11 ms·

A very fascinating article that I have truly enjoyed reading minus the last 10 or so paragraphs where Paul expressed it unequivocally that he's a status-quo war

A very fascinating article that I have truly enjoyed reading minus the last 10 or so paragraphs where Paul expressed it unequivocally that he's a status-quo warrior and that nothing can be done to remedy the problem of the ever widening gap of income inequality in the global economy and more specifically in the US and that it's a "natural" product of the state of affairs in our world. A classical example of « the naturalistic fallacy » [0]. Also, it's also worrying the degree of infatuation or affection for the early 20th century years with central planning of the economy, crony capitalism, robber barons, an all-powerful big government, centralization and concentration of power at the hands of a few, regimented and uniformed society ...etc. No leftie is arguing or longing for any of these policies. What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich and highly connected people. That's how we envision the solution to fix this problem of "fragmentation" as he put when it exactly is more like a "segregation" problem but not based on racial or cultural factors but on economic one into two completely separate societies between the haves and have-nots, between the 1% and the 99% of the population and it's getting worse and uglier by the day. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

dinkumthinkum 11y ago
I don't think Graham is being a status quo warrior here at all and I would have to reread carefully to see if he was really committing the naturalistic fallacy, I think that is an odd reading. I think his reasoning is fairly sound here. He actually laments that solving income inequality is very difficult, which it is. A lot of lip service is paid to this topic and usually all an politician has to say about it is something about manufacturing jobs. I almost feel you may change the entire field of economics with committing the naturalistic fallacy under your reasoning ...
wyager 11y ago
The appeal to nature fallacy us to claim that something is right because it's "natural". It's not necessarily wrong to say that something can't (practically) be changed because it's natural. In this sense, natural means "an (emergent) property of nature". For example, as much as we may dislike it, people will continue to fall to their death in the near future, as gravity and its associated risks are natural. I believe Paul means that these economic properties are to be expected because they arise naturally and it is not practical to eliminate them.
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  It's a useless way of thinking because many things seem natural until they're proven not to be. We though being tied to terrestrial transportation was natural for a very long time, but it turns out there's no natural law preventing human bodies from taking flight after all.
zackmorris 11y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot lately and will ride your coattails for a moment by pointing out that if economics is darwinian, then a possible way out of this situation might be human planning. It doesn't have to be central, it can be a way of living that amplifies the changes you'd like to see in the world. So for example, say a person acquires a certain amount of wealth and wants to make his or her home solar to stop feeding investment in the fossil fuel industry. He or she should consider installing double the number of photovoltaics necessary and give back to the grid to lessen someone else's burden. Now apply that philosophy of cooperation to our daily lives and I think that we can achieve a fairly rapid change in the status quo, and that we are seeing it happening all around us.
- lkrubner 11y ago
  "if economics is darwinian" How can economics be Darwinian? The outcome of economic interactions is not a zero sum, whereas a lion who kills and eats an antelope is engaged in a zero-sum interaction. The antelope gets nothing out of it. As a point of contrast, if you buy a car from Toyota, you have not harmed Toyota, nor has Toyota harmed you (hopefully). It is theoretically possible, when humans engage in trade, for both parties to end up better off. But in nature, in the competition for finite resources, one often sees exchanges in which all species end up worse off. There are many documented cases where predators have been too successful, and killed off all their prey, and then gone extinct themselves -- a negative sum scenario that has no obvious comparison to economic exchanges among humans.
  - mindslight 11y ago
    > a lion who kills and eats an antelope is engaged in a zero-sum interaction When we apply economic thinking, this interaction is actually not zero sum - antelopes in general benefit from the signal that they need to be faster.
    - marshray 11y ago
      But they only need to be faster to avoid being eaten by lions, so this seems to be begging the question.
return0 11y ago
> the degree of infatuation or affection for the early 20th century years with central planning economy, crony capitalism, robber barons... I think you 're being deliberately inflammatory here. He's probably well read about the period but there is no "degree of affection" for that kind of capitalism.
wh-uws 11y ago
"No leftie is arguing or longing for any of these policies. What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich people and highly connected people." And what non lefties are asking is how do you solve income inequality without those policies? And more fair? Fair by what metric exactly?
- lisper 11y ago
