Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Gil — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 08:55:31 -0000

Bill,

I understand that you're joking and realize that I wasn't speaking for myself when proposing that hypothetical.

What I hoped you'd recognize is that many of us view property rights in the same kind of category, though. Property often represents the results of tremendous personal sacrifice and difficult choices; a significant portion of their lives' time and effort. Your cavalier attitude about "frustrating rich peoples' expectations about what they're entitiled to" suggests that you don't take this idea very seriously. I tried to form my "frustrating some promiscuous women's expectations about their entitlement in terms of contol over their bodies" line to try to express how offensive that attitude can be.

The better lesson is that nobody should be "the one in charge of making interpersonal utility comparisons" with respect to basic rights such as these. At least, not the kind that spark coercive remedies.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Bill Korner — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 06:24:01 -0000

Gil: Let me just say that I'm sure glad you're not the one in charge of making interpersonal utility comparisons!

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Gil — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 20:28:16 -0000

No, Bill. I don't think that's the real question.

Should we decide the question of whether or not to permit the rape of women who say "No" on whether some utility function is maximized?

Sure, we might frustrate some promiscuous women's expectations about their entitlement in terms of contol over their bodies, but maybe some women mean "Yes", and maybe some experts judge men to get more benefit than women bear costs, etc.

Sorry, but I don't think that's the way to decide if these are rights violations.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Bill Korner — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 18:33:59 -0000

"you're proposing to initiate lots of specific new rights-violations against specific extant people"

whether its "rights violations" that I am (supposedly) proposing is exactly the question now isn't it?

I admit that frustrating rich peoples' expectations about what they're entitiled to is a cost. The real question is, how severe are the other costs that would be associated with such actions.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Nick Weininger — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 10:26:57 -0000

Bill,

I am indeed averse to interpersonal utility comparison; indeed I see it as the root of most of the evil in the world. As I say, that aversion seems to me a natural consequence of self-ownership, and "completely wack" is not much of an argument against it. (Moreover, as you note, justifying redistributive taxation not only requires justifying interpersonal utility comparison, but the performance of that comparison by people who have no particularly good incentive or skill to do it "well", and a lot of incentive to do it tendentiously).

Of course one needs some means of comparing degrees of rights-violation, since in the real world there is not and will not soon be perfect respect for people's side-constraint rights, and so we have to choose among evils. But this doesn't amount to abandonment of the side-constraints view at all. Believing that murder is always wrong, as a side-constraint, does not preclude one from discussing whether some types of murder are worse than others, nor from considering which sorts of murder we ought to devote the most resources to stopping in the knowledge that we can't stop all of it.

And again, the point is that the burden of proof is *not on me* to show that redressing past injustices will do more harm than good. It's on you to show that it won't, because you're proposing to initiate lots of specific new rights-violations against specific extant people in order to rectify vaguely defined injustices most of which were done to people long dead, and I'm proposing to just leave people alone.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Bill Korner — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 08:03:21 -0000

Nick: Your view of justice seems to be that its a matter of having the least number of rights violations (or maybe minimizing some weighted index of rights violations). Notice that this is not a side-contstraints kind of view at all, but rather what Nozick might have called a "utilitarianism of rights".

You seem very averse to the notion that individuals' well-beings might be comparible. Admittedly assigning that task to government bureaucrats is unappealing, but the idea that individual well-beings are not even vaguely comparible is completely wack.

More to the point, in order to sustain your claim that redressing past injustices will do more harm than good, you'll have to point to something relevant about once and future rights violations. What's that going to be if it has nothing to do with how detrimental these were/will be to people's well-being.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Nick Weininger — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 16:24:30 -0000

Sorry, the hypothesis I was referring to was "initial joint-ownership is consistent with individual self-ownership." My point was thus: even if that possibility is consistent, as you say, it only justifies Georgism at most. George, as I understand him, did *not* believe that all value traced to land; he believed only that *some* inequality traced to past unjust appropriation of land. Nor did he advocate forced re-equalization of land holdings; only the so-called Single Tax on site rents.

