Status Competition & the Political Class

by Will Wilkinson on July 18, 2005

In his 1999 review of Robert Frank’s Luxury Fever, a book that worries itself to death about competitition for status and relative position, Jack Hirshleifer, quoting Adam Smith to good effect, aptly points out that taxes meant to supress competition over income level is probably just a case of pushing the lump around the rug.

Overall, however, the biggest status game in town is not big spending but acquiring power over other people. In short, politics. So a likely consequence of sumptuary legislation would be more and more intense contests over the perennial question, “Who shall be king?” As usual, Adam Smith said it best, in The Wealth of Nations: “It is of the highest impertinence and presumption…in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.”

Earlier on, Hirshleifer makes the excellent point that advocates of higher taxes and bigger government, who are appalled by economic inequality, are well-nigh blind to the rather more objectionable inqequalities in political power that are a necessary part of their schemes. If the objection is that consumers have irrational preferences, so that they are lead into self-defeating, utility minimizing status competitions, then the objection applies equally to the political class:

In fact, one could well argue–Adam Smith certainly did–that those charged with public spending are likely to be even more interested in conspicuous spending than private persons. Think of the tax-financed white-elephant ballparks, the ornate federal office buildings that have sprung up not only in Washington, D.C., but just about everywhere, the hypertrophied public transit systems lacking nothing but riders, the Agriculture Department’s wildly wasteful irrigation schemes. Simple corruption is very likely the major explanation, true, but politicians’ desires for “monuments” (Hoover Dam, J.F. Kennedy Airport, the Sam Rayburn Office Building) are a big part of the story behind such travesties.

Arguments for new or bigger government initiatives driven by a charge of irrational or self-defeating preferences almost always make an implicit, arbitrary, exception for the ruling class. There’s no good justification for invidious comparisons between ideal coercion and non-ideal agency, and vice versa. If you think the pattern of voluntary interaction “fails” according to some standard due to some psychological foible, you’ve taken on a burden to demonstrate that the same foible does not imply that state action will lead to an even more serious failure. This is the burden the Frank/Layard-style statist rarely carries, explaining why their conclusion is so often a destination that can be reached only by a leap of faith.

Viewing 19 Comments

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    Agreed, luxury mongering is not the big problem with inequality of assets. But wealth inequality is, in large part, responsible for the power inequalities you identify.

    Like a lot of libertarians, Will, you seem to see the world as divided clearly into two categories (1) state, coercion, power AND (2) market, voluntarism, and freedom.

    Admittedly, the state has shown itself to be the world's most deadly and wasteful coercer, and continues to do so as we speak. But, in the broader social context, people lacking independent means are being put to unattractive choices all of the time that limit their freedom vis a vis the wealthy. It is largely irrelevant that these choices involve offers not threats.

    Consider:

    (A) The accountant who is offered a job so long as she is willing to indulge management's requests for "profit management".

    (B) The loan officer who regretfully spends his days denying applications of those who are probably not going to be able to repay.

    (C) The lawyer who represents Wal-Mart against a municipality in a land use case (because it pays and somebody else would do it if he did not) against their personal judgement that Wal-Mart is taking advantage of said municipality.

    (D) The army recruitee who (pre-Iraq) saw enlisting as the most promising career path given his lack of skills or collegiate ambitions.

    Now, I think you are fair in requesting assurances that different governmental policies would not make problems worse. But you are definately not fair in ignoring these very common ways in which wealth inequality results in power inequality, even if without so-called "state intervention".

    Also, the rhetoric in Hirshleifer's review about yachts and super expensive watches insidiously obscures the fact that conspicuous consumption's main influence takes place at a much more mundane level.
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    Bill,

    It's true that people with few assets are often faced with difficult choices.

    It seems to me that the best way to improve this is to unleash people's creativity to create wealth and more opportunities for themselves and others, so that everyone will have more and better choices.

    If, on the other hand, you are proposing some kind of coercive scheme to redistribute wealth, I think the burden is on you to show that this will lead to more benefits than costs. You would certainly be inhibiting the process I described above (among many other costs).
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    Oh for heaven's sake Bill. As someone who has been threatened and is not independently wealthy, I see a massive difference between offers and threats. (I worked once in a rehabilitation centre for people with head injuries, the threats came from the clients, not from my employers.)