  Income inequality is not the problem, it's a shorthand for the real problem, which is the mutual reinforcement of wealth inequality and political corruption. Rich people use their disposable income to buy political influence which they then use to get laws passed that allow them to collect rents. The solution is to 1) roll back the corrupt laws (like the preferential tax treatment of carried interest and high-speed trading) and 2) get rid of the absurd legal doctrine established by the Citizens United decision that money=speech and hence the First Amendment applies to bribery.
  - 13thLetter 11y ago
    "2) get rid of the absurd legal doctrine established by the Citizens United decision that money=speech and hence the First Amendment applies to bribery." Unfortunately it's not that simple. The immediate question at hand in Citizens United was about a group of private citizens being prevented from releasing a movie criticizing a Presidential candidate during an election. A movie costs money to produce and requires a large number of people to coordinate, inevitably shading over into a corporate legal structure... just like, say, a union, or a political party, or a newspaper. So how are you going to decide which corporate legal structures are making "legitimate" political speech, whatever that means, and which aren't?
    - lisper 11y ago
      That's a fair question, and not one that can be easily answered in am HN comment. Personally, I would have had no problem with CU if it had remained the narrow decision that John Roberts originally wanted it to be. Clearly, if the First Amendment protects Michael Moore's right to make and show a politically charged film close to an election then it protects Citizens United's right to do the same thing. The problem came when this narrow decision was extended to a broader one that included for-profit corporations and labor unions. (For-profit) corporations and labor unions are legally "persons" in that they can act as legal entities in their own right (no pun intended) independent of any individual human. And they ultimately consist of groups of humans. But they are not humans. They are human constructs. They are technology. And treating them as if they were humans, entitled to human rights, leads to problems. So personally, I would advocate retract CU protections (and Hobby-lobby protections for that matter) from for-profit corporations. I'd also re-instate the historical lower limits on direct contributions to political campaigns.
hoorayimhelping 11y ago
The last paragraph was the whole point: >I worry that if we don't acknowledge this, we're headed for trouble. If we think 20th century cohesion disappeared because of few policy tweaks, we'll be deluded into thinking we can get it back (minus the bad parts, somehow) with a few countertweaks. And then we'll waste our time trying to eliminate fragmentation, when we'd be better off thinking about how to mitigate its consequences. A few people making rules didn't cause this to happen. It was the entire world reacting to things the entire world did for the past hundred years. A few people making rules can't stop that kind of force, even if they have good intentions for everyone else. >What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich people and highly connected people... That's how we envision the solution to fix this problem He mentions this: >You can mitigate this with subsidies at the bottom and taxes at the top, but unless taxes are high enough to discourage people from creating wealth, you're always going to be fighting a losing battle against increasing variation in productivity. I think you're looking at a lower scale than pg. From how I read it, he's saying that yes, you can do a little bit to ease the inequality, but you're not going to fix it unless you stop all technology from happening or you stop paying people their market rate. He's saying income inequality is a feature of technology allowing people to be paid their market value and that you can't 'fix' that; the most you can do is take from people at one end and give to people at the other end.
- shawn-furyan 11y ago
  > he most you can do is take from people at one end and give to people at the other end But he argues before that point that tax rates and tax receipts are very weakly correlated. This would seem to be a limiting factor governing how effectively a government can flatten inequality through wealth redistribution.
  - cma 11y ago
    Seems more like a confusion over how much income to the top comes from wages vs. capital gains. Looking Graham's own income sources, he should have pointed this out. The capital gains rate under Eisenhower was only 25%, while the top bracket was 91%. And the corporate tax rate under Eisenhower was only 50%. Very few of the great sources of dynastic wealth in America were built by accumulating wages under normal income rates.
ktothemc 11y ago
Central planning of the US economy & powerful big government (1930s & beyond) was a Progressive Era initiated reaction to the era of robber barons & crony capitalism (1870s-1910s).
- williamcotton 11y ago
  The U.S. had plenty of centralized planning in the form of protectionism well before the 20th century.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Correct. The United States was strongly mercantilist throughout the 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_%28economics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_%28economics%2...
MBlume 11y ago
> No leftie is arguing or longing for any of these policies. What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich and highly connected people. > That's how we envision the solution to fix this problem of "fragmentation" as he put when it exactly is more like a "segregation" problem but not based on racial or cultural factors but on economic one into two completely separate societies between the haves and have-nots, between the 1% and the 99% of the population and it's getting worse and uglier by the day. This kinda reads like word salad to me -- I have absolutely no idea what concrete policy changes it's meant to imply.
- Retric 11y ago
