4 ms·
No, not ours, not yet, unless the faction that thinks stealing someone else's stuff will solve all our problems gets their way.
by imgabe 4y ago
No, not ours, not yet, unless the faction that thinks stealing someone else's stuff will solve all our problems gets their way.
- woodruffw 4y agoSo much of this conversation is breathless: who said anything about "solving all our problems"?
- imgabe 4y agoThen you just want to take people's stuff for fun, not to solve any problem? Is that supposed to be better?
- woodruffw 4y agoNo, I think I'd be happy with somewhere between "all" and "any."
- imgabe 4y agoAnd the solution to the problems is to give more and more money to the government that already spent trillions of dollars and didn't solve the problem. You don't see a problem with that? You don't think that maybe we should get the government working effectively with what we already give it before we decide to give it more? The government spent $6.8 trillion last year. Do think at some time in November they were like "Damn, we were just about to end homelessness, but we came up $100 billion short. Oh well!" Imagine if you had an employee who wasn't doing their job. Is the solution to give them a raise?
- woodruffw 4y agoAgain: this is very breathless. I don't have to be any particular fan of how the US Government spends its money to observe that taxing wealthy people, even aggressively, is the civically appropriate thing to do. Edit: it's also worth nothing that this reasoning is perfectly symmetrical. Why in the world should I continue to allow a billionaire to profiteer, at the cost of immense civic damage?
- imgabe 4y ago> Why in the world should I continue to allow a billionaire to profiteer, at the cost of immense civic damage? 1. Because creating a valuable company that provides a useful service is not profiteering. 2. Because creating a company did not cause civic damage in the first place. 3. Therefore confiscating the value of that company and transferring it to the government could not reverse any civic damage. 4. Destroying the engine of wealth creation in our society would cause immensely more civic damage. This is also symmetrical in that once you realize this will not solve any problems - and that it will in fact create many more problems, you can then conclude it is not a civically appropriate thing to do. Even if it gives a sense of satisfaction to envious people "intuitively reason" that knocking people down a peg is "civically appropriate".
- woodruffw 4y agoYou're using terms of anger and envy ("satisfaction," "knocking down a peg"), when neither is present. I'm really just interested in taxing them a bit more, because I don't think it's healthy for democratic, pluralistic societies to have such large wealth gaps. There are enough things to dislike about each other without bringing in immense, unspendable amounts of money.
- imgabe 4y agoMaking rich people poorer doesn’t do anything to help people who are poor. We could instead work on ways to make poor people richer, which would actually make their lives better instead of making someone else life worse, and would also reduce the wealth gap. Somehow none of the “tax the rich” crowd seem interested in that.
- woodruffw 4y agoI'm pretty sure I (speaking metaphorically) could take some of Brin's wealth, while still leaving him fabulously wealthy, and make some poor people less poor. This is a not uncommon thing for governments to do, and in most of the developed world it works relatively well. Sociologically speaking, we have decent evidence that eliminating privation can break generational cycles of poverty. Our own (broadly successful!) attempt at it is still within living memory, as is its dismantling[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society