Conservatives Want To Live On Monopoly Money

[marmar]

from AlterNet:



Posted by Zach Carter at 1:10 pm
August 20, 2010

Conservatives Want To Live On Monopoly Money
Posted by Zach Carter on @ 1:10 pm


Do today’s economic conservatives actually want to live in a functional society, or are they striving for an economy that runs on Monopoly Money?

NPR’s Planet Money recently did a fun segment on the classic board game and its relationship to actual economics, featuring commentary from a couple of actual economists. Russell Roberts, an economist at the notoriously conservative George Mason University, argued that Monopoly could be improved with a new tax feature. If successful Monopoly players had to transfer some of their wealth to their less-prosperous competitors, Roberts said we could turn children off to the evils of progressive taxation. Here’s the money quote: “You could get kids to resent taxes at an even earlier age.”

James Kwak does a nice job emphasizing that taxes actually do something useful for society, but I think Roberts’ point creates a deeper and more obvious dilemma. Roberts is arguing that the basic goals of real, living human beings are essentially the same as those of a Monopoly player. A Monopoly player wins by pushing everyone else into total poverty in order to control all resources and establish complete economic domination over his peers. People in the real world who are fueled by such motivations are not ordinary, model citizens—they are completely insane. Life is not a quest to get our hands on as much stuff as we can so our neighbors don’t get to it first. A society that allows a few people to establish supreme economic dominion over all others is not a society at all—it’s just a bunch of nasty brutes trying to destroy each other.

The view Roberts expresses here is so crazy that he himself has quickly disavowed it. But his walk-back is still more interesting than his initial commitment to anarchic brutality. Roberts repeats that he’s against taxes, but argues that he’s only against taxes that redistribute wealth in the wrong direction. Here’s his core argument:

I hadn’t set up my tax lesson as an indictment of redistributive taxation but as an indictment of the way the tax system purports to fund public goods but often just redistributes money to special interest groups (the elderly, (rich or poor), Wall Street execs (really rich) and so on.

The rich, in Roberts’ view, should pay taxes to ensure that social services exist for the poor. But the poor shouldn’t be subsidizing the lifestyles of the wealthy. If we ended policies that redistributed wealth up the income ladder, the tax burden for everyone, Roberts argues, would be much lower. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/08/20/conservatives-want-to-live-on-monopoly-money/

[Confusious]

1. How about this?

You didn't pay your taxes, the roads weren't kept up, so your property on Broadway ain't worth shit now because nobody can get to it.

You didn't pay your taxes, so there are no police, so your property on Broadway ain't worth shit now because of such high crime.

You didn't pay your taxes, so there weren't any firemen, so your property on Broadway ain't worth shit now because it burned down.

Or my favorite:

You didn't pay your taxes and didn't like regulation, so there weren't any regulations or regulators, so your property on Broadway just got taken by a crooked banker. You ain't worth shit now.