    The accountant can say no to the job offer. I have said no to job offers. The accountant is forced to say yes to the job? Let us say that the company interviewed two people for the job, and offered it to another person, who accepted it. Does that mean our accountant then falls over dead from hunger? If so, the death rate should be vastly higher than it actually is - people who are not independently wealthy don't get offered jobs all the time.

    I am not sure why you think that someone would be upset denying loan applications from people who are unlikely to be able to repay the loan - I have heard more complaints about evil greedy companies getting people into debt said company knew they couldn't repay, than the reverse. If your loan officer thinks these people desperately need money, then nothing is stopping him donating his salary to them, and trying to persuade other people to give money for these poor applicants.

    I understand lawyers have their own stated ethical reasons for requiring members to take every client who can pay, I am not sure if this applies to your hypothetical lawyer, but these are related to much broader reasons than any particular reason. However, assume that your lawyer can also refuse the case. Again, imagine the situation where Wal-Mart picked another lawyer over him - would he then have fallen over dead?

    And as for the army recruit, this line of argument puzzles me. What do you think the counter-factual should be? Should the army pay its recruits as little as it can get away with, and kick them out onto civvy street with no skills or qualifications? Do you think that rates as appropriate compensation for people who are willing to risk their lives for their country? Or should the army only accept applications from people who already have a college degree and whose parents earn over $100,000 a year?

    Let me ask you to consider some other situations:
    - an engineering company gives one of its managers an official warning as he has failed to hire any female candidates for his last five job openings, despite in three cases the most qualified candidate being women. The engineering company's stated reason is that they are concerned that they are missing out on the most qualified staff and this may be related to the manager's team missing several deadlines.
    - a rental agency requires its staff to treat all customers with equal courtesy, so a sales agent finds herself forced to chose between keeping her job and treating Asians politely.
    - a client refuses to hire a decorator unless he agrees to a country-floral theme for her house, despite his personal disgust at the flowers and preference for Pasifika themes
    - a Rudolph-Steiner (Waldorf) school threatens to fire a teacher unless she discontinues her traditional, drill-and-skill education and fits in with the school's educational theories. She strongly believes that the drill-and-skill system is superior.

    And all of these situations are vastly different from:
    - he's threatening, if not my life, then a bad beating. Do I run into the bathroom and hope to get the door shut behind me in time (and will I manage to keep it closed against him), or into the hall and hope to get to the other staff before he catches up with me? (I ran into the hall and did).
    - a friend had a gun pointed at her while working as a bank teller, "Hand over the money or you die", and though she followed procedure and handed over the money, and lived, she was still shaken a week later.
    One of the key differences between threats and offers is that if someone makes you an offer and you refuse it, you are no worse off than if they hadn't made you an offer in the first place. If someone threatens you, and you don't manage to find a way to neutralise their threat, you are worse off than if they hadn't threatened you in the first place.

    The 'power inequalities' Bill talks about are part-and-parcel of having to rub along with other people who will often have somewhat different value systems and different objectives to you. I have no idea how any economic system could work if a starting requirement was that no one would ever face a decision between cooperating with someone they disagreed with on some matters relevant to the issue in hand and forgoing some material gain.
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    Tracy: That was a ridiculously uncharitable reading of my post. (But since I would have liked to have been clearer, I will respond.)

    (1) I was not saying that there are no differences between threats and offers per say. Who on Earth would say that?! What I was saying is that when it comes to comparing certain threats with certain offers the fact that one is a threat and the other is an offer makes little difference to how we should evaluate the plight (how sympathetic should we be) of the individual on the receiving end. For example, consider two people: (a) who is threatened with having his income taxed at a greater rate and (b) an unemployed person with no skills who is offered a boring and low status job with long hours. (b) has options, all told, that are worse than (a)’s and therefore (one might reasonably think) we should be worried more about his plight in spite of the fact that he has received an offer while (a) suffers from a threat. Libertarians, however, are often liable to worry extra much about threats of state coercion and to vastly under-appreciate how bad it is that loads of people are having power exerted over them in virtue of their having less resources. That’s what I was arguing against. (Will had the gall, in his original post, to take this skewed vision a step further, implying that the REAL PROBLEM is that people ignore the conspicuous consumption of bon vivant politicians and are over-focused on the malefactors of private wealth.)

    This is a philosophical blog and I could have spelled that out in the original post, but sheesh!!

