This has been known literally for centuries. Its called the second fundamental theorem of welfare economics. I wrote about it in the "Soluctions to Sub-optimal Pareto Optimums" section of my article here: https://governology.wordpress.com/2016/09/04/the-role-of-gov...
No, I just talked with some centrist and right wing congressmen. They know that the only true solution is trickle down economics, we're just not trickling hard enough right now.
> Good luck convincing Trump about any of it, though.
s/Trump/conservatives/
Conservatives (even poor conservatives) seem to be against wealth redistribution of this nature and try to label it as "welfare" and "handouts", which they find distasteful, even when it's the healthiest thing for the economy as a whole. They can't seem to get past the idea that "hard work = wealth", and that giving people breaks is morally bankrupt. They seem to think that all this is a zero-sum game, and that giving aid to the lowest-income people will necessarily take something away from them.
Which I don't get because they seem to be in favor of "handouts" (tax cuts, bailouts, etc.) for the richest of the rich thinking that will drive the economy.
Agreed. People conveniently forget that a producer-only economy doesn't work. If consumers don't have the financial ability to consume, you're screwed.
The reason our economy is working now is because of the huge amount of speculation that fuels the investment sector. Wealth creation is no longer predicated on how much stuff is being sold, just on how much people bet will be sold.
Sure, but those politicians continue to be supported by their constituents, many of whom are poor and vote directly against their self interest.
I'm not going to claim that the Democratic party has no problems, but at least they tend to support social-support programs. Republicans work to cut funding for them whenever they're in power.
We're trying for a higher level of quality than is, uh, exactly typical on the internet. A comment like that one is definitely not a good idea on HN; it breaks at least three of the rules!
On the other hand, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15260643 makes me think that you're an interesting commenter to have around, so if you'd read those guidelines and take them to heart when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
> Rich people have done an absolutely astounding job of convincing poor conservatives that this nonsense makes sense.
I don't know why this was down voted, the process of slowly rephrasing the meaning of the American dream to mean "let's let a select few get super wealthy" from "working together everyone can become rich" is one of the biggest marketing scams in recent history.
I am in poverty myself. But when I see this I view it as punishment to those who figured out how to "succeed in life" with regard to acquiring wealth.
I realize some things like the tax loopholes of avoiding paying taxes but even so the concept of taxing more when you make more seems like punishment. But I understand too, how much does a person need/what about others that are in need.
But then again maybe if they have so much wealth that you can't compete/ever hope to catch up/get on their level.
Just seems to me if it's easier to be poor/not get taxed much then why try to get out of it. Believe me I'm still trying my life sucks, uncertainty fear etc...
I used to have a similar viewpoint. I grew up close to poverty, and only through landing a great job in technology have I significantly changed my standard of living. So it does seem painful when a quarter of my compensation is taken away in taxes.
However, I do think taxation serves a very useful purpose. After a certain level of income/wealth, there is conceivably no need for even more income/wealth. But the cruel irony is that its the very wealthy that keep making a ton of money, due to investments and such. So it certainly makes sense for that money to be taken by the Government and used to try and ensure a basic minimum standard of essential services, such as healthcare, education, nutrition for the destitute etc.
I want the community and society that I live in the improve somehow, and am willing to pay for it.
If you, personally, are freely willing to pay for it, wouldn't it be better if you could be able to do it of your own free will and not forced to do it?
Voluntary action and overcoming coordination problems don't mix well. Best case is the volunteers overpay tremendously for things that benefit a ton of free-riders (those who benefit, and could pay, but choose not to). Worst case it all falls apart and we invent government to compel cooperation and then crush/conquer any societies that don't follow suit and remain awful, disorganized messes.
No, because If I'm completely honest, I want my society to improve but I don't want to spend all my free time looking through a catalog of projects which require funding and choose that. I would rather delegate that job to people who can do that full time.
Did that money come into their hands completely voluntarily?
Likely not. When you buy something you need to survive, can that be said to be a "voluntary" purchase? So when that money ends up in the hands of the owners of the productive machines, they get rich, but are they doing so because of purely "voluntary" participation in the economy?
