6 ms·

"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 dist

by 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.
    - Joeri 11y ago
      When a for-profit corporation exercises free speech, it is actually the speech of its shareholders. Therefore, in the case of corporate speech it's still a group of individuals talking. The only thing you could do is put an individual limit on spending, which is then translated into a limit on corporate speech by summing up the limits of the shareholders, with foreign shareholders contributing zero, and domestic ones seeing their limit divided over their shares.
      - lisper 11y ago
        > When a for-profit corporation exercises free speech, it is actually the speech of its shareholders. No, it's the speech of the management. The shareholders only have indirect control. The only power they generally have is to replace board members. And sometimes they don't even have that. Google, for example, is completely controlled by Larry and Sergey. Facebook is completely controlled by Zuck.
    - 2232 11y ago
      Media are all corporations, and so is ycombinator. If you want "truth" commissions, go right ahead with removing CU, but unless that, this was a great decision.
  - Joeri 11y ago
    You don't try to make the distinction, you just regulate all political speech. During election time, you set aside fair slices of media time for every candidate, where they can make their case, and forbid all political speech outside of those times. Same thing with billboards, magazine ads, google ads, etc... The different candidates will police each other. Never going to happen in the US but definitely practically achievable as it is somewhat how elections work in belgium.
    - 13thLetter 11y ago
      That just kicks the problem up one level: now you've got to figure out the distinction between political speech and non-political speech. I'm not familiar with how things work in Belgium, but in the United States Hollywood has released a large number of explicitly political movies in the past fifteen years, such as Lions for Lambs or Bowling for Columbine or Munich, and that doesn't even get into the political subtexts that are often present even in mass-market blockbusters. Would those be forbidden under this policy? Assuming that you do come up with a plausible way of drawing a line here, you also need to have general trust that this power will not be abused. Given the heavy politicization of regulatory agencies in the United States, a large portion of the population is worried -- not without substantial justification -- that "is this speech opposed to the party in power" will be one of the factors used to draw that line.
      - swombat 11y ago
        Political speech is jot forbidden as a whole, just political speech that appears directly related to an ongoing election. For example, right now, you should be allowed to make a movie about how Reagan sucked, but not one about how Hillary Clinton will suck if she gets elected.
        yummyfajitas 11y ago
        So in your ideal world, Paul Krugman is banned from writing editorials? John Stewart can no longer discuss contemporary politics? And if a citizen notices that all the politicians are lying, he needs to just shut up about it?
  - drewm1980 11y ago
    I would decide that NO corporate legal structures are making "legitimate" political speech. I am 100% comfortable with political discourse taking the form of (volunteer) blog posts, etc... rather than major motion pictures (even if "crowd" funded). Money is not speech. Speech is Speech!
    - 13thLetter 11y ago
      A consistent point of view, but you'll have to apply it to newspapers, book publishers, and television too, just for starters. Money in politics is going to migrate towards any method of advertising that it isn't completely banned from. I'm not convinced that content-based restrictions can be easily applied, either, even putting aside one's confidence in the regulators. To take the above example of a documentary attacking Reagan, it would be easy for it to have the subtext of "and don't vote for Mitt Romney this year, he's just like that Reagan jerk."
- natrius 11y ago
  How are those solutions feasible when the system is captured by the wealthy? I don't think any solution that involves politics can work. We have to solve it outside of politics by making it too difficult to use money to influence politics. We have the technology to do this without winning any votes in Congress. Instead, we need to build tools and educate people. http://meritcapitalism.com http://meritcapitalism.com
- prostoalex 11y ago
  I don't have an online source, but paper version of Business Week magazine did a graph on monetary value of each loophole for US Treasury, and carried interest impact was miniscule (remember that it's still taxed at 23.8% vs 39.6% if it was treated as income, and with so few people taking advantage of it, the total rake-in is rather small). Not that the loophole itself makes any sense. If you want some major impact on government revenues (which would also open doors to things like public finance of campaigns, subsidized tuition, subsidized healthcare, etc.), remove the mortgage interest deduction and standard deduction, but then you quickly find out that one man's loopholes are another man's "Washington reaching into our pockets yet again".
beatpanda 11y ago
This is easy -- any person working a full-time job should be able to pay rent in safe, decent, legal housing, afford to feed themeselves and their family and put clothes on their back. If this condition isn't satisfied, our economic system doesn't work, period.

