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What if we just decline income equality as a meaningful or valuable ideal at all? Full income equality is not a viable or desirable outcome, and it seems like a
by motohagiography 4y ago
What if we just decline income equality as a meaningful or valuable ideal at all? Full income equality is not a viable or desirable outcome, and it seems like a distraction from solvable problems like political and institutional corruption - paid for out of funds collected under the pretext of policies to combat said inequality.
The word and concept is even a second order artifact of the belief in a zero-sum human economy, and an idea whose goal is to centralize power and resources into the very institutions whose corruption it moralizes. The Gini coefficient is no better than a horoscope, and arguably, "income inequality" isn't meaningful as a thing.
What is more plausible? That most of the people who take risks to build businesses do so from an exploitative and evil urge, or that a few performers like Piketty, Varafoukis, Krugman and the Greek chorus of lazy ideologues who talk, write, and flatter for a living are self dealing? The word itself is a begged question, and accepting its negative definition as a premise makes any logic built on that idea seem internally consistent because it will always sound "good" because it is "against bad."
Merely being anti-bad is not even rationally ethical, it just means one has been folded into a mob that doesn't actually believe anything - they're just against the representation of a bad thing. It's easier to believe than accepting we've been tricked, but please, enough.
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoThe fundamental problem is wealth having a high correlation or even causation with power. At any point in time, very little keeps a neutral or even benevolent elite from turning malevolent. At that point, you're stuck with the populace willing to shed sweat, tears and blood to fight back. We also tend to select on relative fitness, and both wealth and power contribute pretty strongly towards fitness. You can educate people to look past this, but it's pretty difficult to get individuals to look past their basic instincts even after training them to do so their entire childhood. You can change society to minimize the negative effects, but society can lose knowledge and trend the other way over time. If it was just "well more income for everyone means less people in poverty", yes, it would be useless. But that's not what is happening.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoWhy don't we attempt to strip the power from wealth rather than attempting to take people's wealth away? The fact that wealth and power are correlated has a lot to do with the fact that we have these hugely complicated legal systems with a lot of gray areas. The wealthier you are, the more you can afford to look for loopholes. What if we took an axe to the codes of laws and closed the loopholes? What if we stripped certain offices of power so that there wasn't much benefit to corruption? Humanity has built systems that give the wealthy power, but we don't have to design them this way.
- arundi2 4y ago
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoI would agree this. That said, good luck trying to change this in the first place. Not only is it incredibly ingrained into our system, the status quo has a lot to lose and would not be willing to give it up, while it is incredibly difficult to unionize the masses and not have them defect for a pittance. Either way this will have to be answered by the time paradigm shifts and automation eventually question the worth of human labor as a whole.
- arundi2 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- qwerty456127 4y agoRich people's children don't necessarily inherit (let alone develop further) any of their merits yet have all the wealth leaving huge numbers of people in poverty. The latter have potential they could have had developed for good of the society but they are doomed to waste it. Perhaps limiting how much can one person inherit could solve the problem, perhaps not.