So then why do I have to pay private individuals for things I need to live, and they don't have to pay back into the system that gave them the infrastructure to earn this money in the first place?
> Did that money come into their hands completely voluntarily?
Yes, if it's in the form of an investment. An investment is a risk, and like it or not, investments are a vital part of any economy. In may cases investments are how small businesses and entrepreneurs get capitalized because banks are much more risk averse. So why punish such a critical segment of the economy? You'll only end up moving the money into other areas that have less benefit for the rest of society.
These arguments would be true if most of our economy and transactions would indeed be centered on things we absolutely need to survive, and the difference between being able to pay and not would be life and death.
It's not. Surviving in any modern first (or even second) world society is laughably easy. So I think we can safely describe most of the transactions as being "voluntary", yes.
I never got the taken by force argument. Is your mortgage or rent taken by force?
There are places in this world that to do not collect tax and you are free to go there.
So long as you are allowed to leave, you have a choice otherwise you have implicitly agreed to the social contract to pay taxes by staying and benefit from being within the protected borders of the government and all service provided therein.
Sure, and our current social contract says you pay less in taxes if you are super wealthy. There are places in this world where the rich are taxed to death, you are free to leave and settle in such utopia.
I made no statement about the "super wealthy". I was simply arguing that taxes are not in fact taken by force (at least in the US where citizens are free to emigrate).
Your hyperbolic example of places "where the rich are taxed to death" also seems to confirm the argument that choice is available.
I think that this started as an argument about a specific thing that taxes are spent on – fighting income inequality. But now you have identified (mistakenly, by the way) the political ideology that, as you think, stands behind my opinions, and are arguing against this political ideology as a whole.
Can we agree on fire departments, roads and military and get back to discussing welfare state, please?
Edit: oh, and by the way, just as lighthouses were actually built by private organizations in Adam Smith's time, 70% of US firefighters are volunteers.
It's interesting that you invoke Adam Smith, given how strongly in favor of redistributive policies he was.
EDIT: As for specific things that taxes should pay for, no, I don't think there's a lot of room for agreement. I know a nontrivial number of people who sincerely believe that roads, for example, should be wholly privatized. You and I may think fire departments and roads matter, but we aren't the only parties to that debate. We don't get to decide for them.
I personally don't want the fruits of my labor, in the form of taxes, being used to bomb civilians (specifically, non-combatants) on the other side of the planet. I don't get that say, and I find murder far more repugnant than "theft".
How do you reconcile that? Should I be "forced" to pay for blowing up women and children over there, while you think having to materially support the poorest in your own country is an imposition — even immoral? How is that in any way in keeping with a philosophy of individual liberty?
> It's interesting that you invoke Adam Smith, given how strongly in favor of redistributive policies he was.
That's exactly my point - he used lighthouses as an example for redistribution through government, and he was famously wrong, as lighthouses were not primarily built by the government. So this is very similar to using fire departments now.
>
How do you reconcile that? Should I be "forced" to pay for blowing up women and children over there, while you think having to materially support the poorest in your own country is an imposition — even immoral? How is that in any way in keeping with a philosophy of individual liberty?
I see a lot of criticism to US military involvement that takes only lost lives into account and does not even try to calculate all the lives, lost and saved, to see if utility function ends up above or below zero. Therefore, I can't take this arguments seriously.
That you apparently think there's a "utility function" in play in bombing civilians suggests to me there is no meaningful possibility of dialogue here. Between that and your position that taxes which are used to support the least fortunate among us are "theft" (but not the taxes used to buy bombs — meaning that it's how they're used, not whether they're collected at all, that you take issue with), I can only conclude that other people are somehow "lesser" in your worldview. I so utterly can't relate to that, that we may as well be speaking different languages.
My position is that people who think "taxes are theft" should have to face a world where the things those taxes pay for aren't available to them.
I'm pretty sure, with, as Einstein put it, "a probability approaching unity", that they would change their minds very quickly about whether those things are worth supporting.
