Are rich democrats hypocrites?
Why it’s hypocritical to support a higher degree of taxation than you donate
Step 1) If a cause is so important that a third-party ought to take money from you to support it (for the sake of social justice, say), then, without a good reason, you should support the cause by making the relevant sacrifices, whether they are forced upon you or not.
Step 2) There’s no good reason to reject the first principle.
Step 3) Socialism is a cause which rich socialists believe a third party (the government) ought to force them to contribute to (I.e., by taxation of their excess income).
Conclusion: So, rich socialists ought to give away however much money they think they ought to have taken from them by third parties for the sake of social justice.
Objection 1: “Giving up that much money is far too burdensome.”
If that were true, then why do you support taxation by the same amount, even in cases where the net benefits don’t accrue to the rich, who would individually be better off consuming their excess wealth?
Objection 2: “The entire system is the problem; no one individual makes a meaningful difference.”
Note that if you think we have a moral obligation to vote (for Bernie Sanders, say) even though our chances of swinging an election are next to nil, this is just blatantly inconsistent. But, in any case, if you don’t think you’re morally entitled to your excess income, and that someone else has a stronger moral claim to it than you do, withholding it from them because your individual contribution won’t make a difference to the larger statistics of who has what hardly seems righteous. Imagine if I discovered that I was in possession of a stolen vehicle but decided to keep it because “what difference does returning just one item to which I am not entitled make to the larger reality of people not getting what they are entitled to?”
We would never say this in any other context in which justice is at stake. May I be a racist in the era of Jim Crow because my individual choice holds no sway over the system of racial injustice overall? Jason Brennan and Christopher Friedman give the example of a judge who refuses to pardon a criminal he discovers to be innocent from their last day of prison because a single day is just a drop in the ocean when compared to the monstrous injustice that is twenty years of wrongful incarceration. If wealth inequality is an injustice against the poor, then perhaps the same reasoning applies.
Objection 3: “Wealth inequality/labor exploitation is a nondivisible collective action problem.”
Obviously not: just donate to the right candidates, or help that single mother with an autistic child who is desperate for financial relief.
Objection 4: “Socialism would become unappealing if people donated their money in the meantime to the degree that they think it ought to be taken from them by taxation in a perfect world.”
On the contrary, sacrifices tend to make people seem more sincere, and their example all the more compelling. And if Christians can convince people to join their causes in pursuit of an aspirational ideal while allowing for “just doing your best” in practice, so can socialists. The point is that the principle behind socialist ethics calls for something no one thinks is a plausible result of a moral theory: that we are guilty of a moral wrong if we fail to make what appear to commonsense like supererogatory sacrifices.