by Hunter Baker Democratic socialism is hot in the United States right now. Both the American media and young people seem to be enamored of the thought of steeply progressive, redistributive tax rates designed to achieve some vision of justice. As with most public policy ideas, we tend to get pretty far down the road before we ask basic questions related to the project. In other words, we imagine a result that appeals to us before we’ve really considered whether other effects are likely and whether the proposal is morally right in the first place. Accordingly, I encourage anyone thinking about democratic socialism to ask the following questions: 1. What is the moral basis for taxing some incomes at higher rates than others? 2. Do we imagine that incomes are entirely the result of some random process? While John Rawls makes an argument along those lines — essentially, that no one really deserves their money because they didn’t control the family they were born into, their genes, etc. — there is a reasonable argument to be made that many people with such advantages seem to fail, while others who lack those advantages seem to succeed. In other words, attributes…
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