Kshartle wrote:
doodle wrote:
Here's an interesting question...should parents be compensated for their work of raising a child? After all, a good parent ccreates a productive citizen which benefits all of society yet the diligent parent who reads to their kids, helps them with homework, etc etc. doesn't get any monetary compensation. What I think Kshartle is not acknowledging is how conditioned we are to believe that money serves as a sole motivation to human effort. In reality is so much more complicated than that. and in many ways our present beliefs and systems are not something natural but rather human constructions that hinge on some particular philosophy or came into being through a long chain of dependent cause and effect actions. In other words, how we got here was the combined result of human beliefs and unintended consequences.
It's obvious if you can't keep a dollar that you earn you have less incentive to earn it. People respond to incentives. Even Krugman is capable of realizing that (fingers crossed).
This is often stated by some but truly is not obvious. People work to earn money. When faced with road blocks, some people will work harder to get to where they would have otherwise gotten, monetarily, because in their equation it was worth it. Perhaps, if person A wishes to have another $50,000 to buy that Porsche they always wanted, they will work only as hard as it takes to get that much money. If they are taxed, they will work harder than they otherwise would.
It's like if there were a cigarette tax, but instead of in dollars, it's in cigarettes. So if someone wanted 10 cigarettes, they might buy 15 cigarettes to get those 10, though they would have only bought 10 before.
It all depends on the marginal cost to someone's happiness of more work (which is usally exponentially costly to one's happiness (ie, working 24 hours straight is more than 3 times worse than working 8 hours straight)) next to the marginal benefit of more work (which is diminishin (earning your first $100,000 is usually much more important than your second $100,000... more and more money causes diminishing returns of happiness for most people).
Where these curves line up for people are going to be very different. For some, they know exactly the "happiness line" they need to hit with their income to live the lifestyle they want, and enjoy their job enough to do what they need to get there, but not enough to do more. For others, they are not engaged at all by their work, and the net marginal benefit of more productive output simply isn't worth it at higher tax rates.
But let's not forget that a ton of taxes go to pay for infrastructure, protection, and what essentially acts as "demand insurance" (SS, medicare, etc) to the supply side of the economy. Maybe these things aren't as productive as the private sector could have been (different debate), but they certainly do contain some benefit beyond that of simply having been stolen from by a bandit.
"Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."
- Thomas Paine
.