by wh-uws 11y ago

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.
  - Joeri 11y ago
    When a for-profit corporation exercises free speech, it is actually the speech of its shareholders. Therefore, in the case of corporate speech it's still a group of individuals talking. The only thing you could do is put an individual limit on spending, which is then translated into a limit on corporate speech by summing up the limits of the shareholders, with foreign shareholders contributing zero, and domestic ones seeing their limit divided over their shares.
    - lisper 11y ago
      > When a for-profit corporation exercises free speech, it is actually the speech of its shareholders. No, it's the speech of the management. The shareholders only have indirect control. The only power they generally have is to replace board members. And sometimes they don't even have that. Google, for example, is completely controlled by Larry and Sergey. Facebook is completely controlled by Zuck.
  - 2232 11y ago
    Media are all corporations, and so is ycombinator. If you want "truth" commissions, go right ahead with removing CU, but unless that, this was a great decision.
- Joeri 11y ago
  You don't try to make the distinction, you just regulate all political speech. During election time, you set aside fair slices of media time for every candidate, where they can make their case, and forbid all political speech outside of those times. Same thing with billboards, magazine ads, google ads, etc... The different candidates will police each other. Never going to happen in the US but definitely practically achievable as it is somewhat how elections work in belgium.
  - 13thLetter 11y ago
    That just kicks the problem up one level: now you've got to figure out the distinction between political speech and non-political speech. I'm not familiar with how things work in Belgium, but in the United States Hollywood has released a large number of explicitly political movies in the past fifteen years, such as Lions for Lambs or Bowling for Columbine or Munich, and that doesn't even get into the political subtexts that are often present even in mass-market blockbusters. Would those be forbidden under this policy? Assuming that you do come up with a plausible way of drawing a line here, you also need to have general trust that this power will not be abused. Given the heavy politicization of regulatory agencies in the United States, a large portion of the population is worried -- not without substantial justification -- that "is this speech opposed to the party in power" will be one of the factors used to draw that line.
    - swombat 11y ago
      Political speech is jot forbidden as a whole, just political speech that appears directly related to an ongoing election. For example, right now, you should be allowed to make a movie about how Reagan sucked, but not one about how Hillary Clinton will suck if she gets elected.
      - yummyfajitas 11y ago
        So in your ideal world, Paul Krugman is banned from writing editorials? John Stewart can no longer discuss contemporary politics? And if a citizen notices that all the politicians are lying, he needs to just shut up about it?
- drewm1980 11y ago
  I would decide that NO corporate legal structures are making "legitimate" political speech. I am 100% comfortable with political discourse taking the form of (volunteer) blog posts, etc... rather than major motion pictures (even if "crowd" funded). Money is not speech. Speech is Speech!
  - 13thLetter 11y ago
    A consistent point of view, but you'll have to apply it to newspapers, book publishers, and television too, just for starters. Money in politics is going to migrate towards any method of advertising that it isn't completely banned from. I'm not convinced that content-based restrictions can be easily applied, either, even putting aside one's confidence in the regulators. To take the above example of a documentary attacking Reagan, it would be easy for it to have the subtext of "and don't vote for Mitt Romney this year, he's just like that Reagan jerk."
natrius 11y ago
How are those solutions feasible when the system is captured by the wealthy? I don't think any solution that involves politics can work. We have to solve it outside of politics by making it too difficult to use money to influence politics. We have the technology to do this without winning any votes in Congress. Instead, we need to build tools and educate people. http://meritcapitalism.com http://meritcapitalism.com
prostoalex 11y ago
I don't have an online source, but paper version of Business Week magazine did a graph on monetary value of each loophole for US Treasury, and carried interest impact was miniscule (remember that it's still taxed at 23.8% vs 39.6% if it was treated as income, and with so few people taking advantage of it, the total rake-in is rather small). Not that the loophole itself makes any sense. If you want some major impact on government revenues (which would also open doors to things like public finance of campaigns, subsidized tuition, subsidized healthcare, etc.), remove the mortgage interest deduction and standard deduction, but then you quickly find out that one man's loopholes are another man's "Washington reaching into our pockets yet again".

beatpanda 11y ago

This is easy -- any person working a full-time job should be able to pay rent in safe, decent, legal housing, afford to feed themeselves and their family and put clothes on their back. If this condition isn't satisfied, our economic system doesn't work, period.