In what bizarro world should it be rational that I be happier to give up $10,000/year more to the government if I simply think that those making more that me are getting soaked even worse?

Depends on what services the govt is providing. If it’s soaking them enough to provide $15k in services to you for the low, low price of $10k, well that’s rational on a superficial basis.

Poverty is a function of how you think and how you spend your time. We must always consider what comes first or what sustains a situation [in most cases], someone’s flawed thought process, flawed work ethic, poor decisions OR something else?

Eradicating economic inequality is just another way of suggesting that we are going to strip the benefits associated with education, hard work, good decision making and risk taking in order to reward failure to become educated, failure to work hard or failure to make good decisions. You get more of what you subsidize, less of what you tax.

Regards,
Sean Shepard
The Liberty File
http://www.libertyfile.com/

The quote I first read at this site describes that perception pretty well:

Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: ‘No man should have so much.’ The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: ‘All men should have as much.’

- Phelps Adams

When you perceive that your neighbor’s success has taken money from a fixed pot you could have had, it’s natural to resent that success.

I thought this was profoundly demonstrated during an episode of the program Nova called Ape Genius. In chapter 3, they show segments from an experiment in Leipzig Germany. A chimpanzee is given the opportunity to remove the success of a neighbor who actively gains at the former’s expense. They contrast the reaction to instances where the original chimpanzee does not see his neighbor’s success as intended theft by the recipient. You can view that 10 minute segment in high resolution Windows Media here. They also offer lower resolution and Quicktime at the first link I included for the overall show. I highly recommend the entire program. There are many interesting questions raised.

However, if I use this experiment as an analogy to free markets, it breaks down in the important aspect that there is only one pot of food and the original chimpanzee is deprived of the ability to find, trade for, or produce his own. But the results are still fascinating. Just like humans, chimps resent success when it’s presented as theft.

I think the division between Ezra Klein’s perspective and a libertarian one is the assumption that others’ success is somehow my loss.

As to the thrust of your last paragraph, I think there is definitely the danger (and probably the reality) that the tendency for people to believe as Mr. Klein describes is quite useful to some in government who actively encourage it. I see the victims of this fraud less as useful idiots, and more as people who have been misled into thinking there is just one pot of food. It’s an easy error to make.

It’s irrational (in a non-iterated game), of course, but it’s also easy to see where people can get the idea that such actions are in their interests.