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December 17, 2006

Peter Singer's new article

I thought I'd discussed Princeton professor Peter Singer before, but it seems not. This guy has strong, sincere moral beliefs that I find monstrous and alien. He is however, interesting and articulate. He has an article in the NY Times magazine that is worth a look. It is a proposal to solve nearly all the world's serious poverty by increasing the gift giving of the rich in the US to a level that he deems acceptable.
As with all his always controversial pieces, there is lots to disagree with.

His argument about the morality of taxation blows my mind a bit. He argues through the agent of Herbert Simon quatations, that tax rates on income as high as 90% could are justified (morally if impractically) by the fact that natural resources, the technology, organizational skills in the community, and the presence of good government make your income possible regardless of your skill level. To this I offer up those oh-so-quotable words by Adam Smith, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest." If someone acts to benefit you for their selfish reasons that does not and cannot create a moral obligation on your part. He feels that he can decide what level of entitlement other people have to the wealth of others and then backs into a rate of taxation to fund such an exercise.

One curious bit is about his discussion is in assigning the burden across countries.
Obviously, the rich in other nations should share the burden of relieving global poverty. The U.S. is responsible for 36 percent of the gross domestic product of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations. Arguably, because the U.S. is richer than all other major nations, and its wealth is more unevenly distributed than wealth in almost any other industrialized country, the rich in the U.S. should contribute more than 36 percent of total global donations. So somewhat more than 36 percent of all aid to relieve global poverty should come from the U.S. For simplicity, let’s take half as a fair share for the U.S. Aggregate social wealth shouldn't matter to this calculation. Only the number of people in your country above a certain wealth threshold. It may well be that a disproportionate number of these people live in the US, but many live outside of the OECD because many of the world's poorest countries are also home to a small number of very rich people. It may be that 80 of the world billionaires live in the US, but that's only 16.5% of the 486 on the list. If that's at all representative of the geography of extreme wealth, then a 50% share of the burden for the US is way to high.

I recommend the article. He is always interesting and though he may boil my blood I always have to get my thoughts in order to explain why, and I appreciate that.

Posted by OneEyedMan at December 17, 2006 2:18 PM

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