It's a purely rhetorical position, of course; I do not actually advocate anyone suffer that experience — because it would be a thing they could only suffer.
EDIT: I'm reminded again of the rural, dues-based fire departments. You're free not to pay your dues. If your house catches fire and you haven't paid, the fire crew will come out, stop at your property line, keep the fire from spreading, and otherwise watch your shit burn. Libertarian paradise, or something...
My apologies if my comment was abrasive, my objection, though, is that pandering to this libertarian slice of the populace ends up costing society more. On a small scale that dues-based fire department might work fine "Oh, it's at frank's house, yea... he'll be surprised" but when you reach a state or country level tracking any sort of voluntary pay-in programs gets complicated and a sane efficient state would find it cheaper to just save frank's house anyways, because the cost of tracking who is who is more expensive than occasionally paying out fraudulently.
This is one of the good motivations for universal basic income, a lot of our social programs have grown to the point where their overhead is getting ridiculous but the solution isn't ending the program, it's cutting any inefficiencies we can find and simplifying the program in a fair manner to get more money to where it needs to go.
Please don't. People who are wealthy came by that wealth via a variety of approaches, but the most important factors seem to all be slanted to keep those on top on top. Another good question to ask is if these people even need another 30 billion dollars or if our modern society has the capability to provide a fair standard of living to everyone.
The vast majority of the "rich" are beneficiaries of generational wealth. They didn't "figure out how to succeed"; they were literally handed everything they have, without ever having to earn a damned thing.
If your definition of "success" is "being born to the right parents", you're advocating an even more unequal society than the one we already have. That is straight-up feudal.
Do you have a reference for that assertion? According to some quick searches, it seems like that was true in the 70s and earlier, but in the recent decade the majority of millionaires and billionaires are now self-made. Of course, that googling is confirmation bias, so I'm interested in data from the other perspective.
My information also comes from Piketty. I appreciate that my confirmation bias is possibly (probably) also in play. The campaign to smear his work, and muddy the waters around his conclusions, probably makes anything short of re-analyzing all of the primary sources one's self an exercise in appealing to authorities whose positions support one's own.
> But when I see this I view it as punishment to those who figured out how to "succeed in life" with regard to acquiring wealth.
And this is one of several reasons why we have income inequality: people such as yourself who are stuck in a bad place don't want help getting out of it.
The problem is that you seem to look at rich people as having gotten there as a function of only their own success and hard work, when in reality they got there for a variety of external reasons they had no control over: maybe they were born into wealth, or maybe they were born into a race with structural advantages, or... (the list goes on).
The fact that you are in poverty is likely due to a large number of factors that you've had no control over, or never could expect to have control over, even factors that may have been put into place generations before you were born. I'm not saying you bear zero responsibility for your situation or should bear zero responsibility for getting out of it, but it's also patently false that you bear 100% of the fault, and my belief is that you also should not be forced to bear 100% of the responsibility for getting out of it.
I'll freely admit that some of my motivations are selfish: I hate the higher crime that poverty brings, which makes me feel less safe. I hate stepping over human feces left by homeless people when I walk around my city. I hate being asked for money on the sidewalk. I want more people who are unburdened by crippling financial worries who can help improve our society. But overall the bottom line is that I hold no illusion that I'm in a secure financial state based solely on my own work and actions. I've had a lot of help along the way, and it's insane to think that it's fair for me to avoid helping others improve their situation.
Yeah I can't handle being asked for money too,I inevitably just dump my wallet into their hands (cash).
I remember some lady at a train station seeing me do this and was like "Oh you're just handed out money huh? Give me some too." (jokingly)
I wasn't born into rich but I was dumb. Your parents/society tries to tell you what not to do in life with regard to finances but nope you know better and you get into debt/fear of being homeless because you're marked (credit) and then you can't apply to places/be denied.
I have an okay mind maybe I can get a tech job and get myself out.
So when exactly do you accept "inequality"? When do you stop in your efforts?
