Friday, February 6, 2015

Matt Bruenig — Should the State Steal from the Poor?


Ya gotta love Matt.
There is a funny group of people out there who became laissez-faire propertarians for secular reasons but then later had to backfill ways to reconcile it with their Catholic religion. One of the things these people often do is concede that, as Locke famously wrote, the poor have a right to the surplus of the rich, but then insist that the state has no role in actualizing that right. 
People who say this seem to imagine that the state can somehow stay out of the matter: the rich will either give it over to the people it belongs to (the poor) or they won’t, and the state will keep out of it. But this can never be the case. 
On this view, the surplus of the rich literally belongs to the poor. It is theirs. Yet, under laissez-faire propertarianism, when the poor go to collect what is theirs (e.g. grab up food and supplies and whatever from the houses of local rich people), the state does not stay out of it. Instead, the state comes out and violently attacks the poor, throwing them in jail even. 
If you believe, as these conservative Catholics claim to, that the surplus truly does belong to the poor, then state enforcement of property law in scenarios like this is literally stealing from the poor. The state is using its force to keep the poor away fromtheir own belongings. Should the state’s force be mobilized in this way? To steal from the poor and give to the rich?
Matt Bruenig
Should the State Steal from the Poor?

My comment there:
Where does the surplus come from? Gains that don't come from work, which is why the workers have a right to it. The surplus is extracted from their productive contribution. 
In economic terms, the surplus is the result of economic rent and rent-seeking behavior.
According to economist Michael Hudson, for example, economic needs to be taxed away both to restore distributive balance after imbalance created by imperfect markets and also to create a disincentive for rent-seeking. 
The surplus that is taxed away should then returned to the economy productively through spending on public purpose, or reducing taxation on workers. 
The formula is don't tax work, tax economic rents — land rent (different from rent on real estate), monopoly rent, and financial rent.

3 comments:

Peter Pan said...

Enable the links, please. Thank-you.

Tom Hickey said...

Link added. I've added a couple of comments over there, too.

Roger Erickson said...

No, leave that to the rich. :(