[extropy-chat] Bloodless Redistribution of Wealth(wasSingulartarians)

[Damien Broderick]

At 01:43 PM 12/28/2005 -0800, spike wrote:

>Wealth creates wealth.  Large piles of wealth in
>the hands of an individual creates larger piles
>of wealth.  Wealth in the hands of government, well
>I'll let you decide if that is a harm or a
>benefit.  Perhaps both....

This is too simplistic to be useful. We need to look closely at the fine 
grain of how this aggregated wealth is spent by govt to know if it's better 
or worse than having it dispersed among many or aggregated by private 
owners (cf. national health in Oz and Canada vs. private funds in USA, 
where the latter notoriously have ludicrously excessive skimming from the 
top, pushing up costs). Does anyone here suppose centralized government (or 
dispersed govt for that matter) never uses such aggregated wealth as a 
multiplier? It doesn't vanish when it goes into the imaginary pocket of the 
wealthy individual, but neither does it vanish when Uncle Sam or whoever 
gets ahold of it.

>In some ways, wealth is subject to the law of
>inverse diminishing utility, or rather advancing
>marginal utility.  If you have a ton of it, you
>can set up factories that create enormous economies
>of scale.

And this differs from govt spending how? Because bureaucracies comprise 
cowards who have to watch their asses, never making bold decisions? Because 
they make too many reckless decisions, never having to worry about where 
the money's coming from? What? (I'm not saying there's no difference, 
plainly there often is, but then govt and private enterprises are set up 
with different, often mutually exclusive, tasks from the outset.)

Damien Broderick