  Revert tax policy back from an effective sub 15% at the top to far more reasonable levels. To start, SS taxes apply to all income levels. Next, you can't avoid capital gains by donating appiceated assets. Further, capital gains is taxed at the same rate as all other income. And my personal favorite, there are zero corporate tax breaks of any kind.
  - incompatible 11y ago
    And at the other end? The popular opinion seems to be that we just need to force companies to pay higher wages, i.e., put up the minimum wage. Now those low paying jobs are illegal and people end up unemployed instead, especially when the economy is bad. I'd be willing to try abolishing minimum wages and letting the government pay a subsidy to anyone making a genuine effort to work, so that they have a reasonable standard of living. I'm just not sure how you measure genuine effort, so that you don't end up subsidising people who pay each other $1/week to go surfing.
    - Retric 11y ago
      Guaranteed minimum income has a lot going for it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income U.S. politics has gotten strange, people complained about welfare mothers not working when that's shat the system was designed to do. IMO, hand out a small fixed amount every month, then flat tax everything last that point and get the government out of micromanaging the economy. Upside, no tax breaks makes everyone's taxes easy, downside would never get implemented.
lnanek2 11y ago
> No leftie is arguing or longing for any of these policies. This is not correct. If you read "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", the book most lefties are pushing nowadays, you'll see there is a chapter with recommended solutions. The recommended solutions are things like government control of CEO salaries, confiscatory taxes on the rich (e.g. not taxes to pay for something, taxes to specifically change their status from rich to middle class, something the author even says wouldn't even bring in useful income for the government because there are so few rich to confiscate from), etc.. So their are central planning policies being recommended indeed.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
graycat 11y ago
> What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich and highly connected people. My guess: Relax, what you want is well on the way. The biggies now, in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, are on the way to a land of commodity products, fungible work, high competition, and low profit margins. Why? Because really powerful innovation they will need but don't much have. The opportunity? For now, more in innovation. The opportunity? Be the only guy who knows how to bake really good bread in a land of suddenly huge quantities of just dirt cheap wheat. Or, computer cycles, data storage bytes, data communications data rates per dollar are through the roof, and operating system, infrastructure, and OSS are all just dirt cheap. So, the challenge and the opportunity is to be innovative and make use of this dirt cheap wheat. Or, 15 years ago, a Web server might have been on one or several single core processors with clock speed of 90 MHz. Now, for much less money can get an 8 core processor with a clock speed of 4.0 GHz. Let's take that ratio in performance: 8 * 4000 / 90 = 356 So, now have one computer that does the work of ballpark 356 computers for less than the cost of one of those 356 old computers. Find something really good for the new computers to do, guys!
pdonis 11y ago
> No leftie is arguing or longing for any of these policies. To the extent they aren't being argued for (I won't comment on whether they are "longed for" except to say that you don't seem to have read many leftist writings), that's because they are now the norm, so the burden of argument is now on those who want to change them. For example, it is now considered the norm that the government will mess with the money supply and the banking and financial system whenever it feels like it, in order to implement centralized control of the economy. Nobody has to argue for it; the burden of argument is on those who aren't sure things like the Fed printing money are a good idea (and most of the time their arguments aren't even heard, they're dismissed as crackpots, even though the worst depression in history occurred after the Fed took control of the money supply). Also, it is now considered the norm that larger and more centralized government is better; the US Federal government, the EU, etc. People talk about a single world government as though it were a natural next step. Nobody has to argue for any of these things. The burden of argument is on those who think centralization of power has done more harm than good (and again, most of the time their arguments aren't even heard, they're dismissed as crackpots). > What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich and highly connected people. And Graham's point is that, even in a perfect world where economic opportunity and access to capital was perfectly equal, there would still be huge variations in wealth, simply because there will be huge variations in how well people take advantage of economic opportunity and access to capital in order to create wealth. And the more technology advances, the larger the variations will be, because technology amplifies the differences in productivity between people. So by all means, fight for a fairer world in which there is equality of opportunity. But don't measure your success by equality of outcome. Unfortunately, equality of outcome is exactly how "success" is measured by basically everyone. And we have "lefties" to thank for that.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
eru 11y ago
> [...] he problem of the ever widening gap of income inequality in the global economy [...] It's exactly the opposite, and even acknowledged in the article: on an international scale, the world is getting more equal, not less.