More generally, it's true that current distributions originated *in part* through quite a bit of injustice of several types. But they are also largely based on just transactions: voluntary wealth creation and trade. Indeed, it is impossible in general to disentangle the just from the unjust portion; too much time has passed and society is too complicated. Defense of existing distributions against mass forced redistribution therefore does not require that one show that they could have come about absolutely justly-- only that you cannot redo them without creating a great deal more injustice. Which is manifestly true, and *does* follow from self-ownership, since even if people only unquestionably own their labor, a very great deal of existing wealth has been earned through that labor.

In any case, Cohen et al (if you've characterized them correctly) are just plain arguing by implicit assertion. Namely: claiming "there is not much inequality that can be justified on the basis of self-ownership alone" is smuggling in an egalitarian premise, namely that inequality in and of itself needs a positive justification. But it doesn't; since individuals are incomparable, not equal, in moral worth (which again is what self-ownership really means), inequality in and of itself is morally neutral. The burden of proof is on those who would forcibly change things as they are, not on those who would continue with existing inequality.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Bill Korner — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 16:02:09 -0000

George's line was that all value, and therefore all inequality, did trace to land, right? So, "everything that resulted from the prior inequality", is strictly speaking all inequality (at least for George).

Also, initial joint-ownership is not a hypothesis about which we should ask "true or not". It's simply another possibility consistent with self-ownership. That's why all the arguments against initial joint-ownership (many of which are, ironically, consequentialist) are beside the point.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Bill Korner — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 15:31:21 -0000

Nick: It would seem that the Georgist purist should have advocated either re-equalization of land holdings and of everything that resulted from thw prior inequality or (pseudo Rawls) a alternative superior in maximin terms.

I think consequentialism is the way to go. But, like you, I am not convinced that "egalitarian consequentialism" as you called it is the only approach that can be justified after Cohen. Still whatever you get will at least be close to that approach. The Critical Review arguments of (if I remember right) Wolff and Weinberg, did show that self-ownership (which is at least consistent with the possibility of interpersonal utility comparability) does not straghtforwardly yield the libertarian rights (and corresponding "rights definition of freedom") that they are very widely believed to yield. That's why that scholarship is important.

In short: Cohen and his expositers are just talking about what inequalities could be justified on the basis of self-ownership alone. The surprising result: not much.

And don't forget that existing distributions are not, in fact, based on a just set of acquisitions and transactions (and rectifications of injustices) on ANYBODY's view. So AT MOST the libertarian is stuck defending them on the grounds that they COULD POSSIBLY been justly arrived at. It's a fruitless enterprise.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Nick Weininger — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 12:57:15 -0000

Also, the joint-initial-ownership premise, even if true, could at most justify Georgist taxation on the site value of land and natural resources, since those things comprise the initial endowment of the world. It cannot justify taxation on earned income at all, much less "progressive" taxation.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Nick Weininger — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 22:37:12 -0000

I'll wade into this. The problem with your consequentialist leap, Bill, is that it smuggles an egalitarian premise into the discussion without justifying it: the premise that we can define a notion of better or worse overall consequences through interpersonal utility comparisons, i.e. that we can speak of "better consequences" without answering the question "consequences to whom?".

But this won't work, because different people's utilities are incomparable, and this incomparability *is* a consequence of self-ownership: it is, in fact, pretty much what self-ownership means. I own myself because I am an end in myself, not a means to anyone else's ends or to a greater social end of maximization of good overall consequences. And my utility is neither lesser, greater, *nor equal* to anyone else's. That's why you need rights to be side-constraints and not balancing acts.

So consequentialist egalitarianism cannot be used to reconcile attacks on property rights with self-ownership.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Gil — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 18:00:01 -0000

Oh.

Okay.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Bill Korner — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 13:57:38 -0000

Gil: Oh, on the contrary, you MUST change them!

:)

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Gil — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 12:52:25 -0000

Bill,

We're talking about people, right?

Individual people who have individual goals, and respond to incentives?

I think Nozick's model approximates my sense of our moral obligation to each other to respect each other's autonomy and limit our interactions to the voluntary (other than defense).

And, his notion of the distributive justice where justly acquired and transferred holdings lead to a just distribution, regardless of how that distribution looks, also squares with my thoughts.

