Sloppy thinking at the 'New Yorker'...

[alexpgp]

Via boingboing, on a commentary by one Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker, to wit:

A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

Semantically, there is not much of a difference between "spreading" wealth and "sharing" it. However, when one considers the source of the wealth, a small, yet significant distinction arises.

In the case of a state's natural resources, they are - since they are owned by the state - pretty much by definition owned collectively by the population of that state. Sharing or spreading monies derived from developing those resources among the population "distributes" the money and, if anything, is about as far as you can get from the socialist tradition, which would hold that the state ought to retain and use such revenue to expand the scope of its power benefit the people.

The source of the government's income tax revenue, on the other hand, is income. Instituting a change where some end up paying more and where a "refund" is given to a large number of others who currently don't pay anything at all may be described using the same adjectives, but also constitutes a fairly significant "redistribution" of wealth, which is a word that nobody - at least nobody in the media - wants to use, at least not in the same paragraph as the word "Obama."

Cheers...

Comments

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

One can argue the other way. Marxism isn't keen on private property. For a state to own resources, it can't be private property. 70% of Alaska is nationalized, and Palin's administration drew revenues from that. Therefore, Palin is a Marxist.

United States isn't Marxist. United States has a progressive income tax system. It had one when the Marxist USSR was around with its same-salary-for-everyone-no-income-taxes system. What Obama is proposing is an adjustment to the existing income tax system which doesn't change its nature. Therefore, Obama isn't Marxist.

Map of Land Owernship in US, 2004 (http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/291-federal-lands-in-the-us/)

That was a bit of contrarianism for fun.

I think the whole discussion is besides the point:
- Neither of the two big parties in US is Marxist in any meaningful sense of the word.
- Neither candidate is running on a flat tax. I am not a supporter of that, but a philosophical criticism of Obama's tax policy seems to require support for a flat tax system. Admittedly, you spend a lot of time in countries that have instituted a flat income tax in the 90s, so perhaps you see an attraction that I don't.
- Both candidates propose tax cuts despite severe deficits.
- US just nationalized much of its banking system with the support of both candidates.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Well, the only mention of Karl Marx in my original post was in the bit taken from Hertzberg's commentary. If Obama is a Marxist, his tax plan isn't the proof. That what he has to say falls, at the very least, somewhere within the mainstream of European social democracy is, I think, hard to dispute.

I would disagree that criticism of the tax policy proposed by Obama requires advocacy of a flat tax. A tax cut that arrives as a 'refund' to citizens whose tax liability is zero to begin with only indirectly touches on issues of taxation. Further, nobody wants to talk about what effective marginal tax rate low-income earners would be subject to under such a plan.

That the US just nationalized much of its banking system with the support of both candidates should serve to underscore the idea that there really isn't that much of a difference between the two parties, regardless of how the media spins the facts. That such a move came as a result of Democratic and Republican administrations encouraging reckless behavior on the part of banks is morally reprehensible as well.

Cheers...