Improving the world and redistribution

I'm putting some thought into how we might make the world a better place.  I think that the general approach should be to express gratitude to people for the things they have done that are helpful and to help people to come up with less destructive alternatives to actions which are harmful.  When people do things that are hurt others, there is usually some reason why they have done this other than a desire to harm others.  They want to realize some goal or set of values.

Sometimes the goal will be completely incompatible with certain other values that people find important.  I believe that this is the case with economic equality.  Determining the statistical distribution of income or wealth within a society would be completely incompatible with liberty.  It is not only the case that it would require the weakening or abolition of property rights.  In order for such a system to be maintained for any length of time it would be necessary to interfere with the rights of people to choose between savings and consumption.

However, there are very few people who only value the relative distribution of wealth or income.  Most supporters of these will also have other values.  They reveal these other values when they present arguments to people who do not express concern about wealth and income distribution, in order to persuade them that they should.  For instance, they will claim that inequality leads to crime and disease.  I want to address these concerns.

First, I will consider disease.  As I have pointed out in previous posts, life expectancy is increasing.  The long term trend is for life expectancy to increase.  We see this when we compare countries that had a similar material standard of living at two points in history.  The richer country will have reached that standard sooner. However, life expectancy will still be higher in the poorer country at that later point in time.  Inequality enables us to develop new medical technologies for richer people, which can then be used by poorer people for less money than would otherwise be required.

As for crime, I think that it is important to say why it is the case that crime would be higher.  Suppose that we had a world that was full of racists.  You might observe that crime would be higher in countries that were more racially diverse.  However, this wouldn't be a valid argument in favor of segregation.  We recognize that the problem is racism.  Similarly, we might say that economic diversity would lead to widespread discontent due to envy, but this wouldn't tell us that economic diversity was wrong.  Perhaps the problem is our envy.  This is what Robert Nozick said.

We need to examine whether we can reduce crime more efficiently through redistribution or by discouraging envy.  First we should think about the means that individuals in our society have to do each of these.  People can give money to the poor.  They can encourage or discourage others from doing so.  They can invest money in companies that will hire people.  They can vote.  They can envy those who are richer, and they can encourage or discourage others from doing so.

It would seem to me that the most efficient way of dealing with the problem of crime would be to directly tackle the issue of envy rather than trying to reduce the amount of envy indirectly by improving the distribution of income.  In fact I would argue that this ought to be the default position.  However, it is likely that there are many people who would disagree.  In addition, it might be the case that it would be helpful for people to both discourage envy and help the poor.

The argument isn't really about whether we should help the poor and encourage others to do so.  The argument is over whether or not we should take money from the rich and give it to the poor.  In the case of the individual we have ruled out most forms of redistribution.  People can vote in favor of redistribution, but there is no private right to redistribute that is generally recognized.  I would argue that forcible redistribution of income would be less effective in reducing envy than voluntary redistribution.  It is much more difficult to hold a grudge against people who are voluntarily helping you than against people who are required to do so by law.  In fact many of the people who are arguing against inequality seem to be actively promoting envy.

It is completely compatible with even a libertarian idea of liberty to use your own resources to help the poor, to encourage others to do so and to discourage envy and encourage others to do so.  Devoting time and treasure to any of these doesn't preclude putting money and effort behind any of the others, except that you cannot expend the same resources for two different ends.  If we are interested in reducing crime, this gives us no reason to oppose any of these measures.