[trefn]

I hadn't heard of this person before, but a couple of points resonated with me:

First, the framing of equality and redistribution, and the suggested emphasis on focusing our efforts on raising the floor rather than lowering the ceiling:

In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to. This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions. If one person’s supposed freedom results in someone else’s subjugation, that is not actually a free society in action. It’s hierarchy in disguise.

To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest). Egalitarians should focus policy attention on areas where that order had broken down. Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences. A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,” Anderson wrote.

There's also an interesting bit that I haven't considered or heard of before: the original arguments for the free market were to escape a tyrannical hierarchy, topping out with the king - a free market was much better than that. But as we have built out free-market economy, we've gotten to the point where the decisions your employer makes are just as arbitrary (and probably have a greater effect on your daily life).

Images of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.

[hliyan]

Her idea of equality as the ability to function equally as human beings resonated with me too.

Many years ago, what started my shift from a capitalist to what I am today, was the following question: "If people had to earn and pay for breathable air (a basic) the same way they had to earn and pay for food, education and medical care (also basics), would the world be a better place or a worse place?"

The world I imagined was one of such desperation that hardly anyone had time to think about anything but themselves, a world that barely advanced because hardly anyone had the luxury of time to think of greater things.

I am now completely sold on the idea of taking the basics out of the competitive equation (nutrition, education and health). Desperation is the enemy of civilization.

[andonisus]

I believe the fundamental difference between paying for air versus food, education, medical care is that air is abundantly free. Someone could try to charge you for it, but you could just open your lungs and consume all of the air which they haven't bottled.

Food requires land, plants, and animals. It requires labor. It requires you to either produce it yourself or interact with someone who does. Air does not.

[lucas_membrane]

Read _The_Air_Trust_, a sci-fi novel about a century old. Then consider that human intelligence declines when CO2 reaches levels that might occur within the next century or two. If levels of inequality do not decline, we can reasonably expect that the wealthy will be polluting the planet with even more CO2 in their efforts to protect the brains of the dominant class.

[n-exploit]

This is already starting to happen in China. The upper class are able to utilize air cleaning technologies to eliminate any external pollution within their living spaces, while the lower and middle classes can't afford such luxuries.

[andonisus]

Is the decline in intelligence with respect to CO2 correlation or causation? Obviously, we should make real efforts to protect our air quality, as we all benefit from this. And we should make efforts to prevent people from polluting the air to their benefit (creating capital or profit from some action which pollutes the air -- an action which otherwise would be unprofitable if we were to make it illegal).

[hliyan]

But what if food was similarly abundant? Either because of natural abundance or massive AI/robot labor?

[andonisus]

Then I would have to reevaluate my position!

[fromthestart]

Because nutrition, education, and healthcare require resources and effort, one cannot guarantee their availability for all without forcing labor, thereby impinging on the freedoms of others. Thus they cannot be basic human rights without forcing some degree of inequality.

One should have every right to pursue such goals, but defining these as unalienable rights is incompatible with egalitarianism.

[hliyan]

This used to be my thought as well when I was a capitalist. But then I realized that this is a form of insurance. What we pay to maintain the welfare system in an insurance premium in case we need it one day. It is also a sort of social utility fee -- it reduces crime and makes society more livable. I'd gladly pay for these benefits...

[zozbot123]

> We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.

Of course, in practice, private government goes hand-in-hand with growth in the usual sort of government - this is what today's "institutional reality" looks like. A truly free institutional reality would have people constantly voting with their feet, shopping around for the best "private government" service. It's only because of pervasive interference that this is not allowed to happen today.

[wazoox]

But there is no way out of "pervasive interference". For instance quite obviously the normal state of a network company as was Standard Oil, AT&T and nowadays Google and Facebook is a monopoly. How do you "vote with your feet" then?

The fundamental error is the erroneous belief that markets will magically find equilibrium states, and optimal ones with that. Both premises are false: market tend to equilibrium only in undesirable situations such as oligopoly, monopoly or monopsony; else they're simply chaotic and fail to converge to anything stable and go anarchically from boom to bust.