Sure it is. People pay other people for goods and services all the time; it happens naturally and is simple. Forcibly taking money away from some people and giving it to others is not natural or simple: it takes a huge, bloated government bureaucracy, which does a terrible job at it anyway.
vs. the "huge, bloated" bureaucracy that has to exist to implement salaried & contract work? You actually believe that more people work in the government on redistribution than in companies?
Also, people pay other people for goods & services that the people with the money want to pay for. The nature of my life should not be determined by the preferences of the people who've managed (frequently via heredity) to hoover up outsize chunks of wealth and power within the economy. As a human being, I do not exist to satisfy the wants of the rich (though I might choose to pursue doing so as means of making a living). The options available as a way to make a living should not be controlled by those who have already been successful.
I agree with the general point you are making here. But you appear to assume that the way to fix it is more government bureaucracy and regulation. I think the way to fix it is less government bureaucracy and regulation. Government bureaucracy and regulation is as bloated as it is because the rich set it up that way. Those regulations benefit them, not you and me. They want society to be set up that way, so that creating wealth requires navigating a complex maze that only they know how to navigate. The only way to fix that is to get rid of the maze.
> you appear to assume that the way to fix it is more government bureaucracy and regulation
I don't assume that. I was merely contrasting your complaints about the bureaucracy required for the government to distribute money to people with the reality that any system for distributing money to people is going to be ... bureaucratic.
I also don't agree with your assessment of things as they are. You claim that the bureaucracies are bloated, but have no evidence that the things they do can be achieved with less bureaucracy. Most regulations exist to check the power of the rich (or some subset of them), not to enable them (or some subset of them). Creating wealth does not involve navigating a complex maze any more than simply being alive does.
> any system for distributing money to people is going to be ... bureaucratic.
Nope. Private charities like churches are not bureaucratic. They distribute money to people based on personal knowledge of those people and a personal judgment on the part of the church community that those people deserve charity.
> You claim that the bureaucracies are bloated, but have no evidence that the things they do can be achieved with less bureaucracy.
Many of the things that bloated government bureaucracies do should not be done at all. So it's pointless to ask for evidence that they could be done with less bureaucracy.
> Most regulations exist to check the power of the rich
That's what we are led to believe. I just don't think it's actually true. A whole new mess of regulations got put in place after the crash of 2008. Yet the rich are even richer now than they were then.
> Many of the things that bloated government bureaucracies do should not be done at all.
Just delete "government" and I might agree with you. On the other hand, even though I largely agree with the content of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs", I think that actually the onus is on those who claim "it doesn't need to be done" to explain one or both of (a) how we ended up with "the doing" in the first place (b) what happens when we get rid of "the doing"
When I said "Most regulations exist to check the power of the rich", I did not mean to imply that they were always effective. However, I also did not mean to imply that they exited to limit the wealth of the rich, merely their power. Particularly in the USA, the concept of seeking to limit wealth accumulation seems to be an anathema to a sizable chunk of the population. Seeking to limit power does not, as naive as this might be.
Regarding churches, I and millions of other people categorically reject systems of aid and redistribution that are based on the personal moral judgement of a handful of people. The bureaucracies we've tried to replace that with do not always do quite what we intended (by a number of different metrics), but they do at least attempt to be (more) value neutral than private charity.
It's easy to create a dewy-eyed view of small, personally-connected communities where things are done "based on personal knowledge of those people". Big cities are full of people who fled that kind of society - the judgement, xenophobia, myopia, and expectations.
> The mechanism / organization of taxing and distributing _can_ be very simple.
In theory, sure. But as the saying goes, in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they aren't. No such "simple" system of taxing and redistributing has ever actually existed. The incentives to complicate and manipulate it are too strong.
And if there’s nothing they need the workers to do or goods the rich want to purchase? Then how should those without wealth eat and provide shelter for their family?
> And if there’s nothing they need the workers to do or goods the rich want to purchase? Then how should those without wealth eat and provide shelter for their family?
The fact that you, for example, don't have any goods or services that, say, Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos wants does not mean Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have all the wealth and you have none.