dinkumthinkum 11y ago

I don't think Graham is being a status quo warrior here at all and I would have to reread carefully to see if he was really committing the naturalistic fallacy, I think that is an odd reading. I think his reasoning is fairly sound here. He actually laments that solving income inequality is very difficult, which it is. A lot of lip service is paid to this topic and usually all an politician has to say about it is something about manufacturing jobs. I almost feel you may change the entire field of economics with committing the naturalistic fallacy under your reasoning ...

wyager 11y ago

The appeal to nature fallacy us to claim that something is right because it's "natural". It's not necessarily wrong to say that something can't (practically) be changed because it's natural. In this sense, natural means "an (emergent) property of nature". For example, as much as we may dislike it, people will continue to fall to their death in the near future, as gravity and its associated risks are natural. I believe Paul means that these economic properties are to be expected because they arise naturally and it is not practical to eliminate them.

erikpukinskis 11y ago
It's a useless way of thinking because many things seem natural until they're proven not to be. We though being tied to terrestrial transportation was natural for a very long time, but it turns out there's no natural law preventing human bodies from taking flight after all.

zackmorris 11y ago

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and will ride your coattails for a moment by pointing out that if economics is darwinian, then a possible way out of this situation might be human planning. It doesn't have to be central, it can be a way of living that amplifies the changes you'd like to see in the world. So for example, say a person acquires a certain amount of wealth and wants to make his or her home solar to stop feeding investment in the fossil fuel industry. He or she should consider installing double the number of photovoltaics necessary and give back to the grid to lessen someone else's burden. Now apply that philosophy of cooperation to our daily lives and I think that we can achieve a fairly rapid change in the status quo, and that we are seeing it happening all around us.

lkrubner 11y ago
"if economics is darwinian" How can economics be Darwinian? The outcome of economic interactions is not a zero sum, whereas a lion who kills and eats an antelope is engaged in a zero-sum interaction. The antelope gets nothing out of it. As a point of contrast, if you buy a car from Toyota, you have not harmed Toyota, nor has Toyota harmed you (hopefully). It is theoretically possible, when humans engage in trade, for both parties to end up better off. But in nature, in the competition for finite resources, one often sees exchanges in which all species end up worse off. There are many documented cases where predators have been too successful, and killed off all their prey, and then gone extinct themselves -- a negative sum scenario that has no obvious comparison to economic exchanges among humans.
- mindslight 11y ago
  > a lion who kills and eats an antelope is engaged in a zero-sum interaction When we apply economic thinking, this interaction is actually not zero sum - antelopes in general benefit from the signal that they need to be faster.
  - marshray 11y ago
    But they only need to be faster to avoid being eaten by lions, so this seems to be begging the question.

return0 11y ago

> the degree of infatuation or affection for the early 20th century years with central planning economy, crony capitalism, robber barons... I think you 're being deliberately inflammatory here. He's probably well read about the period but there is no "degree of affection" for that kind of capitalism.

wh-uws 11y ago

"No leftie is arguing or longing for any of these policies. What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich people and highly connected people." And what non lefties are asking is how do you solve income inequality without those policies? And more fair? Fair by what metric exactly?

