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Arguably, almost everybody in the Western world has gotten rich. Go visit a medieval castle sometime. The standards that now everybody has required an army of

Arguably, almost everybody in the Western world has gotten rich. Go visit a medieval castle sometime. The standards that now everybody has required an army of servants in the old days. It is just a hateful lie of the left to claim "being rich" is dependent on exploiting poor people.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
That's silly - compared to cavemen, even workers in third world countries are "rich", being able to trade things for goods and services and not being required to hunt and gather. Inequality solved?
- kofejnik 7y ago
  yes, exactly; to have equality, you'll have to reduce everyone to the lower common denominator, which will be rather low Also, I don't see why exactly inequality is inherently bad. I'm poorer than Bezos, _and that is a good thing_. Pretty much like Steph Curry is better than me at basketball and so he should have a lot more ball possesion should we be playing on the same team, Bezos is much better than me in allocating resources, so he should have a lot more resources to play with.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    > Bezos is much better than me in allocating resources, so he should have a lot more resources to play with. How do you know that, though? Have you had the opportunity to be in the exact same place he was for the exact same time? Do you sincerely believe there aren't, in the billions of people on earth, someone with better resource allocation skills than Bezos? Having more money is not proof of ability.
    - pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
      We know that because he did it. He literally proved it by becoming a Billionaire. Yes, lots of people were alive in the exact same time when he started Amazon.
      - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        How is that proof of ability more than luck?
        pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
        He has been going at it consistently for many, many years now. He just happened to be lucky year after year? Most people don't even try, but it doesn't stop them from accusing people who put in the work and who take the risks from just being lucky.
        SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        The problem I think is that people attribute all of success to the sheer iron will and willingness to suffer of the individual, when that just isn't the case. Are you attributing all of Amazon's success to Bezos solely? If he left do you assume Amazon would immediately start to fail? Was it Bill Gates alone who kept Microsoft afloat? You have to consider luck, there's a ton of people in the world who put in the work and didn't get anything, and it's not just because they didn't work hard enough.
        kofejnik 7y ago
        I don't see how luck invalidates my point; yes, you probably need luck to make big bucks, but that is just a part of the game. If you make so that no one can get seriously rich, "to prevent exploitation", congratulations, this is how you get Soviet Union, with Gulag and Golodomor and other stuff, but with oh so nice intentions, workers owning means of production, blah blah blah
        pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
        Not everybody becomes a Billionaire, but most people with intelligence and skill amount to at least something. The luck factor is mitigated by people trying several things until they succeed. You throw out the hypothetical example of the talented people who didn't amount to anything, but how common is it really? Would you also say Steve Jobs was merely lucky, and everybody else could have founded Apple? Perhaps people just don't know enough about what those CEOs do? And of course at a basic level, it is always luck, because even being born, being healthy, the place where you are born, intelligence, and so on, are luck. I think to assume people don't deserve stuff because they were lucky is rather backwards. Imagine you had a brain tumor, and you need brain surgery. There is a surgeon who was very lucky - he was born white, male, to a wealthy family, so that he could afford to go to the best schools to become a really good brain surgeon. Would you then say that guy doesn't deserve your money, because he was just lucky?` I'd say that's just bullshit. It doesn't matter why or how he got his qualifications by luck, magic, whatever. What matters right now, what makes you willing to give him money, is that he can provide you with the best odds of a successful brain surgery. You are welcome to pick a random poor person from the street to perform that surgery, for the sake of fairness. After all, it isn't their fault that they weren't able to afford the education to become a brain surgeon, right? And if you say that brain surgeon should have to operate on you for free, that is exploitation, plain and simple. You dispose of his body. In the end he would be punished for becoming a brain surgeon, because people would feel entitled to his services and would make him work 20 hours a day, with no compensation.