Wealth is not a fixed thing. Wealth can be created. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are rich because they founded companies that created enormous amounts of wealth. Say what you like about Windows and Amazon, but Windows made personal computing available to everyone, not just the affluent who could afford a Mac, and Amazon has made cheap products and easy, fast shipping available to everyone, not just the rich who could afford to hire personal shopping and delivery services. And the wealth those companies created had to be spread among everyone, by the very nature of what they did. Windows would have been useless if it were just Bill Gates' personal OS, and Amazon would have been useless if it were just Jeff Bezos' personal shopping service. The whole point was to make those things available to everyone.
Similar remarks apply to everyone who creates wealth. The people who grow the food you eat grow more than they need just for themselves. Then they trade the excess for other things they need or want. The same applies to you. Want some food? Create some wealth that you can trade for it.
The real complaint that can be made about the "1 percent" or "0.01 percent" or "elite" or whatever term you want to use, is that they have created a system that makes it harder for everyone else to create wealth, by putting all kinds of regulations and complications in place that only they know how to navigate. But you don't fix that problem with more regulations and complications. Nor do you fix it by just confiscating what the rich have now and redistributing it; that only works once. You fix it by scaling back all those regulations and complications so more and more people can create wealth themselves instead of having to wait for a few "elites" to do it.
Regulations are the only reason Windows even exists. If had not been for government antitrust laws and their enforcement, IBM would have stifled the PC market before it even began.[1] The thing about these cases is that they don’t even have to fully succeed to open the space for competition. The case against Microsoft continued this trend, providing space for Google and the monopolies of today. So regulation isn’t just good for society, it’s necessary to ensure a competitive market.
Taxation ensures that all of society benefits as the collective wealth increases. It pays for shared resources, and provides for a shared safety net. Taxation isn’t confiscation, it’s the cost of doing business and thriving in a complex society. Trickle down and deregulation are awful policies that only destabilize.
> If had not been for government antitrust laws and their enforcement, IBM would have stifled the PC market before it even began.
Your reference takes a viewpoint that is, to say the least, questionable. IBM didn't even comprehend the PC market. If they had, they would never have given the license for MS-DOS to Microsoft. Nor did they comprehend the market for graphical user interfaces when they told everyone in the late 1980s that yes, OS/2 would be wonderful when it came along but there was no rush, they were much more concerned about coming out with new mainframe hardware and software. Bill Gates didn't want to wait that long, and the result was Windows. IBM had no clue what he was even doing until it was too late.
If you want to look at what antitrust law really accomplished, look up what happened to Alcoa Aluminum. Their "violation" was providing aluminum more cheaply and in greater quantity to their customers than any competitors could. Their breakup in an antitrust lawsuit made aluminum more expensive and scarcer, causing huge costs to industry and ultimately to consumers. Your rosy view of the benefits of regulation is a myth.
> Taxation ensures that all of society benefits as the collective wealth increases. It pays for shared resources, and provides for a shared safety net.
If that was all our tax money was used for, I wouldn't complain. But it isn't.
Not to mention that much of the money the government spends doesn't even come from explicit taxation; it comes from printing money, which has the same economic effect as taxation--us ordinary citizens have our buying power reduced--but is more politically palatable because most people don't understand what is being done to them.
Not unless human society itself is "unnatural". The reasons why money gets invented are common to all human societies that get beyond the tribal stage; money is as natural as the human societies that invent it are.
Society is created by humans. Therefore it is man made, not made by nature.
You don't have to change nature to change society, you can change society by changing humans, which is a very specific subset of nature and not very representative of nature as a whole.
The problems that can easily be solved by money may be natural but we still get to decide how we implement money and the way we do it can create human made problems.
> Society is created by humans. Therefore it is man made, not made by nature.
Okay, then that just means "unnatural" is not a bad thing, unless you think society is a bad thing. But if you think society is a bad thing, why are you taking advantage of the benefits it provides? I assume you are, because if you weren't, you wouldn't be able to post here.
> you can change society by changing humans
Really? And how do you propose to do that? Particularly without grossly violating the rights of the humans you want to change?