Why should anyone care whether you or Cohen think that in the unworkable fictional state of joint-ownership of everything some idiot might not agree to selling part of it?

This doesn't seem to go anywhere towards demonstrating that I must change my notions of morality and justice because people in that situation would only sell their property by considering consequences (as opposed to what?).

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Bill Korner — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 11:19:40 -0000

Cohen is not arguing for joint-ownership. That's precisely what Palmer (and you apparently) don't see/accept. I'm also not arguing for it.

Your statement,

"...almost anything would make them better off than continued joint-ownership."

seems to illustrate your acceptance of my point that deciding between joint-ownership and private-ownership requires considering the consequences of these regimes. It can't be done on self-ownership grounds alone. (That's Cohen's point.)

Nozick's side-constraints view of rights, on the other hand, says that these rights must be respected no matter what the consequences. But, says Cohen, doing so won't necessarily lead to inequality if the world is jointly owned.

Ergo, if you want to defend non-joint property rights as side-constraints, it will have to be on the basis of the good consequences that flow from such a regime. Once these rights are not absolute but depend on the good consequences, then respecting them absolutely (as side-constraints) can be attacked by arguing that better consequcnes (e.g. for individual autonomy) would ensue if they were respected less than absolutely.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Gil — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 10:53:35 -0000

Bill,

I don't know what you're talking about.

It looks to me like there's absolutely nothing left of Cohen's "argument".

"Also, absent ignorance, they wouldn't agree to anything that would make them worse off than continued joint-ownership"

But, almost anything would make them better off than continued joint-ownership. Continued joint-ownership is suicide.

Everyone, absent insanity, would welcome the improvements that come from private ownership.

Requiring unanimity to allow this (or even to agree to the disposition of jointly-owned property) is a death sentence to all.

So, remind me why anything from Cohen should lead someone away from self-ownership+side-constraints?

I mean, other than the fact that liberty leads to possible circumstances that some people don't like.

I think all systems have that feature.

How does Cohen get us somewhere better?

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Bill Korner — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 10:05:15 -0000

And, to be fair, Palmer's article also adduces all sorts of reasons why self-owners should/would/might agree to divide joint holdings or their product. I forgot about that part. Those are the most interesting sections of the paper, but they miss the point too because Nozickian self-owners under joint ownership would have the RIGHT to NOT reason the way Palmer argues they shoud. Also, absent ignorance, they wouldn't agree to anything that would ultimately make them worse off than continued joint-ownership. So we're back to considering the (of course terrible) consequences of joint-ownership and, ultimately, to rejecting self-ownership + side-constraints in favor of, if not some form of consequentialism, then at least a contratarianism that makes stipulations with regard to possible future outcomes.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Bill Korner — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 09:32:02 -0000

Palmer's article totally misses the point, because Cohen's not arguing that the world should be (have been) jointly owned. He's just saying that nothing about self-ownership tells you whether it is (was) and Nozickian argument assume that it wasn't. The main arguments Palmer makes against joint ownership are consequentialist (and, if I remember, Palmer claims to be a consequentialist which is surely incompatible with being a Nozickian). So this whole route dismisses the Nozickian side-constraints, self-ownership world and accepts consequentialist reasoning which is what I was advocating. Sure, you could say that consequentialist reasoning just establishes that the world should have not initially been jointly owned and after that its Nozick all the way. But that would be totally arbitrary.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Gil — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 09:07:22 -0000

Well, Tom G. Palmer's critique seems pretty strong to me.

Perhaps you and many others should reconsider.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Bill Korner — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 06:15:49 -0000

Gil: The definitive critique of Nozick's political philosophy is G.A. Cohen "Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality" and (more tersely) in a 1997 issue of Critical Review titled "Libertarianism" (I think). These works have convinced me and many others.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Gil — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 20:39:34 -0000

Bill,

By autonomy I mean people's ability to persue their own peaceful projects with the minimum coercive interference from other people.

This leaves a huge range of wonderful, creative, kind voluntary cooperation that lets people help each other without treating each other as means rather than ends.