So you take the money of those that have it, no matter how they came by it, and give it to those that don't, regardless of any individual virtue or merit. But you haven't solved inequality. People that live in the cities arguably have access to greater resources (opportunity/leisure/health care/etc) than those that live in rural areas. Perhaps we force some people to live in work in places that they might not otherwise choose to in order to create greater equality? Or do we say we accept the inequality of the urban vs. the rural? The list goes on and the measures to achieve an egalitarian outcome become more draconian. Certainly, with a sufficient use of physical force (or the threat thereof) you can achieve all sorts of "equality"... and all the proponents of such egalitarian proposals here are suggesting is that using brute force against those that wouldn't voluntarily play along is OK. Nothing more intellectually sophisticated than saying, "don't agree, we'll take it."
But in all of this, once you accept that force is a legitimate means to enforce "equality" in this way, you have a hard time keeping those that have appointed themselves lord protectors of the poor (or other victim class) from becoming the new elite.
Because it is. Ask yourself what is the point of any society? Capitalism is not a goal unto itself, it is a tool to reach another goal.
Now different societies might decide on different goals. Let me use an exaggeration to clarify my point. If one man in a country is fantastically rich while everybody else is dirt poor, then that society is a failure.
My assumption would be that most societies would decide that happiness and well being for as broad set of people is that is the goal of society.
en massing piles of wealth with nobody to spend it on is rather pointless.
Of course some inequality is fine, but that is not the point. The point is that ever increasing inequality is a problem.
That society is still a failure if you remove the rich guy.
Attack poverty, not success. Redistribution is probably the best way to do that in many cases, but calling the problem “inequality” suggests we can fix it by dragging everyone down to the same level instead of lifting others up.
This ignores that wealth is relative. Your argument can also be used to argue that the U.S. has solved poverty, because poor people today can afford to eat, which wasn't true x years ago. It's not just about the absolute purchasing power, it's also about the relative social status and power. Not being in poverty doesn't mean much if you still don't hold any social or political power.
> Not being in poverty doesn't mean much if you still don't hold any social or political power.
Really? So if you can't have power, why bother not being poor? Having been below the poverty line and risen above it, this seems very bizarre to me, to say the least.
I don't think anyone but the most extreme socialists would say that everyone should be completely equal. The rest of us just can't agree on how inequal it's ok for us to be.
This statement is misleading, no one is advocating a flat distribution of wealth but why should some families lack access to clean water if we can give it to them.
I don't think anyone but the most extreme libertarians would say that some people should starve so we can all feel better about how little we have.
Guess we can do away with all corporate structures, then, and the protections and benefits thereof. Plus a ton of other stuff necessary to a modern economy. Those things definitely don't (strictly) fall in any of those categories.
Rather than the point of any society, if that's rubbing you the wrong way, how about: why have an (if you prefer, a modern, industrial/post-industrial) economy?
While we could do away with all those, it wouldn't serve much of a purpose. But yes, ultimately corporate structures are not the reason society exists.
>why have an (if you prefer, a modern, industrial/post-industrial) economy?
Well, because it's a more efficient engine for increasing the property and prosperity of the people and the society in general. Again, what does that have to do with inequality inherently being an issue?
The structures necessary to support crazy-high incomes in the modern world are governmental creations of exactly that sort. If we stick to a by-the- and for-the-people kind of ethos, then adjusting how the government manages all this stuff it's creating on their behalf in order to increase the prosperity of the lower classes at some cost to the higher is entirely sensible and just. If inequality additionally means less-equal outcomes in the justice system and lower systemic stability then even more so, on both counts.
Alternatives include: abandoning that ethos and embracing Rule of the (economically) Strongest; or strictly sticking to a government that doesn't engage in that stuff at all and living with the fallout (until every sensible state re-organized under a new federal government that did that stuff again, and/or sought annexation). We do an awful lot of the former, in practice.
> If we stick to a by-the- and for-the-people kind of ethos, then adjusting how the government manages all this stuff it's creating on their behalf in order to increase the prosperity of the lower classes at some cost to the higher is entirely sensible and just.
