Although I'm not sure which aspect surprised you, I wasn't terribly surprised at the idea that people think wealth should be more evenly distributed. You kind of sound like a jerk to yourself if you declare that a society's wealth distribution _should_ look like ours. It's only when it gets down to, say, making decisions about policies that would affect the structure in one way or another, but also affect personal wealth, that people make different choices that might not reflect an abstract belief of "sure, yeah, everyone should have money."
I thought a lot of people that complain about "socialistic wealth redistribution" would actually want the wealth distribution to be whatever it happens to be.
Right, but the study didn't seem like it was asking respondents to make any decisions about redistribution. They were only asked questions about final result in an isolated context. It's easy to say "Sure, it seems like 20% of people could get by on only 36% of the wealth" when the situation is presented in a vacuum. But they weren't asked "would you rather have situation A given programs 1, 2, and 3, or situation B with 4, 5, and 6?" (those programs being tax policy, welfare, etc
( ... )
Comments 3
Reply
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment