The Redistribution Fallacy
The recent rants of Bernie Sanders about taxing the rich to provide benefits is not really news. Barack Obama said the same thing to Joe the Plumber some years ago. Those who talk about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design. But human beings have their own responses to government policies, and consequently we cannot just assume that government policies will have the effect intended. The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example. In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in th...