That kinda flies in the face of one of the main purposes of society I pointed out, though - protection of property. I'm not saying it's wrong, though.
You mention 'if inequality additionally...' that doesn't mean inequality is bad on its own merits. Do you believe inequality is bad on its own merits?
While those two you listed are alternatives, they are not the only alternatives. Hell, you didn't even point out the 'we can do nothing and keep things as they are' option.
> That kinda flies in the face of one of the main purposes of society I pointed out, though - protection of property. I'm not saying it's wrong, though.
When you're protecting property that only exists because we all agreed to have a certain kind of system, adjusting the rules of that system to suit the desires of "we all" so the prosperity (or property) said system creates is distributed slightly differently isn't exactly a failure to protect property.
> You mention 'if inequality additionally...' that doesn't mean inequality is bad on its own merits. Do you believe inequality is bad on its own merits?
Since the things that wealth gains a person (material, influence, opportunity, psychological/ego support, health, and so on) are the entire reason anyone cares about wealth and not meaningful separable from "its own merits", of course.
> While those two you listed are alternatives, they are not the only alternatives. Hell, you didn't even point out the 'we can do nothing and keep things as they are' option.
We largely willfully ignore (it's someone's will, anyway) that our political system includes the rules that allow our economy to prosper as it does, and that those rules ought to be there to serve us all, since we all have a say in them and they exist for us—if we hold as important the ideal of a government by and for the people. So again, I think we effectively abandon that sphere of public policy to the wealthy under propaganda that makes many believe it's immoral to change the rules of government to suit one's needs or wants when those changes happen to disadvantage the rich in any way. In such a case the modifications are said to constitute class war (boo!) and stealing (boo!) and are just so unfair (boo!). A position which might hold if our government weren't responsible for the edifice that allowed such wealth to accumulate to begin with, and I don't remotely just mean protecting property—so if we want to get rid of all that stuff and its benefits, then maybe there's an argument for making addressing inequality beyond the proper scope of government.
>When you're protecting property that only exists because we all agreed to have a certain kind of system, adjusting the rules of that system to suit the desires of "we all" so the prosperity (or property) said system creates is distributed slightly differently isn't exactly a failure to protect property.
Yes, yes it is. If it was voluntary, it wouldn't be, but what you're talking about is involuntary transfer of property from A->B.
>Since the things that wealth gains a person (material, influence, opportunity, psychological/ego support, health, and so on) are the entire reason anyone cares about wealth and not meaningful separable from "its own merits", of course.
So influence, opportunities and health are all negatives? I don't think I am understanding you.
The problem is not just inequality in of itself; it's the scale of that inequality that's a problem.
When 1/4 to 1/3 of the population is vulnerable to a health accident or can't provide for themselves/their family, AND half of the country's wealth goes to ~ 2% of the population, we have an inequality of many orders of magnitude.
What it boils down to is this: do we as a society simply write off those who struggle to meet basic human needs, or do we try to help them live?
I could also write an article about how you can make two lengths of rope the same by cutting the longer one and tying it to the shorter one. I don't think it'd be news though.
You also strike me as the person who'd write an article about how printing money makes everyone richer, because it's like "lengthening a rope". Economics is far from intuitive, and using a metaphor to hide all the complexity doesn't change that. This is typical HN arrogance at its finest.
The foregone conclusion is that the amount of inequality we have is far beyond the level that balances private incentives with public good. Too much inequality traps money outside of the economy, and doesn't properly reward labor and effort.
I don't think solving inequality in a purely mathematical way was the problem. Maybe the author should have spent him time doing something more valuable, like pretending to squish a far away person's head between his fingers by squinting one eye.
Right, let's start by redistributing the wealth held by people in silicon valley making more than 50k a year. Think of all the people we could lift out of poverty if all us tech folks just gave up our wealth! I'm sure we could do without that second helping of avocado toast each day. The solution is obviously to steal from the wealthy and give it to the poor.
