IceCream wrote:

One way of doing this would be to force(Stansfield) those with power to trade more fairly, or to redistribute wealth later.

Pragmatically, there's significant downsides to this and similar manipulation of the private sector. Namely, if you regularly "punish" the wealthy, less otherwise creative/skilled people are motivated to become wealthy. Those that are already wealthy are motivated to move to a different country that treats them better.

No sane person would work themselves to the bone if they knew full well their country's laws are setup in such a way to take back the fruits of their labor. They'll either not work hard and just be average instead, move to a country with more economic freedom, or try to change and/or exploit the laws to work in their favor instead.  All three of these, in the long run, achieve the opposite of your original goal of improving your country's economy.

Note the above is a conservative's argument and an objectivist isn't an "extreme conservative". An objectivist doesn't accept your very premise of optimizing "for the greater good" in the first place. To him, "the greater good" is a poorly defined concept used essentially as a meaningless slogan to justify sacrificing the rights of some individuals for the benefit of others, which he would regard as evil regardless of the outcome on the basis that it contradicts man's very nature. If you wish to understand that further, it helps if you understand their definition of what a "right" is:

Ayn Rand wrote:

A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self- sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action-which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action—specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.

Going back to the example before, the starving man has no "right" to free bread and the grocer is not obliged to give him any (or charge less than $10) but merely the "right" to engage in trade with the grocer (or others, or produce it himself, etc). Of course, that doesn't mean the objectivist thinks the grocer shouldn't give him cheap bread (it's quite possible it's even in the grocer's self interest, in the long run, to help the guy out) but merely that nobody should force him to.

overture2112 wrote:

Pragmatically, there's significant downsides to this and similar manipulation of the private sector. Namely, if you regularly "punish" the wealthy, less otherwise creative/skilled people are motivated to become wealthy. Those that are already wealthy are motivated to move to a different country that treats them better.

This is one of those ideas that gets mentioned often, but there's very little evidence that rather high taxation rates, as one example of "punishment", make any difference to wealth or motivation.  The US went through a lot of growth with a 90% marginal income tax rate and better growth than we have now with tax rates higher than the Clinton levels.  So depending on what you mean by "punishing", the statement varies in its accuracy.

overture2112 wrote:

IceCream wrote:

One way of doing this would be to force(Stansfield) those with power to trade more fairly, or to redistribute wealth later.

Pragmatically, there's significant downsides to this and similar manipulation of the private sector. Namely, if you regularly "punish" the wealthy, less otherwise creative/skilled people are motivated to become wealthy. Those that are already wealthy are motivated to move to a different country that treats them better.

No sane person would work themselves to the bone if they knew full well their country's laws are setup in such a way to take back the fruits of their labor. They'll either not work hard and just be average instead, move to a country with more economic freedom, or try to change and/or exploit the laws to work in their favor instead.  All three of these, in the long run, achieve the opposite of your original goal of improving your country's economy.

I agree, i think it's worth being pragmatic about these things, and it may be the case that we have to accept some inequality because of that. Again, i don't know if that's actually true, because i don't have enough data to find out. The data i have seen suggest that it's not true though (such as that money doesn't motivate people to succeed for creative and skilled roles, and the lack of correlation of GDP growth and tax rates).

But actually, i think this is probably far less problematic than a lot of people suggest anyway. Firstly, how hard a person has worked and the value of their skills and knowledge should already be present in the concept of an equitable trade. A third party isn't going to call it an equitable trade if it unduly rewards one side of the trade at the expense of another. A society with only equitable trades doesn't mean complete equality of outcome. So, what we're really asking is not whether the wealthy should be "punished" through being asked to trade fairly, or through redistribution, but only whether they are willing to use their skills and creativity in return for equitable trades, or whether they are only willing to trade if they can trade unequitably, with the scales tipped heavily towards them.

Honestly, i do think that society is better off without people who are so self interested that it comes at the detriment of others, so yes, they should feel free to leave if they are only interested in trades that are that way. I don't think creativity, skills or knowledge are tied to that level of selfishness, so we can just make sure those who are willing to trade fairly are in the right environment for those skills to develop instead.

Also, there are equally, if not more important pragmatic reasons in the other direction. Regardless of what definition of rights Ayn Rand uses, inevitably there is only so much an enslaved class is going to take before rising up and redistributing the wealth, violently if necessary.

overture2112 wrote:

Note the above is a conservative's argument and an objectivist isn't an "extreme conservative". An objectivist doesn't accept your very premise of optimizing "for the greater good" in the first place. To him, "the greater good" is a poorly defined concept used essentially as a meaningless slogan to justify sacrificing the rights of some individuals for the benefit of others, which he would regard as evil regardless of the outcome on the basis that it contradicts man's very nature. If you wish to understand that further, it helps if you understand their definition of what a "right" is:

ok, well, i obviously do believe in the greater good, and i think it's human nature to do so, but i don't think it's actually in any way necessary for this argument. I don't think you do need to accept it as a concept for the argument to run. Even if you take things on purely selfish, rational terms, although internally coherent, libertarianism still doesn't really make sense as a choice. The only real difference between what i am saying and what the libertarian says is not found in the concept of the greater good, but in the concept of what is "voluntary", as you already pointed out.

