It’s amusing to me that the employed poor are the ones physically feeding the poor, i.e. employed to actually do the work, but in order to do so they’re required to give money to the rich so that the rich can pay the employed poor to do this.
Comedian Steve Hughes came up with a bit on the topic of not giving money to the homeless, immitating the attitude of “are you insane? They can’t be trusted”, the punchline being that you should give it to a registered charity… and they’ll make sure the homeless get it.
Generally speaking the right want the middlemen to be capitalists because they don’t trust government, and the left want the middlemen to be government because they don’t trust capitalists.
“What’s actually out there” is a mixed economy somewhere in the middle.
Time for some stats:
Scandinavia dominate the countries that have the closest to, or above 1/2 their GDP being taxed, which approximates their economy going equally through the public sector as the private sector - above even Cuba. As reference points, the UK taxes about a 1/3 of their GDP, the US taxes about 1/4 of their GDP and China about 1/5 of their GDP.
What’s amazing is that however you slice it there’s a positive correlation between taxation as a proportion of GDP and GDP (per person parity). Including the outliers it’s not that strong, at around 0.25, but if you remove about 10 statistical outliers that have high GDP per person despite low taxation and 10 vice versa (which happen to almost all be oil rich nations and a couple of tax havens, and corrupt poor African nations respectively), the correlation jumps to just either side of 0.5 depending on how you do it.
Basically, countries are producing more per person when they are taxed more, proving that the left are objectively correct in trusting government over capitalists to get the best out of everyone.
And how do the, admittedly much more subjective, measures of happiness line up with these stats?
Well there’s actually a nearly 0.5 correlation coefficient between Taxation and Happiness, there’s an astonishing coefficient of over 0.7 between GDP per person and Happiness, and when you calculate the ratio of GDP per person per taxation to emphasise the high GDP and low taxation countries, the correlation is weak at less than 0.2 - so the solution definitely doesn’t seem to be to lower tax rates.
From what I can tell, the philosophy is different for the right who’re chasing the 0.2 instead of the 0.5 - they would rather put most of their eggs in the basket of rewarding whatever innovation sells the most than be happy, on the assumption that the sacrifice of most of its people in the present is worth, and necessary for maximising innovations for the future. Anecdotally there’s certainly been a lot of technological innovation from the US at least, but what do the stats say?
Well, according to the International Innovation Index, which does lack some data from some less developed countries (mostly a fair few African countries and the odd country just east of the Arabian Peninsula), Innovation has that familiar 0.5 correlation with Taxation, an even more impressive correlation with GDP per person that approaches 0.8, an almost negligible correlation with that ratio of GDP per person per taxation of 0.1, and it knocks that assumption that sacrifice of happiness in the present is worth and necessary for innovations for the future completely out of the water with an Innovation to Happiness correlation coefficient of nearly 0.7.
Basically the right is statistically overwhelmingly wrong in its approach to whatever it’s trying to achieve, and just slowing things down and making things worse for everyone. Makes me angry.
That’s probably the main, only real difference really between leftists and right wingers…
But anecdotes and propaganda are so much easier swallowed, and who actually checks these things these days anyway, huh? All I did was lift things off Wikipedia and put them into a spreadsheet - feel free to check it yourself.