Reply #31: Income re-distribution!!

[MrPrax]

The government can be used as a device to re-distribute income. Poverty could be eliminated simply through the tax system (minimum income provisions)...
I consider myself to be a 'responsible' socialist...in that it won't happen in my lifetime.
But there can be a move towards socializing the profits. I see two distinct categories...
Things You Need - food, shelter, clothing, medicine, education
Thing You Don't - most of the other crap produced by a consumptive capitalist allocation
The free market is great at rationing 'crap' you don't need and very poor in rationing the things that most would consider the basics of life...
1) Cap profit taking in one area of goods and force the speculation/innovation into the other areas of the economy.
I don't care if someone makes a million on a better mousetrap, I care they made their million off of renting out slums or jacking the price of drugs to sick people.
It's immoral and not EVEN under a capitalist ethos a 'earned' profit.
2) the system produces abundance (locally and globally), so the Protestant work ethic makes no sense. Working has become degraded and so their really should be simply a way of winding down 'full employment' theories (both Left and Right have a problem dealing with this notion and still develop theories around the 'over-utilization' of labor power) Why bother--just give people the bucks and tell them to say home.
This can be done by recognizing that even in macro-theory something like Inflation (Non-accelerated rate of inflation) has a 'economic benefit' and the cyclical unemployment (pocket, bubble, structural, etc etc - bs) and so why should people who are 'unemployed' suffer 'no income' The fact they are out of the workforce is produces efficiencies, so why not pay people and rationalize the labor market.
3) provide 'market' disincentive to Duplicities; no need for resources of any kind to be wasted on consumer diversity for groups of products that essentially DO the same thing--penalize the 'overlap' and reward real 'convergence' that pays dividends in resource management effiiencies and use that money to offset 'unemployment'
4) fully account for private sector expenses--paying MJ a huge contract to put his name on a shoe, or fleets of lawyers, or high-rotation advertising are NOT a legitimate expenses and shouldn't be born by the 'price' economic system.
As such ascertain the real value and profit of private business (reasonable return on investment) and then incrementally tax the excess. Companies lard themselves with debt because money is too cheap...in other words, force them to BE capitalists again.

The system that is running now is not either socialist or capitalist...just corrupt