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> our billionaires have created empires (their companies) and we live really well because of them I'd disagree with the statement, that most of the US citizens

by akuji1993 6y ago

> our billionaires have created empires (their companies) and we live really well because of them I'd disagree with the statement, that most of the US citizens live a good life while 40% are in danger of being evicted right now. That's only the first example coming from the top of my head. You could easily make an argument how most people living paycheck to paycheck is not a great status also. > So you have a dual economy - those in the US who are running the empire's money printing machines, and those who can't help those companies print money. Wouldn't you consider this amoral from the start? There is proficiencies that won't ever be able to get out of poverity for this exact reason. Most artists, writers, philosophers, social workers, health care workers won't ever be able to get out of poverity / low middle class, because they are not "worth" as much, as people working IT, finance, governance. > The poor people are actually rich compared to the rest of the world This comparison doesn't really matter when they can't live where they are right now. If you want to analyse their quality of living you have to only consider their material conditions where they live, not how their money would be able to make them live in South Africa or Swasiland. > The US is very capitalist in mindset. Keep in mind that in capitalism, companies also help those not within the company by creating better quality goods for consumers (everyone else), so the more empires grow, the cheaper/better the consumer goods are, and the better quality of life is for everyone, not just those who work for the empire. In theory this would lead to better lifestyles for others, but as the capitalist tries to minimize cost and maximize profit, they are moving away from US based production and produce cheaper in China, South East Asia etc. leaving their US workers behind with no wage to buy their products. Capitalism has reached the stage of maxizing profit through globalization, chasing for the cheapest production possible around the globe. This is why US poverity is increasing and unemployment becomes a more and more desperate issue. The capitalist, in the end, doesn't care about the people outside of his profit scope. He should though, since those people buy his products. If nobody is left buying product, their is no profit. Some people argue this can be corrected by "ethical capitalism" which I think is a dream castle, but you might disagree. I'd argue that we can reach those goals easier, through socialist companies where not one capitalist is controlling the company, but all the workers collectively. They won't go oversees with their production, as they protect their own jobs. They won't cut safety measures for the same reason. Same for health care etc. Workers will protect themselves way better and lead the society to a more balanced way of living this way in general. I kind of have the feeling you're not that big of a proponent of capitalism as I thought in the beginning... You have some interesting analysis with the appended criticisms. > you first have to change the willingness of the American people to willingly accept systematized and distributed personal loss. We agree that this needs to happen. I don't think the numbers have to be quite as drastic as you proposed, if we just take 80% of the wealth accumulated by the rich (there will be enough left for them) and do a sensible tax reform targeting the Top 10-20% correctly. That would be a start. Going the way of reform, we'd start with that and health care reform and see what's the next step from there. The alternative of revolution is an existing alternative, but costs lives and can hurt the system for the next 20-30 years, so not really desirable. The first step towards reform would be getting Biden into office and then pressuring him to actually take the steps he promised after talking to Sanders. Regarding instead of taxing, making it so that billionaires need to redistribute privately, I don't agree that that's better than a for example workers council deciding what to do with tax money. The Gates Foundation has distributed their donations 96% to US and European organisations and just 4% to African owned and run organsations. I appreciate them trying to help, but I think you need to put more of this money directly into the hands of African orgs as they for sure know best, what their citizens need. I'll check out your link later today, thanks. And also thanks for not making this an aggressive, unproductive conversation.

spyckie2 6y ago
> I'd disagree with the statement, that most of the US citizens live a good life while 40% are in danger of being evicted right now. That's only the first example coming from the top of my head. You could easily make an argument how most people living paycheck to paycheck is not a great status also. My point is that minimum wage in the US -> ($16.50 / hr in many states), is really high compared to many other countries. For instance, the median wage in Taiwan / China is 1/3 of the minimum wage in the US. Why does the US have the minimum wage so high? Why do bus drivers in the US get paid 10-100 times more than bus drivers in India? It's because of "trickle down" economics - because the US economy is so strong we can have really high wages for the lowest skilled jobs in our economy. > Wouldn't you consider this amoral from the start? There is proficiencies that won't ever be able to get out of poverty for this exact reason. Most artists, writers, philosophers, social workers, health care workers won't ever be able to get out of poverty / low middle class, because they are not "worth" as much, as people working IT, finance, governance. I wouldn't consider it amoral. The reality is that creating great environments for people to grow up in is hard work, and not a "universal right" by any means. Nature does not give everyone super comfortable and fair lives - consider the cold north or the scorching deserts and you'll realize that this assumption that everyone deserves the same life is... not grounded in the real world. Life is fundamentally unfair. You have certain populations of animals growing up in fertile galopagos without any predators, and you have other animals growing in 10000 ft deep oceans with extremely harsh environments to survive. That's life. Fairness in life is a good ideal but a bad policy. It's like saying, I don't like how the world has deserts and tundra, I'm going to make the entire world have perfect weather and homogenous, ideal environments for everyone - the engineering effort would be astronomical and also probably cause a lot of problems to the environment. I'd rather have a policy that is grounded in how the world works, which I think capitalism is (as opposed to socialism). > I'd argue that we can reach those goals easier, through socialist companies where not one capitalist is controlling the company, but all the workers collectively. They won't go oversees with their production, as they protect their own jobs. They won't cut safety measures for the same reason. Same for health care etc. Workers will protect themselves way better and lead the society to a more balanced way of living this way in general. The assumption that collectives can allocate resources better than individuals is flat out wrong. The reality is that the decision making and skill of the person(s) in charge determine the efficiency of allocation. This is basic business theory. You don't put a random joe to allocate budget and policy decisions for billions of dollars at the top level; you put a skilled CFO or COO who has 20+ years of experience and has done it many times before to make those decisions. Capitalism naturally causes the people who have the best allocation skills to be assigned the seat of being the one to allocate resources. This is opposed to socialism, which has no policy or strategy towards who gets the control of the resources. Where capitalism goes wrong is in hyper focusing on allocating resources to money making. You want the focus to be distributed evenly across money making, social welfare, and innovation. If you told these CEOs and CFOs running organizations to allocate resources to build better communities instead of just making more money, they would have the skills to do a good job at it. We just don't tell them to do that... because I dunno, American ideals? > I don't think the numbers have to be quite as drastic as you proposed I think they have to be much worse than what I proposed. Bloat in the current system is really, really high. In Taiwan, they live the same standard of living as the US with basically 1/4 of the cost. > if we just take 80% of the wealth accumulated by the rich (there will be enough left for them) and do a sensible tax reform targeting the Top 10-20% correctly. Understand you may not be from the US, but its probably more accurate to say "for us" rather than "for them". If you're a programmer on hacker news, 95% chance you'd be in the top 5% of the US in terms of income generation. > just 4% to African owned and run organsations. It's because most African owned and run organizations are not skilled enough to be entrusted with the money to actually produce results. If you've tried to run an organization before, it's extremely difficult to allocate resources efficiently to solve problems. That's the key bottleneck of economics and I suspect its the major perspective difference between you and me. I view resource allocation as the absolutely hardest problem in the world, where you think everyone can do it well. 99.999% of people, if given $1 million and a difficult mission, will fail that mission, not because they lack heart, morality, ethics, or understanding, but because they don't know how to use the resources given to solve problems.