    (2) There’s a big difference between my examples and the one’s you cite and that is that they are meant to illustrate how people’s “best offer” (in some senses) can easily be to do things that put them in grave danger (soldier), have bad economic consequences (accounting fraud), etc.

    I do embrace the point of your examples: OF COUSE, none of us would have the power to do exactly what we please even in societies where (1) wealth inequality did not systematically place loads and loads of people in a position of relative powerlessness compared to those of independent means and, more importantly, (2) expose most everyone to political/economic domination by an ever smaller managerial elite in and out of government.

    But here and now there is such a systematic subjection to power. And that’s what I was talking about in my post.
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    Oops. One oversight in that last post.

    Person (a), in my example, should be assumed to be very wealthy, perhaps even an Hiltonesque heiress.
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    Well Bill, how should I have read your post in a charitable way? You're the one who said "it is largely irrelevant that these choices involve offers not threats".

    I pointed out that the choices the people faced in receving job offers were far more favourable than the choices I and others have faced when being threatened. To me, whether someone receives a job offer or faces danger to life and limb makes a vast difference to how we should view the plight of the person on the receiving end.

    In your examples of (a) the rich person who faces a tax raise, and (b) the no-skill person offered a boring and low status job with long hours, to me you pick a funny point to get concerned about the no-skill person. Personally I would be more concerned about person (b) if they didn't get a job offer (and still had no skills). As long as this person is not a slave, then they are at least no worse off on receiving a job offer as they can refuse it, and may well be better off. For person (b) to get one job offer is a good thing, for them to get 10 job offers would be a better thing.

    Meanwhile the case of the tax raise person is more complicated. I will assume that this tax raise isn't voluntary.
    First step would be to say that person (a) is worse off, since they have less money.
    Second step, however the government is planning to spend the money on something that will benefit person (a) more than the money would, (e.g. policing), or this is a potential-pareto improvement and though person(a) will be worse off, person (e) will be considerably better off.
    Third step, do you trust the government? The more you distrust the government, the more you are likely to consider that raising taxes is a bad thing. (And this view may change depending on the government. It would be difficult for anyone to honestly regard a tax raise by Mugabe's government as likely to have beneficial results).

    As to your examples of people receiving job offers on the condition of doing something they object to, you still puzzle me as to what are the dangerous power inequalities. Let's go through the points again:

    - Company decides that all these pressures for "profit management" are wrong and are having bad impacts on the company's culture so that the costs of having staff steal from them outweigh the benefits from "profit management". They therefore decide it will be more profitable to hire another mechanic rather than another accountant.

    - Loan company decides to only lend money to people who are desperate rather than those who can repay. It lays off our loan applicant officer in favour of hiring some psychologists to decide what sort of tests would require the most perseverance for each applicant (e.g. solving a sudoku puzzle, or riding a unicycle) as a way of determing who is most desperate by who will persevere at these tasks.

    - The Wal-Mart manager, on receiving notification of the court case, has a road-to-Damascus conversion, and decides Wal-Mart's behaviour was indefensible, and will settle with the municipality out of court. Consequently they do not need to hire a lawyer.

    - A new, strongly pacifist, government is elected and disbands the armed forces. Consequently the potential army recruit cannot join the army.

    In these cases the companies/governments involved are acting ethically according to your ethics, as far as I can guess at them, and the job hunters are faced with the same outcomes as if they had refused the job offers in your first set of examples. Would you say that the job hunters are inherently better off because the companies/government is not offering work to them now, compared to if they had refused the job offers?

    In a country of 4 million people, where I can legally refuse a job offer or any other offer, I am not bothered by inequalities in wealth. My concerns about politics are related to whether the government is removing potential choices from me and my fellow citizens, not some vague worry that I might get a job offer from someone who wants me to do something unethical.

    And I am still puzzled as to how you think that people in the armed forces should be treated. Please tell me, do you
    1. Think they should be paid as little as possible and given as few skills as possible that will help them in civilian life, in order to remove any moral concerns about rewarding people for risking their lives?
    2. The armed forces should be restricted to people with a college degree and whose parents are sufficiently wealthy?
    3. some other option?
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    Tracy: We're wasting our time here. (But I like wasting time.)

    I said that CERTAIN offers left their recipient in a worse position than CERTAIN threats left their recipients. And then I "offered" the comparison of persons (a) and (b). You didn't address that comparison. If you don't want to compare those people's plight then that's fine.

