@Foxfyre,
Foxfyre wrote:The email was not describing how distribution of wealth is done but rather an illustration of human behavior when you remove expectation of a just reward for the effort expended.
No, the e-mail posited that humans would behave in a certain manner when presented with a
particular type of redistributive scheme -- namely, a scheme that confiscates 100 percent of grades/income and redistributes them equally to all. As
Thomas pointed out, this is just an illustration of the mythical, "
hic sunt dracones" right end of the Laffer Curve. But even Laffer understood that tax revenues didn't disappear once the government instituted
any tax on incomes. There are, in other words, redistributive schemes that effectively punish extra effort and those that do not. After all, it's the Laffer
Curve, not the Laffer Descending Straight Line.
The e-mail thus takes one type of scheme -- a confiscatory 100 percent redistribution of grades in a classroom -- and use it as an analogy for some sort of taxation scheme that may or may not be proposed by the Obama administration in the future. But Obama has never -- and
will never -- propose the kind of scheme that is used as an analogy in the e-mail, so it's simply delusional to think that the human behavior illustrated in the e-mail would be the same behavior exhibited in response to a far less punitive scheme of taxation. People don't react the same way, for instance, to a 39 percent marginal tax rate as they would to a 100 percent effective rate. In short, the e-mail "professor" wants to address a plan by the Obama administration that doesn't exist by means of an analogy that doesn't make sense. It's a strawman argument, pure and simple, which is probably why it appeals to you so much.
