Activity

In the context of tax policy, however, positive freedom matters as well. Positive freedom is the “ability to”—the capacity to do things, and the possibility of selecting goals and making efforts to realize them. Such freedom requires resources. In capitalist societies with low levels of redistribut…

Of course, hard work, guile, and luck afford some workers the ability to become capitalists. But the basic structure of capitalism, in which a small number own most of the productive assets, guarantees that the vast majority of people will (at best) spend their lives earning wages, but never profit…

The socialist view of redistribution within a capitalist society must reject an important premise at play in nearly all tax policy debates: that pre-tax income is something earned solely by individual effort and possessed privately before the state intervenes to take a part of it. Once we break fro…

Capitalism deprives many people of real freedom in this sense. Poverty in the midst of plenty exists because of a direct equation between material resources and the resources needed for self-determination.