    I never said that the offerees in my examples were worse off than they would have been with no offer. (With the possible exception of the soldier who might well have been better of taking (b)'s uninteresting, long-hour job stateside.)

    My points about the accountant, loan officer, lawyer, and soldier were (1) that they are worse off (also less autonomous) than they should have to be relative to those with more wealth and (2) that the offer, to the extent it makes them better off, comes at a price often neglected by the autonomy-minded libertarian. Namely, if the accept it, they will be required to do things that are bad for them, bad for the economy, etc.

    You are not really resisting THESE points at all.
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    Bill. I thought I did address your comparison. Let me try again.

    Person (b) is either better off, or at worse not any worse off for receiving the job offer.

    Person (a) may or may not be worse off. That is a complicated question. Thus it gets a more complicated answer and people argue about it a lot more.

    Consequently I do not worry about person (b) getting a job offer. Person (b) being offered a job, even a boring job with long hours, is GOOD. Person (b) getting ten job offers is BETTER. Person (b) having no skills is BAD.

    Is there anyway I can make this more clear? Job offer GOOD.

    I think our problem may be the counterfactual. I am treating the counterfactual here as person (b) does not get a job offer, and person (a) does not have taxes raised on them. I do not know what your counterfactual is. A world where person (b) is highly skilled and independently wealthy? Fine to imagine such a world and to work towards it, but how does offering a job or not move person (b) closer to there? (Please take this as resisting your points.)

    I said that CERTAIN offers left their recipient in a worse position than CERTAIN threats left their recipients.
    But the job offer to person (b), as long as he can refuse it, does not leave him in a worse-off position compared to the counterfactual of not having a job offer.
    Meanwhile the threat of raising taxes may leave person (a) in a worse-off position compared to the counter-factual of not having taxes raised.

    Of course person (b) may still be worse off after reciving the job offer than person (a) is worse off after getting a tax raise. But person (b)'s position has still improved compared to if they had no job offer.

    But, in the broader social context, people lacking independent means are being put to unattractive choices all of the time that limit their freedom vis a vis the wealthy. It is largely irrelevant that these choices involve offers not threats.
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    I never said that the offerees in my examples were worse off than they would have been with no offer.
    You sound very much to me like you are being contradictory here. Threats generally leave people worse off. If it is largely irrelevant that these choices involve offers, not threats, then this implies that you are arguing that the offerees are worse off for receiving the offers, in the same way as I and my friend were worse off for receiving the threats.

    that they are worse off (also less autonomous) than they should have to be relative to those with more wealth and (2) that the offer, to the extent it makes them better off, comes at a price often neglected by the autonomy-minded libertarian.

    Okay. Firstly "than they should have to be" implies a whole moral theory behind it about what relative wealth differentials should be. I'll point out that you're unlikely to command universal agreement to whatever this theory is.

    "that the offer, to the extent it makes them better off, comes at a price often neglected by the autonomy-minded libertarian."
    Secondly, okay, so now I am to be my brother's conscience, and the conscience of everyone else in the world. I am to sit over each job offer they receive, and decide whether it is morally better or worse for them to accept or deny it. This is too big a problem, there are some 6 billion people in the world, I simply cannot worry about how they balance their morals for each and every decision they make. The prices they pay and the benefits they take must, within a broad framework, be up to them. And let their decisions be on their conscience. (This is why libertarians neglect this price, this is perhaps the essence of libertarianism, the idea that people are morally responsible for themselves, and just because you disagree with a decision does not mean you have the right to stop them from making it).

    You are also ignoring my question of how members of the armed forces should be treated. If it is bad to reward poor people for risking their lives for their country since it encourages them to do so, how should the armed forces be treated?
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    After (a) has been threatened with taxes and (b) has been offered a job, (a) is still way better off overall THAN (b) is. I'm comparing (a) and (b) to each other, not each one individually before and after the offer/threat. The point I was making has always been this:

    If you want to see who's better off, who's more autonomous, and who's subject to others' power (maybe no ones in particular) then just noting that one person got threatened and the other got an offer is not going tell you the whole story. Ceteris paribus anyone would usually rather get an offer than a threat, but its easy to exagerate the relevance of this in many important cases.