I'll try to explain that more clearly:

Ayn Rand wrote:

The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.

This, as it reads out of context, could have been lifted straight from Marx. Marx would say that the product of a worker's labour is appropriated by the capitalist class, who then dispose of their product. Because the worker has no legal right to the true value of the product of their labour, they are a slave.

I don't know whether Marx would agree to the second paragraph (i need to reread some of his stuff), but anyway, i have no problem with it.

So, the conclusions are the same, but the meanings are different. We should note that on Rand's definition of slavery, the only slaves are those who were forcibly locked up and kept as prisoners. Anyone else was just making a voluntary trade for food and shelter. There's no problem with bonded labour or serfdom either, on Rand's definition. This is obviously different from the more common definitions of unfree labour, which include threat of destitution or extreme hardship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfree_labour

This comes directly from using such a narrow definition of what voluntary action is. There is no recognition that one person's freedom will naturally limit another's. On Rand's definition of rights, if there is only me and one other person in the world, and i claim 100% of the resources because i got in slightly faster, the other person can't do anything about it, or they will be violating my rights (since they are only allowed the freedom to take rational action for the support, furtherance, fulfillment, and enjoyment of their own life insofar as it doesn't impact on my property). They just have to lay down and die instead. That's obviously absurd.

For the same reason, although on the surface it would seem like a society that wished to enforce fair trade or redistribution could offer a libertarian the same kind of "voluntary" choice that they wish to offer others; that of either participating in the society under such a contract or else going somewhere else and not trading in our society at all, the libertarian wants to claim special status by having the third option of participating in society but not playing by it's "voluntary" rules, since the only way of enforcing such rules would be by force, which is against the libertarian's view of rights. But if i try to say that i want a third option of trading fairly, that's also out of the question because they've already claimed all the resources, and nobody's forcing me to do anything, obviously i have the completely "voluntary" option of going and starving if i disagree with the terms of their trade. The thing is though, the only way the libertarian can enforce their own view of rights is by force. They need a government or security guards to be able to hold onto what they claim as their own property. The rules by which others would enforce their own view of rights are equally as internally coherent as a libertarian's, only wider. The only real difference is that other views lead to far less absurd consequences.

I mentioned Rawl's veil of ignorance before, but i didn't really explain it. Rawls argues that we should try to rationally determine what kind of society we want, and what kind of rights, from behind a veil of ignorance. What this means is that you should try to determine what kind of rights you want in society without knowing what position in society you will end up in. I don't think it's possible to rationally choose Rand's version of rights if you do that. Unless you have regulations regarding the fair trade and transfer of property, you just end up with results that no rational person would be willing to accept from that position.

I just want to point out, i don't think there's anything wrong with Rand's version of rights as far as they do stretch, they just don't stretch far enough. I would also say that a starving man doesn't have the "right" to free bread. He should have the right to trade fairly for the bread, not be faced with a false choice because someone else claimed the means of production as their own property first. Pragmatically though, a starving man is always going to do what is rational to keep himself alive, whether it violates someone else's property rights or not. So in the long term, pragmatically, i think if you want to achieve a stable society, you have to take that into account.

overture2112 wrote:

I think it's important to realize that because these "punishments"...

I'm not sure what exactly you by "punishments" yet, but I don't know of any data that shows tax rates are an issue.

vix86 wrote:

overture2112 wrote:

[Marriage penalty question]

This is pretty hard/impossible to answer without more information on the subject. You ask this as if most of us will have knowledge of this particular subject, and I doubt many of us do.

Perhaps I should have phrased it better but I was merely fishing for some curious people that might be tempted to research the topic or perhaps provide some first hand / anecdotal evidence (which can be interesting so long as it's presented as anecdotal). Something like your theorycrafting below is good too.

vix86 wrote:

...If westerners made up almost 50% of that <1%, then you have to figure an even smaller fraction of that is going to be made up of marrying couples that are planning to leave Japan. The figure is just way too small for anyone to be able to believe that Japanese women marrying foreigners and leaving Japan; are the reason that Japanese culture is "dying."

I was originally guessings towards Japanese marrying foreigners and emigrating aiding to the proliferation (on the assumption first generation Japanese immigrants have more of an effect than later generations), but that's a good point; it probably isn't a large enough number to matter.

P.S. the OP's mention of "dying" in the title is a bit extreme (and I didn't mean for my questions to imply this outcome) but in his post he tones it down a bit, ex:

Tsuchinoko wrote:

Is Japan getting bigger and better, or is getting left behind?

overture2112 wrote:

I linked to a paper on 103万円・130万円の壁 as an example.

I keep asking you what you mean by "punishment", since the statements you make seem so vague as to be undebatable.  My point was concerning tax rates, not the effects of "non-linearities and non-convexities" as in the paper you quote.