Poverty hurts children in ways we're beginning to understand

> we cannot provide every child in the world with the same standard of living as that had by the average Norwegian,

That's a straw man - that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about much more achievable aims, such as children not being hungry and not living in unhealthy housing. Many interventions to reduce poverty are relatively low cost. We’re certainly not talking Teslas & Scandinavian design for all.

On zero sum games, you’re talking about economics here and if anything is an example of non-zero-sum game, it’s economics and monetary theory. Large amounts of wealth and economic potential are created pretty much every minute.

Your example of sending your child to a better school isn’t really accurate for a few reasons. There is a practical, real world limit on school fees. At a certain level of income you would have been able to afford the best school possible, hired tutors, etc… and any further earning would not make a difference. You personally might not be at that level, but a lot of the progressive ideas for taxation target those who are exactly in that situation.

The wealth taxes being proposed by a couple of the US Democratic nominees would kick in at the level of millionaires, who are far removed from scraping together every last dollar for the college fund. Other tax changes would certainly not have “dramatic” negative impacts on tax payers, many might see gains.

The preschool/school example is great, especially as you brought up Norway! You have a problem of having to pay to send children to school. That’s the problem, not that any tax changes might jeopardise that. So let’s solve that problem!

In Norway you wouldn’t have to worry about affording preschool as they are all state funded, even the private ones. You pay a small additional contribution at most, if you can afford to, but that’s capped by the local government and about $350 a month. The schools are free (you pay a similar amount for after school babysitting if you need it) and all roughly a similar good standard. University is similar. So your problem of having to afford 20 years or so of education disappears entirely. Which is pretty awesome, plus your healthcare costs also don't exist and you have much more money for discretionary spending. A lot of Norwegians have cabins in the mountains and boats in the fjords, and it's not because they pay low taxes and ignore child poverty.

How do you propose changing the wealth distribution?

Changing post-tax income distribution is fairly straightforward (in theory), but it's less clear to me how to change wealth distribution.

Do they have stable, two parent families? That seems to be one of the most significant pillars of functioning society.

No thanks. I can't help being intelligent, but I can help setting foot into ivory towers.

> He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.

-- George Orwell, "Nineteen-Eightyfour"

What the heck does this have to do with eugenics or feudalism? If you want to practice horse archery, all power to you, but you better find the money to pay for it. It's inane to claim the right to be a horse archer with government support, or blame the lack of means for a good warhorse on increasing inequality. Now, if the government/society at large feels our light cavalry reserve is critically low given all the Canadian heavy infantry, it would be a-ok for the society to subsidize aspiring horse archers to a necessary extent. Then, and only then. Otherwise, you are free to pay for it yourself - all power to you!

The same exact reasoning applies to having children. I don't see any good explicit reason to produce more children across the board, in fact I see the reverse (be it global warming and the per capita emissions in the first world, the recent electoral successes based on the plight of poor workers suffering due to globalism, automation, whatever); plus there's also plenty of willing immigrants that would solve the governments/societies problem, if there even was one. So, the government has no good reason whatsoever to subsidize child-making. If someone wants to do it as a hobby, all power to them!