The entitlement mentality

The rich are being taxed at ever-higher levels, while more workers at the bottom of the income ladder are paying no taxes at all. As for spending, resources flowing to those at the bottom far outstrip those flowing to those at the top.

Far from 'favoring the rich,' as many believe, our tax code is massively redistributionist, sending literally trillions of dollars into low-income homes and far less into wealthy homes. This may be good or bad, depending on your point of view, but the fact is it's happening. And those who argue that recent tax cuts 'benefit the rich' ignore the reality.

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No one minds helping the truly needy. But as with welfare in the pre-1996 reform era, reliance on government can become a habit — imposing huge costs on our national economy.

Worse, a 'what's in it for me?' attitude seems increasingly the norm. Once a nation of stoic, self-reliant individualists, America now seems full of people who think other taxpayers owe them something. They see the 'system' as a giant cow to be milked — and damn the cow.

This is backed up by polling data. In a 1994 Pew poll, 57% agreed with the statement 'Government should care for those who can't care for themselves.' Today, it's 69%.

It's sad enough when a nation punishes its most productive citizens and rewards the least productive. But the real shame is that there are so many myths about taxes and poverty we can't even have an honest discussion about it.

Freedom and equality

Richard Pipes via Don Boudreaux:

Liberty is by its nature inegalitarian, because living creatures differ in strength, intelligence, ambition, courage, perseverance, and all else that makes for success.... As Walter Bagehot observed over a century ago, "there is no method by which men can be both free and equal."

So much for liberté, égalité, fraternité, right? But a1ccording to Catherine Hajdenko-Marshall, he's not talking about economic equality, but about political equality:

In this statement he summarized what he believed was one of the greatest fallacies in the French and American ideology, namely, that it was possible to achieve liberty and equality simultaneously. Nothing was so hazardous for Bagehot, who saw the combined ideals of equality and democracy as one of the most damaging concepts in nineteenth century politics. Equality meant giving rights and privileges to people who were totally unprepared to make good use of them. Why introduce equality and put a country at risk by exposing it to the uneducated opinion of the greatest number, when a restricted access to the suffrage secured the placing in power of those who deserved it most—if not the ablest—and who were almost certain to represent the people even better than they would themselves?

The Bagehot quote is from his "France or England", an 1863 article from The Economist (also found in his Collected Works). Anyway, we shouldn't take quotes out of context, eh?

Update
Robin Hanson on Paternalism:

...[We can] imagine no-fuss government warnings: let anything the government would have banned be sold only at special "would have banned" stores, whose customers pass a test showing they understand that regulators disapprove.

The reason we don't allow such stores seems obvious: we expect people would shop there. And their reason to shop also seems obvious: just as kids do not always believe parents, citizens do not always believe regulators. A regulator claim that no one should buy some product can seem overconfident and otherwise biased.

On the other hand, regulators who choose requirements and bans instead of warnings seem to believe that citizens are biased to neglect regulator advice. Thus bias claims seem to be central to paternalism; regulators and citizens each think the others are biased.

To evaluate if paternalism is good or bad, we need more than the sort of evidence that would convince regulators that they are less biased than citizens, or that would convince citizens that they are less biased than regulators. After all, we expect each group to be biased in underestimating their own bias.

Without such evidence, paternalism is just arrogance, i.e., an unsupported presumption by regulators of their own superiority.