lisper 11y ago
Income inequality is not the problem, it's a shorthand for the real problem, which is the mutual reinforcement of wealth inequality and political corruption. Rich people use their disposable income to buy political influence which they then use to get laws passed that allow them to collect rents. The solution is to 1) roll back the corrupt laws (like the preferential tax treatment of carried interest and high-speed trading) and 2) get rid of the absurd legal doctrine established by the Citizens United decision that money=speech and hence the First Amendment applies to bribery.
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  "2) get rid of the absurd legal doctrine established by the Citizens United decision that money=speech and hence the First Amendment applies to bribery." Unfortunately it's not that simple. The immediate question at hand in Citizens United was about a group of private citizens being prevented from releasing a movie criticizing a Presidential candidate during an election. A movie costs money to produce and requires a large number of people to coordinate, inevitably shading over into a corporate legal structure... just like, say, a union, or a political party, or a newspaper. So how are you going to decide which corporate legal structures are making "legitimate" political speech, whatever that means, and which aren't?
  - lisper 11y ago
    That's a fair question, and not one that can be easily answered in am HN comment. Personally, I would have had no problem with CU if it had remained the narrow decision that John Roberts originally wanted it to be. Clearly, if the First Amendment protects Michael Moore's right to make and show a politically charged film close to an election then it protects Citizens United's right to do the same thing. The problem came when this narrow decision was extended to a broader one that included for-profit corporations and labor unions. (For-profit) corporations and labor unions are legally "persons" in that they can act as legal entities in their own right (no pun intended) independent of any individual human. And they ultimately consist of groups of humans. But they are not humans. They are human constructs. They are technology. And treating them as if they were humans, entitled to human rights, leads to problems. So personally, I would advocate retract CU protections (and Hobby-lobby protections for that matter) from for-profit corporations. I'd also re-instate the historical lower limits on direct contributions to political campaigns.

hoorayimhelping 11y ago

The last paragraph was the whole point: >I worry that if we don't acknowledge this, we're headed for trouble. If we think 20th century cohesion disappeared because of few policy tweaks, we'll be deluded into thinking we can get it back (minus the bad parts, somehow) with a few countertweaks. And then we'll waste our time trying to eliminate fragmentation, when we'd be better off thinking about how to mitigate its consequences. A few people making rules didn't cause this to happen. It was the entire world reacting to things the entire world did for the past hundred years. A few people making rules can't stop that kind of force, even if they have good intentions for everyone else. >What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich people and highly connected people... That's how we envision the solution to fix this problem He mentions this: >You can mitigate this with subsidies at the bottom and taxes at the top, but unless taxes are high enough to discourage people from creating wealth, you're always going to be fighting a losing battle against increasing variation in productivity. I think you're looking at a lower scale than pg. From how I read it, he's saying that yes, you can do a little bit to ease the inequality, but you're not going to fix it unless you stop all technology from happening or you stop paying people their market rate. He's saying income inequality is a feature of technology allowing people to be paid their market value and that you can't 'fix' that; the most you can do is take from people at one end and give to people at the other end.

shawn-furyan 11y ago
> he most you can do is take from people at one end and give to people at the other end But he argues before that point that tax rates and tax receipts are very weakly correlated. This would seem to be a limiting factor governing how effectively a government can flatten inequality through wealth redistribution.
- cma 11y ago
  Seems more like a confusion over how much income to the top comes from wages vs. capital gains. Looking Graham's own income sources, he should have pointed this out. The capital gains rate under Eisenhower was only 25%, while the top bracket was 91%. And the corporate tax rate under Eisenhower was only 50%. Very few of the great sources of dynastic wealth in America were built by accumulating wages under normal income rates.

ktothemc 11y ago

Central planning of the US economy & powerful big government (1930s & beyond) was a Progressive Era initiated reaction to the era of robber barons & crony capitalism (1870s-1910s).

williamcotton 11y ago
The U.S. had plenty of centralized planning in the form of protectionism well before the 20th century.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Correct. The United States was strongly mercantilist throughout the 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_%28economics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_%28economics%2...

MBlume 11y ago

> No leftie is arguing or longing for any of these policies. What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich and highly connected people. > That's how we envision the solution to fix this problem of "fragmentation" as he put when it exactly is more like a "segregation" problem but not based on racial or cultural factors but on economic one into two completely separate societies between the haves and have-nots, between the 1% and the 99% of the population and it's getting worse and uglier by the day. This kinda reads like word salad to me -- I have absolutely no idea what concrete policy changes it's meant to imply.

