is good too: “The first thing that happens when you win the lottery is that you typically lose all your friends. Some of them resent your good fortune. Some have unrealistic expectations in sharing it. Some are embarrassed to hang around with people who dress so much better than they. Some have nothing in common with someone who doesn’t have to struggle. Then, there is the temptation to quit your job and become essentially idle, which produces depression. For an entrepreneur or film maker, maybe the extra money could be put to good use, but for most people the $75,000 limit on happiness is operative, and having $200,000 a year wouldn’t make them three times as happy; probably it wouldn’t make them happier at all. Not to mention the traps of not managing the money well, or developing expensive addictions that waste it all, or being targeted by criminals.”
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I bet they would shoot everybody that tried to get some extra cash by, let’s say, selling something outside the tightly regulated state market. The author of that text is a textbook example of a “useful idiot”. I bet he does not know that the first ones to be executed by NKVD were communists, “fellow travelers” and the like.
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Exactly. 🙂 And pesky college professors with opinions of their own, too.
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Exactly. And the pesky, opinionated academics would also be punished harshly for existing.
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75 000$????? He’s crazy!
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I would have no problem with 12 000$/year in Québec from a negative income tax scheme, though.
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I would substitute “redistribution of opportunity” for that of wealth. If schools were uniformly good, after-school programs and libraries with night hours uniformly available, income sufficient for good nutrition, medical care available, parks and recreation available in every neighborhood, and poor people not concentrated in ghettos, then I think that many more people would be happy. A better educated populace can be good for the economy. I am all for modified capitalism.
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“I am all for modified capitalism.”
– Hear, hear!
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