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    I didn't answer your question about the soldier because that is not what this thread is about. This thread is about whether governmental extravagence is ignored while private wealth is unfairly maligned. I took issue with that whole rubric and pointed out ways in which private wealth transmutes into political power and diminished autonomy.

    But okay:

    If the least attractive civilian jobs were more attractive, that would reduce the chance that someone joins the military for the non-autonomous reason that all their other options suck. Not everyone joins for this reason, but many do.

    (I am quite happy to refer to the United States, as a country not the government per se, as threatening people with poor job prospects into joining the military. I'm sure that notion would make your blood boil.)
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    I should not have said "quite happy". I'm obviously not happy people are being threatened. I meant that it seems to me accurate to put it that way.
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    On second thought, I don't want to say that we're threatening people into joining the military. I'm not confident about where to draw the moral baseline.

    But I do think that some moral baseline has to come into play because the question is not just: "Was he better or worse off after the threat/offer?" but also "Better or worse off relative to what?" If the starting point is unacceptable (because non-autonomous or for some other reason) then just knowing whether it was a threat or offer won't tell us all we want to know. So, I agree with you that there are contentious value judgements involved regarding the question of what one should be able to expect. But I disagree insofar as your answer to that question is just: "to be however well-off, autonomous, etc. she happened to be before the threat/offer".
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    Here's a gimmicky example to illustrate the importance of moral baselines in evaluating whether something is a threat or an offer:

    Suppose my son is kidnapped, I know not by whom. I get a phone call from someone offering to provide info about how to get him back if I deposit $100,000 in a certain account. Is this a threat or an offer? Does it matter if the caller is affiliated with the kidnapper? If you're tempted to say its an offer either way simply because it makes me better off than having no idea how to rescue my son, then ask yourself: How is this different from someone calling me and saying, "If you ever want to see your son again deposit..." etc. That would be a threat right?
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    Time for some headers here.

    GENERAL ARGUMENT
    If you want to see who's better off, who's more autonomous, and who's subject to others' power (maybe no ones in particular) then just noting that one person got threatened and the other got an offer is not going tell you the whole story. Ceteris paribus anyone would usually rather get an offer than a threat, but its easy to exagerate the relevance of this in many important cases.

    You are changing what you are arguing here from what you said at the start.
    But wealth inequality is, in large part, responsible for the power inequalities you identify.
    ...
    people lacking independent means are being put to unattractive choices all of the time that limit their freedom vis a vis the wealthy. It is largely irrelevant that these choices involve offers not threats.

    You are now stating a different proposition. You first were arguing that differences in wealth meant that some people were facing choices that limited their freedom. Now you are stating that the question of who is better off can't be answered just by looking at who has received an offer or a threat.

    Of course under many situations someone offered a choice may be worse off than someone else who has been threatened. But this does not mean that being offered a choice limits your freedom, like a threat does.

    KIDNAPPING
    I can see I should have given some definitions of "offer" or "threat" earlier. One can construct a situation in such you can make a statement using the word "offer" but the situation is actually a threat. E.g. the mafia's 'offer' to join a neighbourhood protection league after having made it obvious that you are being protected from the mafia burning down your house if you don't join.

    So, in the case of the kidnapping, if the call is from the kidnappers then it's a part of a threat, and part of a crime. If it is from an informed bystander (not part of the kidnappers' plot) then it's an offer (at that price, I think a deeply immoral offer, but an offer, not a threat).

    Consider the kidnapping happened, you got the phone call, your son was returned alive and unharmed, the police caught the kidnappers and whoever made the offer (this may be the same person). Surely in this case the police in deciding what charges to lay, would consider if the offerer was part of the kidnapping plot or an informed bystander to the kidnapping seeking to make money from returning your son? (I have no idea how American law would actually treat the "informed bystander" situation, and it probably varies from state-to-state, but I suspect that it would make a difference, it would in NZ).

    If it is an offer, for a $100,000 for information to let you retrieve your son, here I would step away from a strict application of libertarianism, and say, along with Posner, that in this case the common law concept of necessity comes into play and you could not be held to a contract to pay $100,000, just as if there is only one port for a ship in a storm (and the ship would otherwise sink), the common law holds that a ship is only required to pay the normal going rate for mooring there. In this case, there isn't a normal going rate for information about where kidnapped sons are, so a payment for actual costs and time, plus a bit extra would make sense.