spyckie2 6y ago

> I'd disagree with the statement, that most of the US citizens live a good life while 40% are in danger of being evicted right now. That's only the first example coming from the top of my head. You could easily make an argument how most people living paycheck to paycheck is not a great status also. My point is that minimum wage in the US -> ($16.50 / hr in many states), is really high compared to many other countries. For instance, the median wage in Taiwan / China is 1/3 of the minimum wage in the US. Why does the US have the minimum wage so high? Why do bus drivers in the US get paid 10-100 times more than bus drivers in India? It's because of "trickle down" economics - because the US economy is so strong we can have really high wages for the lowest skilled jobs in our economy. > Wouldn't you consider this amoral from the start? There is proficiencies that won't ever be able to get out of poverty for this exact reason. Most artists, writers, philosophers, social workers, health care workers won't ever be able to get out of poverty / low middle class, because they are not "worth" as much, as people working IT, finance, governance. I wouldn't consider it amoral. The reality is that creating great environments for people to grow up in is hard work, and not a "universal right" by any means. Nature does not give everyone super comfortable and fair lives - consider the cold north or the scorching deserts and you'll realize that this assumption that everyone deserves the same life is... not grounded in the real world. Life is fundamentally unfair. You have certain populations of animals growing up in fertile galopagos without any predators, and you have other animals growing in 10000 ft deep oceans with extremely harsh environments to survive. That's life. Fairness in life is a good ideal but a bad policy. It's like saying, I don't like how the world has deserts and tundra, I'm going to make the entire world have perfect weather and homogenous, ideal environments for everyone - the engineering effort would be astronomical and also probably cause a lot of problems to the environment. I'd rather have a policy that is grounded in how the world works, which I think capitalism is (as opposed to socialism). > I'd argue that we can reach those goals easier, through socialist companies where not one capitalist is controlling the company, but all the workers collectively. They won't go oversees with their production, as they protect their own jobs. They won't cut safety measures for the same reason. Same for health care etc. Workers will protect themselves way better and lead the society to a more balanced way of living this way in general. The assumption that collectives can allocate resources better than individuals is flat out wrong. The reality is that the decision making and skill of the person(s) in charge determine the efficiency of allocation. This is basic business theory. You don't put a random joe to allocate budget and policy decisions for billions of dollars at the top level; you put a skilled CFO or COO who has 20+ years of experience and has done it many times before to make those decisions. Capitalism naturally causes the people who have the best allocation skills to be assigned the seat of being the one to allocate resources. This is opposed to socialism, which has no policy or strategy towards who gets the control of the resources. Where capitalism goes wrong is in hyper focusing on allocating resources to money making. You want the focus to be distributed evenly across money making, social welfare, and innovation. If you told these CEOs and CFOs running organizations to allocate resources to build better communities instead of just making more money, they would have the skills to do a good job at it. We just don't tell them to do that... because I dunno, American ideals? > I don't think the numbers have to be quite as drastic as you proposed I think they have to be much worse than what I proposed. Bloat in the current system is really, really high. In Taiwan, they live the same standard of living as the US with basically 1/4 of the cost. > if we just take 80% of the wealth accumulated by the rich (there will be enough left for them) and do a sensible tax reform targeting the Top 10-20% correctly. Understand you may not be from the US, but its probably more accurate to say "for us" rather than "for them". If you're a programmer on hacker news, 95% chance you'd be in the top 5% of the US in terms of income generation. > just 4% to African owned and run organsations. It's because most African owned and run organizations are not skilled enough to be entrusted with the money to actually produce results. If you've tried to run an organization before, it's extremely difficult to allocate resources efficiently to solve problems. That's the key bottleneck of economics and I suspect its the major perspective difference between you and me. I view resource allocation as the absolutely hardest problem in the world, where you think everyone can do it well. 99.999% of people, if given $1 million and a difficult mission, will fail that mission, not because they lack heart, morality, ethics, or understanding, but because they don't know how to use the resources given to solve problems.