Retric 11y ago
Revert tax policy back from an effective sub 15% at the top to far more reasonable levels. To start, SS taxes apply to all income levels. Next, you can't avoid capital gains by donating appiceated assets. Further, capital gains is taxed at the same rate as all other income. And my personal favorite, there are zero corporate tax breaks of any kind.
- incompatible 11y ago
  And at the other end? The popular opinion seems to be that we just need to force companies to pay higher wages, i.e., put up the minimum wage. Now those low paying jobs are illegal and people end up unemployed instead, especially when the economy is bad. I'd be willing to try abolishing minimum wages and letting the government pay a subsidy to anyone making a genuine effort to work, so that they have a reasonable standard of living. I'm just not sure how you measure genuine effort, so that you don't end up subsidising people who pay each other $1/week to go surfing.
  - Retric 11y ago
    Guaranteed minimum income has a lot going for it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income U.S. politics has gotten strange, people complained about welfare mothers not working when that's shat the system was designed to do. IMO, hand out a small fixed amount every month, then flat tax everything last that point and get the government out of micromanaging the economy. Upside, no tax breaks makes everyone's taxes easy, downside would never get implemented.

lnanek2 11y ago

> No leftie is arguing or longing for any of these policies. This is not correct. If you read "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", the book most lefties are pushing nowadays, you'll see there is a chapter with recommended solutions. The recommended solutions are things like government control of CEO salaries, confiscatory taxes on the rich (e.g. not taxes to pay for something, taxes to specifically change their status from rich to middle class, something the author even says wouldn't even bring in useful income for the government because there are so few rich to confiscate from), etc.. So their are central planning policies being recommended indeed.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

graycat 11y ago

> What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich and highly connected people. My guess: Relax, what you want is well on the way. The biggies now, in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, are on the way to a land of commodity products, fungible work, high competition, and low profit margins. Why? Because really powerful innovation they will need but don't much have. The opportunity? For now, more in innovation. The opportunity? Be the only guy who knows how to bake really good bread in a land of suddenly huge quantities of just dirt cheap wheat. Or, computer cycles, data storage bytes, data communications data rates per dollar are through the roof, and operating system, infrastructure, and OSS are all just dirt cheap. So, the challenge and the opportunity is to be innovative and make use of this dirt cheap wheat. Or, 15 years ago, a Web server might have been on one or several single core processors with clock speed of 90 MHz. Now, for much less money can get an 8 core processor with a clock speed of 4.0 GHz. Let's take that ratio in performance: 8 * 4000 / 90 = 356 So, now have one computer that does the work of ballpark 356 computers for less than the cost of one of those 356 old computers. Find something really good for the new computers to do, guys!

pdonis 11y ago

> No leftie is arguing or longing for any of these policies. To the extent they aren't being argued for (I won't comment on whether they are "longed for" except to say that you don't seem to have read many leftist writings), that's because they are now the norm, so the burden of argument is now on those who want to change them. For example, it is now considered the norm that the government will mess with the money supply and the banking and financial system whenever it feels like it, in order to implement centralized control of the economy. Nobody has to argue for it; the burden of argument is on those who aren't sure things like the Fed printing money are a good idea (and most of the time their arguments aren't even heard, they're dismissed as crackpots, even though the worst depression in history occurred after the Fed took control of the money supply). Also, it is now considered the norm that larger and more centralized government is better; the US Federal government, the EU, etc. People talk about a single world government as though it were a natural next step. Nobody has to argue for any of these things. The burden of argument is on those who think centralization of power has done more harm than good (and again, most of the time their arguments aren't even heard, they're dismissed as crackpots). > What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich and highly connected people. And Graham's point is that, even in a perfect world where economic opportunity and access to capital was perfectly equal, there would still be huge variations in wealth, simply because there will be huge variations in how well people take advantage of economic opportunity and access to capital in order to create wealth. And the more technology advances, the larger the variations will be, because technology amplifies the differences in productivity between people. So by all means, fight for a fairer world in which there is equality of opportunity. But don't measure your success by equality of outcome. Unfortunately, equality of outcome is exactly how "success" is measured by basically everyone. And we have "lefties" to thank for that.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

eru 11y ago

> [...] he problem of the ever widening gap of income inequality in the global economy [...] It's exactly the opposite, and even acknowledged in the article: on an international scale, the world is getting more equal, not less.