The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
AC -- AT: Redistribution of Wealth
Download 2.09 Mb.
|
2AC -- AT: Redistribution of WealthAlt fails – taking money away from the rich does nothingMccloskey 19 [Mccloskey, Deirdre Nansen, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois, 2019, "Why Liberalism Works : How True Liberal Values Produce A Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World For All.," Yale University Press, SMarx, JTong] What does not matter ethically are the routine historical ups and downs of the Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, or the vulgar excesses of the 1 percent of the 1 percent, of a sort one could have seen on display three centuries ago in Versailles, or thirty centuries ago in Egypt. There are not enough really rich people to make expropriating them serve any purpose ex- cept stoking envy. If we seized all the assets of the eighty-five wealthiest people in the world to make a fund to give annually to the poorest half, it would raise their spending power by less than 10 cents a day. 3 The assets of the wealthiest eighty-five persons were reported in 2014 by Oxfam to total $1.7 trillion. (There is, by the way, something screwy about Oxfam’s number here, because the world’s interest-bearing assets are on the order of scores of trillions, and if including the assets of human capital, too, they are on the order of hundreds of trillions. But let’s go with Oxfam’s figure for the nonce.) If a fund of that size earned a robust 7 percent annual return, there would be $119 billion a year, which is only $326 million a day, to distribute among the poorest half, 3.6 billion people—or 9 cents per person. All the foreign aid to Africa or South and Central America, to give an- other example of how redistribution does not accomplish a great deal, is dwarfed by the amount that nations in such areas would gain if the people of Europe or the United States abandoned tariffs and other protections for their already rich agriculture.4 The way to help the poor, in short, is to let the Great Enrichment proceed by commercially tested betterment, as it has widely since 1800 and especially in the past forty years. Charity or expropriation is not efficacious, particularly considering that the charity in foreign aid or the ex- propriation by military coup has flowed into Swiss bank accounts, not into the subsistence of the poor. A high market price for the poor farmer, by con- trast, goes to his children. Commerce works better than theft. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
|