    ARMY PAY RATES
    Thank you for answering my question on army pay rates. It is an interesting answer, that having poor other options reduces your autonomy. I suspect that you are always going to think that people are being pushed into the army, since as living standards increase army conditions have to increase to attract staff. (And we can say the same for other jobs that require risking your life, such as firefighting.)
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    Tracy, I thought you did give a definition (and a fine, well-respected one):

    It's an offer if you'd rather have the choice than not and a threat if you would rather not face the choice. I personally think that other morally relevant issues often complicate the judgement and no "value-free" definition of threat/offer will do. But lots of people disagree with me including, I believe, Rhodes, Michael R. in his paper "The Nature of Coercion", Journal of Value Inquiry, 34 (2/3)(2000).

    I should not have said "choices limit their freedom vis a vis the wealthy". It's not having the choice per se that limits the accountant's freedom compared to that enjoyed by the indepepdnently wealthy. (I can see how much of what you wrote was a response to that mistake of mine.) But the point I'm striving to make is that the mere having of choices is often much closer to morally irrelevant than morally decisive, especially when the choices are as unattractive as my hypothetical soldier's.

    So maybe I should have said: "The availability of choices, misleads us into thinking that the poor are not less free than the wealthy because of their dependence on the wealthy."

    Of course, I was also making the point that concentrated wealth generally (not wealthy individuals) translates into political power (power OVER those not party to that wealth, not power wielded BY individuals). But that's a separate point.

    However averse you are to guaranteed minimum incomes (and I'm not a defender myself), if you find the point about bad options reducing autonomy convincing then you might want to consider whether guaranteed minimum incomes would increase autonomy.
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    "The availability of choices, misleads us into thinking that the poor are not less free than the wealthy because of their dependence on the wealthy."

    I do not think it is misleading to think that the availability of choices makes us freer. I believe that I am freer than a member of the Politburo in Stalinist USSR because I have more options, like the options of openly disagreeing with Stalin or with the current PM of New Zealand, without getting sent to a gulag or killed by an ice-pick. If the availability of options does not make us freer, what does?

    Consequently I do not see how you are making your point that the having of options is close to morally irrelevant. Do you see no moral difference between offering a job to someone and pointing a gun at someone and demanding money? (If not, can you please provide a description of yourself, so I can avoid you in the future? :) )

    And to me there is a massive difference between political power and the power that comes from increased wealth. The power of wealth can only be exercised by making the other person better off. (I am here ignoring the class of cases where a rich person bribes a public official to throw a business competitor in jail or hires a hitman to kill their father-in-law as these were not examples you picked when you worried about people being offered choices and anyway, pretty much any libertarian would object to such activities even more than to tax raises).

    A wealthy person is as dependent on other people as a poor person is. Bill Gates does not grow his own food, and while he could maybe become self-sufficient in food production, he cannot do that and make his own healthcare, construct and run his own sewerage system, mine the ores and smelt them to make the metal to make his own computers, etc. He is dependent on other people to do many things for him. In a market economy, he must pay them. Since he is so high in the income distribution, he is highly dependent on people poorer than him. Yes, he can pay more people to do more things for him than the poor person can, but he is still dependent on their agreeing to do so.

    My problem with guaranteed minimum incomes, or rights to healthcare/education/housing/etc is that, since we live in a world where manna, let alone healthcare, does not fall from the heaven, they imply a reduction in freedom for other people. To be more precise, since wealth is only created through labour, if people have a right to an income then someone who goes off to become a Buddhist nun is violating other people's rights just as much as if she went around punching anyone who declared themselves to be a Christian.
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    Incidentally, I have no problems with someone, including a government, offering to pay someone more if they take up more dangerous work.

    I risk my life all the time for fun. Every time I venture out onto the roads, be that driving a vehicle, a passenger in a vehicle, or a pedestrian, I am risking my life. I go out onto the roads often to visit friends and family. And I sometimes even invite them over to my place, thus risking their lives.

    Consequently the soldier case doesn't bother me. I risk my life for the most immaterial of gains, why shouldn't he if he wants to?
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    Well, I do think you make an interesting point about our mutual dependence (specifically Bill Gates'). One of the nice things about the division of labor was how it tends to make this dependence more obvious... at least it should be more obvious.
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    I have to say, that I could not agree with you in 100% regarding olitical Class, but it's just my opinion, which could be wrong :)