It is mind boggling how many Americans think wealth redistribution is this crazy impossible thing, which will mean massive downgrades in ones economic well being.
We've done this shit in Europe for a long time. I live in Norway and make about 90K or so in the tech business. I pay roughly 34% in income tax. How is that so bad.
Americans tend to grossly exaggerate by talking about marginal tax rate rather than their actual effective tax rate.
Of course the rates might not be hugely different, but that is partly because most Europeans pay a lot more taxes in other areas. Sales tax in Norway is 25%. Alcohol and cigarettes have very high taxes and so does cars with big engines. Car taxes could be 200-300% at its worst. However electric cars have no taxes, so there is a way out ;-)
Honestly though, I don't think wealth distribution purely through taxes is the way to go. That is not how we created equality in Norway. A lot has to do with the corporatist model where big employer and employee unions set wages in big national bargains. This combined with public education with very even quality, levels the playing field.
Education in America is extremely uneven in the US and that creates a very uneven playing field. In the US education is sort of monopolized. People can't go to schools other than their local school district unless of course they pay a private school. That means poor people are locked out of good schools. In Norway I can send my kids to any school. However I send them to one of the closest schools because academic quality of schools is not that different from each other.
Richer schools can't bid for better teachers etc. In fact schools in poorer neighborhoods are more likely to get more money to compensate for their relative disadvantage.
>Honestly though, I don't think wealth distribution purely through taxes is the way to go. That is not how we created equality in Norway. A lot has to do with the corporatist model where big employer and employee unions set wages in big national bargains. This combined with public education with very even quality, levels the playing field.
Being incredibly resource rich in comparison to your population numbers helps - that's most of the underpinning for the welfare economy of Norway, if I'm not mistaken, not income taxes or taxes on cigarettes.
Totally agree as far as education is concerned, though.
Gimping the rich to subsidize the poor is dysgenic and not in-line with the realities of nature. Given that Nowrway is still relatively homogenous when it comes to demographics I would expect strong socialist programs to do decently. In a place like USA where an unfortunate number of residents simply see such programs as a handout rather than having an associated social obligation, this would not work.
Why is the redistribution of societal wealth "stealing" when it comes from rich people, but "earned" when it comes from poor people?
Poor people suffer far more theft on a daily basis -- they are forced to pay higher rates for credit, they spend vastly more time interacting with the bureaucracy while receiving substantially fewer benefits, and the terrible options available to them for healthy living robs them of quality twilight years -- but we rich folks kick up an almighty fuss any time it's suggested that we redress this balance by paying tiny bit more in taxes. So little, in fact, that it wouldn't likely impact our lifestyles in the slightest.
I live in a high-tax country now and, although I receive a smaller paycheck than I did back in the US, I'm richer in almost every other way. The crime rate is effectively zero. There's no homelessness. Substance abuse and its associated ill effects are exceedingly rare. My family and my neighbors' families are healthy -- owing to the free universal health care we all receive, regardless of income or status -- so the risk of communicable disease is extremely low.
So don't think of wealth redistribution as "stealing from the wealthy and giving to the poor". Think of it as "investing in a healthy and sizable middle class". Like the one our parents grew up in. The one that oversaw the most prosperous period in world history. The one now being systematically dismantled by we privileged few.
It is only stealing, when the premise is that there is no society, democracy or state, and everything you ever earned was earned completely independent of everything else.
At least that is what the neo-liberal fantasy world seems to be. They treat capitalism as if it some natural law of nature.
Every capitalist has to make their money within a society. That society is what enables them to become rich. Put Bill Gates in Somalia as a child, and there never would have been a Microsoft and he never would have been a billionaire.
Bill Gates and his fortune is a product of the society he grew up in which is shaped by democratic participation, deciding on what should and should not be taxed.
If a democracy says we can increase taxes on the wealthy, then that is just a choice, not stealing.
> That society is what enables them to become rich.
Somewhat true. Where you go with it is false, though. You seem to think that the society is all that enabled them to become rich. But if that's true, why does Bill Gates have more money than me? I'm in the same society.
