> There requires no empathy to conclude that providing for our neediest appears to be economically beneficial for everyone
Unless you have information on the distribution of returns, they conclusion is unwarranted. At best, you can say that if you find a friction-free way of taxing and equally redistributing the gains (including most of the redistribution to the poor), and paying it back (starting by paying back 100% to the people you took it from in the first place) you would improve things for everyone.
But of course, you can't: reversing the redistribution would reverse the gains from the redistribution.
So what it does is improve the mean. It maybe improves the median. But for everyone? No, it doesn't. At least, not in the narrow financial terms those figures address.
Unless you have information on the distribution of returns, they conclusion is unwarranted. At best, you can say that if you find a friction-free way of taxing and equally redistributing the gains (including most of the redistribution to the poor), and paying it back (starting by paying back 100% to the people you took it from in the first place) you would improve things for everyone.
But of course, you can't: reversing the redistribution would reverse the gains from the redistribution.
So what it does is improve the mean. It maybe improves the median. But for everyone? No, it doesn't. At least, not in the narrow financial terms those figures address.