4 ms·
> what Trump is doing - or at least, what it can be proven that he is doing - is so far entirely within the scope of the powers of the office and is within law.
by cromwellian 9y ago
> what Trump is doing - or at least, what it can be proven that he is doing - is so far entirely within the scope of the powers of the office and is within law. What sort of things can be done about the actions of the President as long as he's acting within the law?
What can be done is exactly what's being done: Challenge him in the courts, lobby congress to make changes, vote in the midterms to change congress.
>What if the geeks themselves see inequality as a natural outcome...
What if the geeks themselves are people who read Atlas Shrugged as teenagers, fantasized about revenge for years of bullying in school, and now feel justified in their new status as meritocratically earned and confirmation of their inherent worth.
In other words, people with a false theory of meritocracy, that justifies their own serendipitous gains in life, grants little weight to those unlucky enough to be born in unfortunate situations (e.g oh, you were born to bad parents in a crack infested neighborhood? The fact that you're not rich is obviously your fault for not studying in school hard enough, and your claims that I need to pay more taxes so your family can freeload for generations is unfair to me)
What if people who believe in libertarianism have no scientific data to back up their claims of efficacy? That there's no correlation between say, marginal tax rates and economic growth? That views on government incompetence are self fulfilling? What if they're completely wrong about the ability of the market to account for negative externalities and self correct before irreparable damage in rendered to the environmental or society?
What if meritocracy is bullshit, and that the people who ride at the top of the pyramid get there based on who they know, and not what they personally achieve? What if two people who work equally hard and are equally smart, results in one being in abject poverty and the other being fantastically rich because the latter had met a wealthy and connected family friend when they attended Stanford?
What if claiming that opposition to laissez-faire capitalism doesn't mean you're a Marxist and doesn't mean you want to punish success? What if you see a crisis in capitalism coming from automation that will cause vast swaths of humanity to be structurally unemployed and that Universal Basic Income (the dreaded "redistribution" word) might be necessary in the end?
What if the predictable consequence of Trump's tax cuts is a $2 trillion deficit, and the vast majority of the corporate profits plowed into stock buybacks and executive compensation, and the bottom 10% ends up worse?
What if either-or is a logical fallacy, and that a system can enable and incentivize advancement without being winner-take-all? What if people won't stop trying to be entrepreneurs and get rich, even if you raise their taxes by 10% to pay for universal health care, or college? What if a vibrant social safety net encourages more people to take entrepreneurial risks because failure doesn't mean destitution?
What if Silicon Valley Techno-Libertarians, especially of the Peter Thiel type, have a dogmatic, unsupported view of success and failure, ascribe too much of their own situation only to their own volition and actions they're taken, and then go on echo chamber sites arguing against redistribution, affirmative action, and other attempts to limit the most damaging negative externalities of a winner-take-all system?