More Of My Balloon Juice

I know that I am inviting criticism for supporting this position. It always amazes me that I can never convince my conservative friends that this is a perfectly reasonable way to run a society. It is cliche to say this but we ARE all in this together.

Much of our successes in life falls to an accident of birth or decisions we make that can either have good or bad results. We never know. It's a crap shoot. I like the idea that as I am out there striving to be all I can be, that there is a safety net to catch me if I fail and to support those around me, who ARE me, but who often, through no fault of their own, (the disabled, those born to poverty) find themselves having to struggle hard to survive. The way society cares for the least fortunate matters. It forms values of compassion and humanity that I want to be core principles in the world I live in.

My vision of economic morality is more or less Rawlsian: we should try to create the society each of us would want if we didn’t know in advance who we’d be. And I believe that this vision leads, in practice, to something like the kind of society Western democracies have constructed since World War II — societies in which the hard-working, talented and/or lucky can get rich, but in which some of their wealth is taxed away to pay for a social safety net, because you could have been one of those who strikes out.

Such a society doesn’t correspond to any kind of abstract ideal, whether it’s “people should be allowed to keep what they earn” or “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. It’s a very non-Utopian compromise. But it works, and it’s a pretty decent arrangement (more decent in some countries than others.)

That decency is what’s under attack by claims that it’s immoral to deprive society’s winners of any portion of their winnings. It isn’t.

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