Redistribution
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- redirect [[Template:Not verified]]
- For redistribution in the political sense, please see redistricting.
Public programs and policy measures intended for redistributive purposes include welfare programs, progressive taxation, and public education. Redistributive efforts have been proposed for and applied to monetary wealth, land, opportunity, capital, as well as human capital throughout history.
Arguments in favor of redistribution
Most people, throughout history, have agreed that an autocratic dictatorship is an undesirable situation. In addition, individual and group ambitions toward this end often produce competitive tensions within society that are undisputedly counterproductive.Additionally, landless, jobless, or mateless individuals become disenfranchised from their societies and are likely to war against it. In mass, they can create a revolution.
For these reasons, as well as subjective concerns of social justice, most societies aim to dampen the natural tendencies of distribution toward oligarchy and monarchy. This can be done through preventative measures, but also, after the fact, by way of redistributive mechanisms.
Redistribution, broadly defined, refers to the taking of finite resources from those whom society judges to "have enough" and reallocating them to the underprivileged.
In the past, redistributive efforts could be quite overt. For example, government could decree that certain lands were no longer the property of their original owners, and appropriate them to someone else. However, this invariantly meets bitter controversy, and therefore is rarely done. In modern societies, redistribution normally takes a more subtle form.
Examples of redistribution
In modern society, redistribution takes many forms:- Progressive taxation: Taxing wealthy individuals at higher rates, and the poor at low rates (possibly zero or negative) has a redistributive effect. Public services, in theory, are equally available to all, so to charge the wealthy more for them, and the poor less, operates in the benefit of the poor.
- Welfare programs: Many welfare programs exist specifically to provide assistance to the poor, and are funded by wealthier individuals.
- Public education: Perhaps the least controversial variety of redistribution is education. By offering publicly-funded educational opportunities to all citizens, a society allows even its poorest members, in theory, access to further opportunities and investment in their own human capital.
- Reparations: Reparations are payments, usually of a monetary form, made in attempt to rectify past wrongs. In the United States, payments of reparations have been proposed for African-Americans, many of whose ancestors were enslaved, and the Native Americans.
- Affirmative action: To compensate for racial discrimination in the past and, possibly, present, affirmative action measured have been proposed. Affirmative action takes many forms which range from the uncontroversial to the drastic.
- Inheritance taxes: Since large inheritances come not by merit and represent an affront to distributive justice, most societies tax them substantially. However, it is becoming an increasingly political issue whether wealth that has already been taxed as it was earned should be taxed again upon the owner's death. That is why only particularly large inheritances are usually taxed. For example, in the U.S., inheritances were taxed 50% over $1.2 million until 2001. An opponent of the American inheritance tax is George W. Bush, who temporarily repealed it. By renaming the estate tax the "death tax", American conservatives were able to galvanize the population against the tax during the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, despite the fact that over 99% of Americans are not wealthy enough for the tax to be an issue.
Criticism
While some measure of redistribution is necessary for a society to maintain function, redistribution invariantly meets with controversy, especially from those who are privileged and stand to lose in the process.Criticism of redistribution does come, therefore, from the self-protecting elite. However, there is also an intellectual case against "too much" redistribution. Redistributing economic or political benefits, especially those earned by merit, reduces incentive for individuals within a society to produce.
The least controversial redistributive measures are normally in the form of education, because general consensus is that educating the population benefits all. Social welfare programs are considerably more controversial, but even most American conservatives agree that a social "safety net" is to the general benefit. Overt redistributive efforts are the most controversial of all, sometimes bitterly so.
See also
External links
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