> If a democracy says we can increase taxes on the wealthy, then that is just a choice, not stealing.
That presumes that everything a democracy decides on is just a choice - that it can't be wrong. I disagree with that statement. More, I think history disagrees with that statement.
You seem to think that the society is all that enabled them to become rich. But if that's true, why does Bill Gates have more money than me? I'm in the same society.
Billionaires didn't really exist until there were billions of people. You can't amass that kind of wealth if there aren't people to generate it. Wealth is a means of capturing value and part of the value it captures is the value created by human intelligence and labor.
The fact that some people are both talented at capturing value created by society as a whole and well positioned to do so is a large factor in why some people have vast wealth and some do not. It doesn't mean someone like Bill Gates is "better"/smarter/whatever overall than other people. There is a combination of factors that lead to the concentration of wealth in the hands of one person like that.
This is why people argue so much about it. That wealth is created by the very existence of all of society, but inordinately benefits a small percentage of people.
I don't know how we do this better. I am not for Basic Income, nor am I for trying to manipulate things with a goal of creating "level" outcomes. I think both of those approaches are inherently problematic.
For one thing, society as a whole benefits when we actively reward certain behaviors. Being too punitive and too angry about some folks being rich hurts society as a whole. Bill Gates helped create real value for society by making the PC available to the masses, thereby revolutionizing life and business for pretty much everyone.
We need to not be discouraging things like that (things like people creating real value for society by being business people, etc). But I do think we need to do a better job of not shafting the masses.
> Bill Gates helped create real value for society by making the PC available to the masses, thereby revolutionizing life and business for pretty much everyone.
Yes, exactly. Bill Gates created way more value than I did, therefore it is not totally unreasonable that he has way more money than I do.
> But I do think we need to do a better job of not shafting the masses.
Yeah, there's the real problem. We want to reward value creators enough that people try to create value. And yet, those who don't (or who try and fail) shouldn't be left completely behind.
We want to reward value creators enough that people try to create value. And yet, those who don't (or who try and fail) shouldn't be left completely behind.
One of the problems with this statement is the assumption that poor people are poor because they don't create value. One of the problems with that is the feminization of poverty. Women tend to be poorer than men. This is so not because we all simply laze around watching soap operas and eating bon bons. Instead, it is true because some portion of our time and energy goes into having and raising kids, taking care of relatives who are sick, and supporting the careers of our husbands in various ways.
One largely invisible way that women end up poorer is that families typically move to follow the husband's career. In other words, if they move to a new city as a family, it is because the husband sought employment elsewhere and got it.
For him, this is almost always a step up for his career. When his wife then quits her job to go with him, her next job is usually a step down for her. You do this enough and women end up going nowhere fast in their careers.
It is a complicated topic, but one of those complications is that an awful lot of poor people do create value for society, it just mostly doesn't result in them capturing value. If it is a woman who is poor, the odds are very high that she did plenty to benefit other people, but, no, it in no way resulted in financial security for her.
It would be really nice if people would stop implying that poor people are just lazy ass bums who do nothing at all of value. I was a military wife and homeschooling mom. I supported my husband's career and I took excellent care of two special needs sons. I just got off the street recently, after nearly 6 years of homelessness.
So, your framing implies ugly things about me and other people like me that are absolutely not true.
From your comments, I actually was somewhat aware of your situation. (Though it was news to me that you had made it off the street. Very welcome news, too.) I tried to write my comment such that it didn't imply anything negative about you. I can now see how what I wrote can be taken that way; I didn't intend that.
I meant to be saying that people can, though no fault of their own, fail to create much economic value, at least as measured in dollars that people will pay for what they do. (Yeah, sometimes it's their fault. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's kind of a mix - they made a choice, and it worked out badly, but it wasn't a clear-cut bad choice. Sometimes it's hard to tell. The point is, these people are there, in very bad economic circumstances.) The question is, what do we do about it? What do we do that genuinely helps them, without taxing the rich so much that it dulls the incentive to create the stuff that will make all of us better off?
