It bothers me that advocates seldom make a reasoned argument for the thing that they advocate. Their efforts consist almost entirely of finding fault with some alternative and use that alone as the reason why their views should be seen as correct. It takes very little effort the show that their ideas are as bad or worse than the ones they critcize. It's a classic rookie logic error: if not x then do nonsense on the assumption that y. In many if not all cases it isn't y either. It's neither, an error condition.

Earlier today while skimming a few sites and following some of their links an example of that caught my eye. Some fellow living his unexamined life was astonished that on some subject his opponents actually had the better arguments, yet he firmly believed that they were bereft of ideas. Of course they are, but so is the astonished fellow, and that has been true in the overwhelming majority of instances for decades, probably since time began though I have less data to support that contention.

We see these truths demonstrated every time there is regime change. The party that was out of power had no ideas and wandered in the wilderness hoping to get some. The party that was in power, of course, had no ideas either, and the public soon tired of them and sent them packing, only to replace them with the ones who only moments before were known to be just as barren. All either party does is reward supporters and try to rig the system in ways that will keep them in power long after society tires of them. The one who dies with the most loot wins.

Consider this more subtle example of this type of thought error.

. . . it doesn’t take them long to fallaciously infer that your dog owns your house. . . Since I didn’t come up with the theory of computation, did not build this computer or the Internet, since I cannot singlehandedly prop up the entire context of wealth-enabling institutions in which I am embedded, and since taxpayers paid for the education that enabled me to read and write, I deserve next to nothing of the economic value of this blog (if it has any). Daly and Alperovitz’s view comes down to the idea that, since we’re constantly enjoying and building on the positive spillovers of prior economic activity and earlier generations of wise governnance, society deserves almost everything produced.

But if that’s true, then it’s likely true that today’s innovators are also undercompensated, since they will be able to internalize only a tiny fraction of the value they pass on to future generations. So which is it? Larry and Sergei are too rich or not rich enough? Moreover, if successful American entrepreneurs don’t deserve much of their profits, then neither do contemporary American citizens who have done even less than the entrepeneurs to create economic value. . .

Their real worry is inequality. They want higher taxes on the wealthy and more government spending. And they seem to think popular but confused intuitions about desert and distribution stand in the way of their egalitarian policy objectives. That may be true. But it’s hard to see how offering an even less intuitve but nevertheless false account of desert and distribution is supposed to help them.

Neither. The fact that no one entirely deserves their living since a great deal of it is genetic and cultural inheritance rather than a consequence of ideas and actions derived from first principles does not imply that anyone or everyone else is deserving. They are, if anything, less deserving. Desert is irrelevant.

I think that a better way to think about this starts with the same base notion: we stand on the backs of our ancestors, as others will in time stand on ours. We are all completely equal in that. Now, what do we do with that patrimony? There is still plenty of latitude for disputes about the comparatively small variations of outcomes for individuals who share a given patrimony. Greed and envy are not resolved. But, the disputes should be able to proceed in a less confused way.