[camgunz]

It is treating everyone equally if you don't interpret "equal" under kindergarten "everyone gets the same candy bar" rules. Progressive tax systems try to reduce societal inequality by sharing resources more equally. They recognize that often times high wealth and income come from chance and circumstance, rather than merit or hard work, and seek to rebalance the system.

[robertlagrant]

You're talking about equality of opportunity (which is treating everyone equally) Vs equality of outcome (which is treating people unequally to engineer an outcome.

Why not just say, 'I don't believe in treating everyone equally"? If you have a different position then say so. Why try and redefine things? What's the goal?

[camgunz]

Generally I'm not wild about the equality of opportunity/outcome framing. I think to really advocate for equality of opportunity you have to account for the vagaries of life, like:

- If you're born into a wealthy family, how should we handicap you or boost others to give everyone "equality of opportunity"

- Or, should we outlaw wealthy families (maybe this is a 100% tax on wealth > $1m), assuming we could actually do this

- If you're born into a normal family, but one of your parents dies when you're 17, how should we compensate you, or handicap everyone else?

- If you get thyroid cancer at age 33, how should we compensate you, or handicap everyone else?

- How would we even quantify these opportunity gaps? The way we currently do it is by comparing lifetime earnings and try to ceteris paribus everything else, but as we start compensating, we're disturbing the experiment. Also, where does the money come from?

I'd love to hear a set of policies that deals with life's basic unfairness, but I bet it would look a lot like progressive taxation, a strong social safety net, and heavily subsidized education, and the people who support equality of opportunity definitely don't support those things. Mostly their position distills down to "don't tax us to subsidize low income/wealth people", and the best you can say about that is it doesn't reckon with the unfairness issue.

So I reject the premise. But, I also think that "equality" is actually a complex concept. Is a society that allows super wealthy people alongside homeless people equal? Is a society that puts a 100% tax on wealth > $1m but a 0% tax on income < $12,950 equal? What about a society that gives women 6 months paid leave for birth and early childhood, but men 6 weeks? What about a society that subsidizes insulin but not L-dopamine for Parkinson's sufferers?

My ideal would be that we treat people with "equal regard" for their needs and situation. Maybe that sounds like bullshit, or the idea of the government deciding what your needs are/should be is worrying, or you're skeptical we could ever really quantify it, and I would mostly agree. But I also can't come up with a better or more reasonable goal, even though we might not ever practically achieve it.

[robertlagrant]

> - If you're born into a wealthy family, how should we handicap you or boost others to give everyone "equality of opportunity"

Equality of opportunity isn't equalising everything in life, it's equalising what the state (and other institutions) provides to each person. Equalising everything is equality of outcome, or how some people use "equity".

I.e. having a decent schooling, being treated equally by social institutions such as banking and law enforcement, and having an decent shot at jobs and housing, those are things to do with equality of opportunity. People shouldn't be unequally treated.

That doesn't mean that a legally blind person can become a fighter pilot, or people should be graded in school differently to compensate for ancestral sins; changing the treatment based on the individual would also be equality of outcome.

Outside of those definitions, to be clear, I'd say some things are definitely fantastic to do terms of helping people, such as providing braille on money. We just need to remember that each time we do this it's disproportionately expensive, so we need to make sure we're prioritising (somehow) to remove the most disadvantage from the most people. But I don't think this sort of thing should be in an equality discussion, as it muddles it too much.

[camgunz]

(being a little US-centric here, sorry)

> it's equalising what the state (and other institutions) provides to each person

Well, a couple of things about that:

- That's not equality of opportunity, it's anti-discrimination

- Generally the point of these programs is to create a more equitable society, i.e. when bad stuff happens to you (cancer, slavery) we drop a money bag at your door to catch you back up. People at least say (and indeed the Declaration of Independence starts off by saying) we want an equal society, and this is how we do it. If we give the same bag of money to everyone no matter what happened to them, that doesn't address the inequality, it just causes inflation. Indeed, you can't fix inequality by treating everyone equally, because life doesn't treat everyone equally.

> changing the treatment based on the individual would also be equality of outcome.

Why aren't we concerned with outcomes? Whenever I hear the opportunity/outcome framing this is my immediate question. Aren't outcomes the only thing that matters here? Of course we need to consider tradeoffs and costs, but if the goal is to make a more equitable society, how can we not consider outcomes? Can you claim to be an equal society when none of your policies discriminate (let's stipulate this is the case in the US, but it definitely is not), but 2/3s of your people (women and minorities in the US) are effectively an underclass? If that's the definition of equality, it doesn't sound very useful. I think we can do better.

Again this sounds like an excuse to ignore life's basic unfairness, as well as bad stuff our society has done in the past (slavery, the chattel system) and currently does in the present (the war on drugs, the gender pay gap). It's like, it's fine if we deprived people of opportunity in the past, even last year, as long as we fix that opportunity inequality sometime in the future, as though that didn't permanently set millions of people back. How do we make up for past, current, and existing and future inequities of opportunity?

Or put another way, how will we compensate the people today who will be victimized by:

- a vindictive immigration policy

- a racist carceral system

- a misogynistic reproductive rights regime

- a transphobic... everything

Will we just fix the glitch and ignore the damage those systems and policies have created? Again that doesn't sound like it really addresses the full scope of the problem.

[avmich]

> Why not just say, 'I don't believe in treating everyone equally"?

Because that's not what I mean. I'm not redefining things - progressive tax was invented way back.

[robertlagrant]

I'm not saying you invented progressive tax. I'm saying you're redefining "treating everyone equally".