And since there's (I think) a lot of "help" that doesn't actually help, I'll specifically ask you: What would have helped you?
You are taking my remarks very graciously. Thank you for that. I don't mean to be a bear on such topics, but sometimes I come across that way.
I posted the announcement that I was off the street to HN and it very, very quietly got upvoted over the course of the night and people were very kind to me in remarks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15205436
It didn't make the front page. The surprisingly high karma count for the piece happened really slowly, not enough to get it on the front page, so I imagine that a lot of people missed the announcement. It was a very strange experience.
What would have helped me would have been to get taken more seriously. In fact, once I began getting taken more seriously, that did help me. In recent months, I sometimes get resume work and I have a small amount of Patreon money for my blog writing. (Plus, my blogs sometimes get tips and my ad money is trending up as traffic trends up.) That preceded me getting back into housing and helped facilitate it.
I have reason to believe that sometimes rather influential people read what I write, but do not ever promote my work. They don't want to admit to reading anything I write. This makes me pretty crazy. A little more traffic, a small amount more social proof that I am not just a crazy loser or whatever can (and did, when it finally happened on a very small scale) make a difference for someone like me.
I think there are a number of reasons I don't get taken seriously or treated in a manner that helps me make money. I think classism is a factor and I think my gender is a factor.
There are other issues, like some people legitimately think I am nuts. But, some of those people were extremely ugly to me in a way that is wholly unwarranted by an assumption of mental health issues. These were often people who imagine they are good and kind people. They often wear that on their sleeve. It is virtue signaling and their actions (at least wrt me) don't match their claims.
So, less virtue signaling, and more just helping me figure out how to make money online, which was the primary I thing I asked for consistently over the years and was often openly dismissed, often by people who, themselves, earn their living online in some sense or to some degree.
What does that say about Microsoft stashing away much of their profit in oversea tax heavens to avoid paying that? Is that also the will of the people? Much of Gates's wealth is also protected in his own private trust so as not to be taken away by the gov't force. So it seems like the only people getting screwed are the middle-class folks who pay much larger percentage of their income.
Roads and bridges are not bought with tax percentages, they are bought with tax dollars. Somebody making twice as much as you paying the same tax rate is paying twice as much tax as you.
Somebody making twice as much as me can afford to pay more than twice as much as me in taxes and still make more money than me. Money has diminishing returns anyways.
Communism has been tried already and has resulted in failed states and miserable people....the most recent example is Valenzuela...why is this so hard to see?
> Because after the next crash, the Fed won't be able to bail out the economy by lowering the interest rate. Am I wrong?
I suspect you might be wrong with this next crash, as the USD would have to get trashed to a degree and on a short timescale no one thinks possible today before we hit gold-scale monetary reset bottom scenarios. What surprised me about the 2008 crash was it revealed to an extent I never thought possible before how invested traders over the entire world are in USD denomination. I thought there would be ferocious push-back manifesting in the FX and bond markets, with knock-on downdrafts on US equities, from the QE's and bailouts. I was wrong. Some people rail against "regulatory capture", but I think "model capture" is overlooked; so much of our economic infrastructure is so heavily entwined with a USD-based economic representation model that a short, sharp shock is apparently unlikely to happen. We'll likely see a decades-long transition to another model like when the GBP was displaced by the USD, this time hopefully not with punctuated and moved along with horrific world wars and economic dislocations like last time.
This is ironic to me, because I had thought with all the computer-aided modeling we have available today, that contingency plans are in place at the large trading houses to relatively quickly (within 3-5 years) switch away from USD-denominated transactions, should the US start to monkey around too much with the money supply.
If it reaches the point where the USD isn't a viable trade mechanism, your gold isn't going to help you. Someone is just going to take your food and water. They won't bother with the gold. I guess you could melt it into bullets.
They could return to printing money right? That will work until another countries currency becomes more powerful than ours? I'm assuming that any recession in the US would more-or-less be a global recession.