So, I endorse the Nozickean rights as side-constraints view, rather than forcing other people to improve the choices of the worse-off.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Bill Korner — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 17:59:45 -0000

Gil: I'm not claiming to speak for Scanlon. I don't know what he'd think about (1).

I don't know what you mean by autonomy, but you can find a sketch of my thoughts in this thread at the end of my response to Will. Also, I had this extended discussion with a libertarian reader of this blog under a thread about the "Political Class". That had lots of talk about autonomy in it.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Gil — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 17:32:26 -0000

Thanks for the explanation, Bill. I was more familiar with Rawls than Scanlon, but I think they both "game" the system with their rules, and I don't accept that either of their bargains capture a good conception of justice.

In any case, I'm not at all inclined to accept 1). And, I'm a reasonable man. So, you and Scanlon must accept that it's unjust.

It seems reasonable to me to consider things other than my relative place in some social or economic hierarchy (like whether people's autonomy is respected to a degree that makes a slide into tyranny unlikely). If Scanlon defines this as outside of reasonable consideration, then I think he's cheating and the bargain is intrinsically unfair.

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Bill Korner — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 12:48:45 -0000

Gil: The point of Scanlon's contractarianism is to ask what principles people we would accept if we didn't know, for example, whether we were going to be rich or poor. The main difference between his view and Rawls' is that we're not just considering what society we'd be willing to take the risk of occupying an unknown position in. Rather, for Scanlon the right principles are the ones that give us a society in which we'd be willing to accept any position. (That's a rough characterization and I'm no expert.)

So, given the current distribution, it may be impossible to organize a "redistributive movement" among the wealthy (without democratic politics involving the institutions of government). But even so, what I say about which principles would more likely be rejected by Scanlon's contractors could be true and morally relevant (on his theory as I understand it).

Re: Preference Change and Tax Policy, Again

Bill Korner — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 12:36:11 -0000

Here's an improved version of my last post. Please excuse the reposting which, I admit, can be annoying:

Will: You originally said "it is cheap to equivocate between the desire for status and the desire for relative position in the income distribution." But then you turn around and re-write my principles in terms of "contingent preferences for relative income." You surely agree that that is a different question! It may be your question, but it's not mine (or Layard’s, I think) and I can't see how yours is more useful except to make your point. To say that the preferences are "contingent" (upon the individual’s choice I think you mean) itself begs an important questions. To describe them as for "relative income" avoids taking stock of the real preferences at stake including (a) not to be see oneself as less worthy because of lesser buying power, (b) not to suffer from lesser social status that comes from being known to have less wealth, (c) to be able to confer benefits on others and perform other social functions that require sufficient relative income, (d) to have more choices about what sort of employment to accept and perhaps to be an employer instead of an employee, and a host of other reasons. No one has a preference for higher relative income PER SE! If that is really what Layard thinks, then that makes him a strawman. (So why waste all this time debunking him.) All these ills are consequences of having a lower relative income. This does raise the interesting issue of what we are trying to do when we describe agents in terms of their “preferences”, itself a word that makes them sound relatively trivial. (“I ‘prefer’ that there not be genocide in the Sudan.”)

When you say that I formulated the principles in too specific terms, are you just saying that they are more specific then the kind Scanlon uses? If that's true (I'm not convinced), I disagree with Scanlon and would defend my version of his views over his.

I don't know about Scanlon's politics. Is he a libertarian or is it just that you think he should be given his views as you understand them? I’m pretty sure he’s not a libertarian.

It’s very dubious and highly disputed that respecting autonomy requires not taxing high incomes more than low incomes (for whatever reason). The thesis that the motive of alleviating suffering from relative income deprivation makes the taxation especially anti-autonomy is way out. (You seem to think Scanlon would be onboard here. I strongly doubt it.)

Also, as I have argued all over this blog, an individual's [relative] autonomy should be evaluated by looking at the whole range of choices he/she faces and how attractive those are compared to others' choices (in his/her view). I suggest that this is a much more meaningful view of autonomy than one that sees it as having ones rights as side-constraints respected. Are you going for a side-constraints view of autonomy, or do you accept that it has to do with the quality of choice faced?