  - onion2k 7y ago
    to have equality, you'll have to reduce everyone to the lower common denominator, which will be rather low Why must everyone go down to the lower common denominator? Wouldn't moving everyone to the average also be equality? For most middle-class Westerners that would be a reduction, but for most people on Earth that would very likely be a small improvement, and in some cases a significant improvement. The real problem is that it's logistically impossible. Someone living in the middle of a desert just can't have access to the sort of food wealth and stable energy supply we have because the technologies to get those things to where they are don't really exist yet. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to move everyone towards the average a bit though.
    - tathougies 7y ago
      Of course the technology exists to bring food to the desert. Move to california if you think this is what the hold up is.
      - onion2k 7y ago
        California has ports and airports and... roads. People stay in the same places for a long time. Try delivering fresh produce to nomadic Bedouin tribes in the Eastern Sahara and you might find it a little trickier.
        Mirioron 7y ago
        Then perhaps living in the Eastern Sahara is not a good choice?
    - kofejnik 7y ago
      If everybody is forced to be average, what's the point of even trying? I'd probably noodle on my guitar all day and play Fallout, rather than work
      - onion2k 7y ago
        A huge number of people work very hard for much less than middle class Westerners have. They would all get more than they have now. I suspect that would lead to better global productivity even with the loss of your input.
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    It's a bit of a strawman to take arguments of the general form "we should enact policies to reduce inequality" and implicitly restate them as "we should enact policies that force perfect equality," then argue against that restatement, don't you think?
    - beerandt 7y ago
      I think the concept of "inequality" itself is a type of straw man. It's basically a problem that will perputually exist. Arguments (straw man or not) pointing out the lack of a concrete, absolute (non-relative), morally justified goal is appropriate as long as "inequality" itself is the stated "problem." If we were talking about a fixed, concrete goal, then I'd agree with you. Reducing poverty, reducing world hunger, increasing standards of living, etc are things that can be accomplished by setting some absolute, concrete moral goals, which moving towards by any measure might be considered morally good. But "inequality" on its own is, prima facia, a term that requires comparison to the point of "perfect equality". Doing good things might result in less inequality, but reducing inequality for the sake of itself is just justification of envy. There's nothing inherently "evil" or even negative about it. On a side note: "Reducing inequality" is an activists dream. They can sell political solutions forever for a problem that will always exist, by some form of the definition. (Unless we were to oversimplify it and set some standard deviation type hard-target for income distribution, but I've not heard anyone suggest this, let alone an appropriate "fair" target distribution. I'm not for it, but it's at least a measurable goal.)
- pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
  Why exactly is inequality a problem? Because people suffer from their envy? People starving, having no health care, low life expectancy, that sort of thing, are problems. Their neighbor having more money in the bank is not really a problem. There are also actually differences in skills, performance, diligence, and so on. It would be very unfair if some people weren't allowed to earn more money than others. Whether it should be possible to be arbitrarily rich is another question.
  - ianleeclark 7y ago
    > People starving, having no health care, low life expectancy, that sort of thing, are problems. Their neighbor having more money in the bank is not really a problem. Most people, when they critique wealth inequality, aren't critiquing their neighbors because most people in the same zip code are going to be at similar levels. When people critique wealth inequality, they're talking about the Koch brothers, or other parties who leverage capital to gain unfair advantage and political powers and then work against the first half of your statement. > Whether it should be possible to be arbitrarily rich is another question. I, too, am in favor of a 100% wealth tax upon death. No more freeloading failsons.
    - pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
      "Unfair capital advantage" Well, again, start accumulating capital, if it is such an unfair advantage. "I, too, am in favor of a 100% wealth tax upon death. No more freeloading failsons." I am absolute against such a thing, in fact I consider it an insane proposal. It seems one of the fundamental human rights should be people being allowed to provide for their children. People work to have successful children. It is absolutely incorrect that all children should have the same starting positions for a fair world. If a couple works hard to earn money, and others don't work and instead pop out 10 children, why on earth would it be fair to take money from the hard working parents to distribute it to all? I know many people who would like to have more children, but feel they can't afford them. Why should they be punished for being responsible. It even starts before people have children. They work hard to be attractive and find a good mate, to improve the odds for their children. That is basic human nature. The acts of their parents are not the children's fault, of course, and everybody should be given a fair chance to make it in life. But there are limits. Both strategies can be valid (have few children and try to give them a good head start in live vs having as many children as possible and leaving them to their own devices), but it would be unfair to politically punish one strategy over the other. At the very least, if you take away money from the responsible parents, you should have to limit the behavior of the irresponsible parents. The only way to make things completely equal for everyone is to disallow people to have children, and instead rise future children in clone factories. Why should that be considered desirable? And even more basic than that: people should be allowed to do with their money as they please. Including giving it to their children.
simoom22 7y ago
Are you saying poor people aren't exploited?
- kofejnik 7y ago
  not the parent's OP, but yes; I'm saying the whole notion of exploitation is rather silly
  - simoom22 7y ago
    We'll, I guess all notions can seem silly from some perspective. Children climbing up chimneys or adults wearing diapers to meet chicken plucking quotas can seen silly from a certain perspective, but usually not a first person one.
- pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
  Presumably there are people who are being exploited in the world. But to claim in general poverty is a result of exploitation seems very questionable. Start with basics. People live in the woods, with nothing. Some start building a hut from sticks, others don't. The ones living in huts suddenly are richer than the ones who don't, even though they haven't taken anything away from the ones who don't have huts. And of the ones who don't have huts demand some of the huts from the people who built them, who is doing the exploiting?
  - bigger_cheese 7y ago
    People in huts eventually band together into villages, villages start to trade goods with one another. Eventually the largest village is able to coerce (either using the threat of force via superior military or through infiltration, bribery subversion etc) the smaller villages into giving it the best deals. The largest village gets very rich while extracting all the resources and goods from the smaller villages around it. The largest village is able to ram through treaties, trade pacts etc that favor it's interests, it is able to interfere in politics of surrounding villages and sometimes provides backing to despots or outright overthrow leadership of smaller villages that might be doing something the largest village does not agree with.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago

That's silly - compared to cavemen, even workers in third world countries are "rich", being able to trade things for goods and services and not being required to hunt and gather. Inequality solved?

kofejnik 7y ago
yes, exactly; to have equality, you'll have to reduce everyone to the lower common denominator, which will be rather low Also, I don't see why exactly inequality is inherently bad. I'm poorer than Bezos, _and that is a good thing_. Pretty much like Steph Curry is better than me at basketball and so he should have a lot more ball possesion should we be playing on the same team, Bezos is much better than me in allocating resources, so he should have a lot more resources to play with.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  > Bezos is much better than me in allocating resources, so he should have a lot more resources to play with. How do you know that, though? Have you had the opportunity to be in the exact same place he was for the exact same time? Do you sincerely believe there aren't, in the billions of people on earth, someone with better resource allocation skills than Bezos? Having more money is not proof of ability.
  - pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
    We know that because he did it. He literally proved it by becoming a Billionaire. Yes, lots of people were alive in the exact same time when he started Amazon.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      How is that proof of ability more than luck?
      - pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
        He has been going at it consistently for many, many years now. He just happened to be lucky year after year? Most people don't even try, but it doesn't stop them from accusing people who put in the work and who take the risks from just being lucky.
        SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        The problem I think is that people attribute all of success to the sheer iron will and willingness to suffer of the individual, when that just isn't the case. Are you attributing all of Amazon's success to Bezos solely? If he left do you assume Amazon would immediately start to fail? Was it Bill Gates alone who kept Microsoft afloat? You have to consider luck, there's a ton of people in the world who put in the work and didn't get anything, and it's not just because they didn't work hard enough.
        kofejnik 7y ago
        I don't see how luck invalidates my point; yes, you probably need luck to make big bucks, but that is just a part of the game. If you make so that no one can get seriously rich, "to prevent exploitation", congratulations, this is how you get Soviet Union, with Gulag and Golodomor and other stuff, but with oh so nice intentions, workers owning means of production, blah blah blah
        pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
        Not everybody becomes a Billionaire, but most people with intelligence and skill amount to at least something. The luck factor is mitigated by people trying several things until they succeed. You throw out the hypothetical example of the talented people who didn't amount to anything, but how common is it really? Would you also say Steve Jobs was merely lucky, and everybody else could have founded Apple? Perhaps people just don't know enough about what those CEOs do? And of course at a basic level, it is always luck, because even being born, being healthy, the place where you are born, intelligence, and so on, are luck. I think to assume people don't deserve stuff because they were lucky is rather backwards. Imagine you had a brain tumor, and you need brain surgery. There is a surgeon who was very lucky - he was born white, male, to a wealthy family, so that he could afford to go to the best schools to become a really good brain surgeon. Would you then say that guy doesn't deserve your money, because he was just lucky?` I'd say that's just bullshit. It doesn't matter why or how he got his qualifications by luck, magic, whatever. What matters right now, what makes you willing to give him money, is that he can provide you with the best odds of a successful brain surgery. You are welcome to pick a random poor person from the street to perform that surgery, for the sake of fairness. After all, it isn't their fault that they weren't able to afford the education to become a brain surgeon, right? And if you say that brain surgeon should have to operate on you for free, that is exploitation, plain and simple. You dispose of his body. In the end he would be punished for becoming a brain surgeon, because people would feel entitled to his services and would make him work 20 hours a day, with no compensation.
- onion2k 7y ago
  to have equality, you'll have to reduce everyone to the lower common denominator, which will be rather low Why must everyone go down to the lower common denominator? Wouldn't moving everyone to the average also be equality? For most middle-class Westerners that would be a reduction, but for most people on Earth that would very likely be a small improvement, and in some cases a significant improvement. The real problem is that it's logistically impossible. Someone living in the middle of a desert just can't have access to the sort of food wealth and stable energy supply we have because the technologies to get those things to where they are don't really exist yet. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to move everyone towards the average a bit though.
  - tathougies 7y ago
    Of course the technology exists to bring food to the desert. Move to california if you think this is what the hold up is.
    - onion2k 7y ago
      California has ports and airports and... roads. People stay in the same places for a long time. Try delivering fresh produce to nomadic Bedouin tribes in the Eastern Sahara and you might find it a little trickier.
      - Mirioron 7y ago
        Then perhaps living in the Eastern Sahara is not a good choice?
  - kofejnik 7y ago
    If everybody is forced to be average, what's the point of even trying? I'd probably noodle on my guitar all day and play Fallout, rather than work
    - onion2k 7y ago
      A huge number of people work very hard for much less than middle class Westerners have. They would all get more than they have now. I suspect that would lead to better global productivity even with the loss of your input.
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  It's a bit of a strawman to take arguments of the general form "we should enact policies to reduce inequality" and implicitly restate them as "we should enact policies that force perfect equality," then argue against that restatement, don't you think?
  - beerandt 7y ago
    I think the concept of "inequality" itself is a type of straw man. It's basically a problem that will perputually exist. Arguments (straw man or not) pointing out the lack of a concrete, absolute (non-relative), morally justified goal is appropriate as long as "inequality" itself is the stated "problem." If we were talking about a fixed, concrete goal, then I'd agree with you. Reducing poverty, reducing world hunger, increasing standards of living, etc are things that can be accomplished by setting some absolute, concrete moral goals, which moving towards by any measure might be considered morally good. But "inequality" on its own is, prima facia, a term that requires comparison to the point of "perfect equality". Doing good things might result in less inequality, but reducing inequality for the sake of itself is just justification of envy. There's nothing inherently "evil" or even negative about it. On a side note: "Reducing inequality" is an activists dream. They can sell political solutions forever for a problem that will always exist, by some form of the definition. (Unless we were to oversimplify it and set some standard deviation type hard-target for income distribution, but I've not heard anyone suggest this, let alone an appropriate "fair" target distribution. I'm not for it, but it's at least a measurable goal.)
pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
Why exactly is inequality a problem? Because people suffer from their envy? People starving, having no health care, low life expectancy, that sort of thing, are problems. Their neighbor having more money in the bank is not really a problem. There are also actually differences in skills, performance, diligence, and so on. It would be very unfair if some people weren't allowed to earn more money than others. Whether it should be possible to be arbitrarily rich is another question.
- ianleeclark 7y ago
  > People starving, having no health care, low life expectancy, that sort of thing, are problems. Their neighbor having more money in the bank is not really a problem. Most people, when they critique wealth inequality, aren't critiquing their neighbors because most people in the same zip code are going to be at similar levels. When people critique wealth inequality, they're talking about the Koch brothers, or other parties who leverage capital to gain unfair advantage and political powers and then work against the first half of your statement. > Whether it should be possible to be arbitrarily rich is another question. I, too, am in favor of a 100% wealth tax upon death. No more freeloading failsons.
  - pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
    "Unfair capital advantage" Well, again, start accumulating capital, if it is such an unfair advantage. "I, too, am in favor of a 100% wealth tax upon death. No more freeloading failsons." I am absolute against such a thing, in fact I consider it an insane proposal. It seems one of the fundamental human rights should be people being allowed to provide for their children. People work to have successful children. It is absolutely incorrect that all children should have the same starting positions for a fair world. If a couple works hard to earn money, and others don't work and instead pop out 10 children, why on earth would it be fair to take money from the hard working parents to distribute it to all? I know many people who would like to have more children, but feel they can't afford them. Why should they be punished for being responsible. It even starts before people have children. They work hard to be attractive and find a good mate, to improve the odds for their children. That is basic human nature. The acts of their parents are not the children's fault, of course, and everybody should be given a fair chance to make it in life. But there are limits. Both strategies can be valid (have few children and try to give them a good head start in live vs having as many children as possible and leaving them to their own devices), but it would be unfair to politically punish one strategy over the other. At the very least, if you take away money from the responsible parents, you should have to limit the behavior of the irresponsible parents. The only way to make things completely equal for everyone is to disallow people to have children, and instead rise future children in clone factories. Why should that be considered desirable? And even more basic than that: people should be allowed to do with their money as they please. Including giving it to their children.

simoom22 7y ago

Are you saying poor people aren't exploited?

kofejnik 7y ago
not the parent's OP, but yes; I'm saying the whole notion of exploitation is rather silly
- simoom22 7y ago
  We'll, I guess all notions can seem silly from some perspective. Children climbing up chimneys or adults wearing diapers to meet chicken plucking quotas can seen silly from a certain perspective, but usually not a first person one.
pksdjfikkkkdsff 7y ago
Presumably there are people who are being exploited in the world. But to claim in general poverty is a result of exploitation seems very questionable. Start with basics. People live in the woods, with nothing. Some start building a hut from sticks, others don't. The ones living in huts suddenly are richer than the ones who don't, even though they haven't taken anything away from the ones who don't have huts. And of the ones who don't have huts demand some of the huts from the people who built them, who is doing the exploiting?
- bigger_cheese 7y ago
  People in huts eventually band together into villages, villages start to trade goods with one another. Eventually the largest village is able to coerce (either using the threat of force via superior military or through infiltration, bribery subversion etc) the smaller villages into giving it the best deals. The largest village gets very rich while extracting all the resources and goods from the smaller villages around it. The largest village is able to ram through treaties, trade pacts etc that favor it's interests, it is able to interfere in politics of surrounding villages and sometimes provides backing to despots or outright overthrow leadership of smaller villages that might be doing something the largest village does not agree with.