Redistribution as insurance: clarifications

I'm indebted to Matthew Sinclair, who's thoughtful post has forced me to clarify my views upon the case for redistributive taxation as a way of correcting for the absence of pre-birth insurance markets.
I fear Matthew might be ascribing to me a stronger position than I actually hold. We don't need an extreme or strong view on moral luck or determinism to believe in some form of redistribution as insurance. We merely need to believe that, in the original position, people would agree to pay out if they experienced great advantage in exchange for receiving money if they were poorly situated.
Exactly what great advantage means - and what pay-out it would warrant - is  a matter for debate. But I think it reasonable to suppose that it entails some redistribution from, say, premiership footballers or recipients of City bonuses, to starving Africans.
It's surely trival that these extreme cases are cases of luck. Talented footballers earned little before the 1960s, and talented traders earned little in the 1970s. It's luck that such people happen to be thriving at a time when their talents are in demand.
I agree with Matthew that "we don't really know how we would behave in the original position." I think Rawls' maximin principle is an extreme form of risk-aversion.
What we do know, though, is that they would agree that some inequality would be justifiable - to incentivize people to work hard or develop innovations and businesses, or to compensate the talented for the hard work needed to cultivate their talent. They would reject a "slavery of the talented" for the same reason they'd reject a toleration of extreme poverty - for fear they'd end up in this situation.
But surely, people in this original position would agree to tax inheritances more than wage income, because these arguments for inequality apply less strongly to inheritance. Some high wages are the legitimate result of effort and necessary for incentives. It's harder to say the same for inheritance.
I agree with Matthew that it would be "mean spirited and low to value some having the comfort to read, paint and own big boats lower than avoiding the risk of being born in Burnley." But people in the original position might easily make this judgment too - reading and painting are modest pleasures, and being born in Burnley isn't a huge hardship. 
Finally, Matthew says:

Being born disadvantaged would be a sacrifice I hope I would be happy to risk so that humanity might, on occasion, do something glorious that might ennoble us all.

This is an empirical claim. How disadvantaged are you prepared to be? Born in Burnley maybe. But what about being born in Darfur? And what are the chances that such disadvantage is actually a necessary condition of humanity doing something noble?
Personally, I suspect the most noble thing humanity can do is to try and remove the worst disadvantages we suffer.

Comments

[anon]

Matthew seems to be suggesting that art would have no place in an egalitarian society because it has no utilitarian value for the common man - thus, people in the "original position" should tolerate some inequality in order to create a "privileged group" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privileged_group ) for the provision of such public goods. This may be an argument against complete egalitarianism, but how does it contradict Rawls' principle?

[Cleanthes]

" It's luck that such people happen to be thriving at a time when their talents are in demand. "

You can't really mean that? It would be luck if they were thriving far above any sensible measure of value generated and you can make a good case that that is indeed the case here.

But to say that it is luck to thrive when you are *in demand* is surely nonsense.

[Rob Spear]

Both the citizens basic income, and the inheritance tax require big government programs to avoid fraud - the basic income needs the government to track people, where they live, and their citizenship status; the inheritance tax requires that the government monitor wealth transfers, to ensure that they do not happen sufficiently close to the end of a persons life to be considered "inheritance". The claim that this is some kind of new "libertarian" redistributionism seems dubious. Given the nature of politicians, you can be sure that a new Leviathan would be erected on the back of these measures within a generation.

[anon]

Rob Spear:

I agree that inheritance tax can get costly to administer, but you're completely wrong wrt. the basic income. Any sort of democratic government requires tracking people citizenship status, and basic income requires no further bureaucracy: if people are eligible to vote, they get a basic income check. The best combination is probably with a land value tax, which imposes no excess burden on the economy, while being among the easiest taxes to administer and taxing completely unearned income.

[AntiCitizenOne]

Parents can avoid having childen in Burnley.

[Mark Wadsworth]

Anon 5.43 20 Feb, well said!

[Broattkeerm]

Good for people to know.