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We need to not have powerful people What does this even mean?
by p1esk 5mo ago
We need to not have powerful people
What does this even mean?
- queenkjuul 5mo agoMake currently powerful people less powerful and currently powerless people more powerful. C'mon, HN users forgot how to think? Forgot to ask Claude?
- p1esk 5mo agoTo do that you first need to become more powerful than those powerful people, right?
- BrenBarn 5mo agoWell, no, you just a need a coalition that collectively is more powerful.
- p1esk 5mo agoWe already have two such coalitions within Congress: Republicans and Democrats. How is that working out?
- mcdonje 5mo agoThey got captured
- BrenBarn 5mo agoThose are coalitions of politicians, which to an increasing extent are part of the "powerful" group that needs to be overridden. By coalitions I mean coalitions of the actual citizenry.
- p1esk 5mo agoI struggle to imagine how would something like that form, function, or become powerful enough to matter. Do you have any examples of such coalitions?
- BrenBarn 5mo agoUnfortunately most of them are bad. The Tea Party is maybe one, for instance. Note that I'm not describing any type of "structure" here. I just mean a group of people who are willing to vote for the same things.
- thot_experiment 5mo agoIt's very easy to get started on this, you tax the shit out of people who have a lot of money because the old adage is true.
- p1esk 5mo agoEven if you could achieve that, there would still be rich people. Musk would still be a billionaire even if he had to pay 90% tax. Plus, many powerful people in government are not that rich.
- mcdonje 5mo agoHis ability to use his wealth to influence the government and the populous would be significantly reduced. There's a big difference between "rich" and "rich enough circumvent democracy."
- p1esk 5mo agoDon’t you think a far bigger threat to democracy is that government allows this influence? And voters seem to be perfectly OK with both 250M campaign contributions and widespread lobbying?
- mcdonje 5mo agoWhataboutism. Which is funny because it's literally the same problem. It's somewhat intractable at this point unless or until we can figure out how to structure society in a way that can actually prevent it. Not sure we have the organizational knowledge at this point. The government used to have better guards in place, but then what happened? They got weakened because of the monied interests already existed were successful at largely capturing the government. Guess what else happened during much the same time period; The government largely stopped breaking up monopolies, and many unions were busted or otherwise weakened or eliminated.