21–30 of 147 posts
History rhymes. Read Thomas Piketty's Capital and Will Durant's Story of Civilization to understand the cause and recurring nature of economic inequality.
Frighteningly fallacious logic. I want a house with a pool. But I don't want one a 2-hour commute from work even if it has a pool. Does that mean I don't value the pool?
Stuck through it for shits and giggles, but the article doesn't really get better from there.
Don't we all want to be super rich? If we aren't rich, fairness is the next best thing.
He's right in that Capitalism is not about marking up a product to generate a profit by taking the cost of the goods and the labor to produce it but rather by paying labor less than what their labor is worth. And this is what bothers people. It isn't fair. And they are helpless to change it.
And it is what is happening more and more. And the eventuality of it is Capitalism will eat itself as those without will be large enough in numbers where they assume power. Those which did the exploiting will either have their heads rolled or at the very least made impotent and marginalized. This is revolution and leads to Socialism and eventually Communism.
The second part Marx argues is that only the State can sort out the best way to distribute means and goods - that the free market is too chaotic. This I disagree with and I think time has shown this to be false. The state will eventually be corrupt if it isn't already. And whose to say what is best for one person is also the best for the other?
So, the free market exists where people can pick and choose. They have freedom. This allows some to have more than others and I think people are in fact OK with that. In fact I think people want that because we believe in getting what you're worth. Its just they don't want their own labor to be discounted to the point of being exploited - which is happening more and more with through wage suppression via policy or globalism which has displaced a lot of people very quickly, even if it might eventually benefit everyone as a whole.
Even "Fairness" isn't quite as useful a metric - where do you draw the line between things that should be eliminated as being unfair and things that are valuable culture and individuality? Parental intelligence is strongly causally coupled with their children's future intelligence simply through their working vocabulary and talkativeness, which is clearly unfair from the perspective of the newborn child; how do you f…
When the civilization is confined to one small planet while hitting the physical limits to growth, the fixed pie is a good analogy. There is fixed and diminishing amount of arable land to grow the wheat and apples. You can make only so many pies.
Even "Fairness" isn't quite as useful a metric - where do you draw the line between things that should be eliminated as being unfair and things that are valuable culture and individuality? Parental intelligence is strongly causally coupled with their children's future intelligence simply through their working vocabulary and talkativeness, which is clearly unfair from the perspective of the newborn child; how do you f…
Ah, the hypothetical "entire new pie". Just produce it, bro; then there will be no more arguments about inequality.
People would rather see those less fortunate have to beg and suffer than to give up what they 'worked' for.
Never mind the fact that we all derive benefit from systems that we inherited, and did not work for...
> A world in which everyone suffered from horrible poverty would be a perfectly equal one, he says, but few would prefer that to the world in which we now live. Therefore, “equality” can’t be what we really value. Frighteningly fallacious logic. I want a house with a pool. But I don't want one a 2-hour commute from work even if it has a pool. Does that mean I don't value the pool? Stuck through it for shits and giggl…
Not everyone takes those chances, but we want to make sure those who do have the shots to gamble the take, so that there is a churn that allows the cream to rise to the top.
That, to me, is the meaning of the message of equality, and I suspect it's what people like Sanders are talking about.
This makes sense. It's not that we should all be uniform but rather we all have access to being uniform if we so choose. Even if we attempted equality, time would introduce inequality due to the risks people take. One invests wisely, the other gambles away. Do we compensate the gambler to reestablish equilibrium? Should a soon to be retiree have the same wealth or earning power as a new graduate of X degree, or even…
Maybe we should compensate workers based on responsibilities (ie dependents I was following you up until this notion. Compensation has nothing to do with a worker's responsibilities. Compensation is based on how much the job is worth to the person or company paying. That's why a brain-surgeon with no dependents is paid more than a ditch-digger with a house full of kids.