51–60 of 76 posts
Marxism has been tried and failed.
Perhaps the rich should be taxed differently, but the simplistic assertion (ending poverty four times over) is obviously false.
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Plus if you give everyone 18% more money, won't you just end up with 18% (or more) inflation as profiteering kicks in?
Many people would be able to afford different things, like phones, solar lights to replace kerosene, smokeless stoves, etc.
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Well, running football teams and building mansions aren't necessarily wealth destroying activities. Football teams can be relatively big employers plus distribute lare amounts to players who then also buy expensive things putting more money back into the economy. Many Chinese rich would be very large employers. Also their culture of saving allows the US to continue spending outside of their means, for now.
The Fed is the only thing that allows the US to continue to spend outside its means for now (including the biggest spendthrift of all, the US Government), and more specifically the dollar global reserve currency (or FRN). The Chinese aren't buying any meaningful amount of our new debt these days. Mostly they just cycle existing debt, from long to short etc as it makes sense. Ditto the Japanese, who hold almost as muc…
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"Calling poverty in those places "self-inflicted" is like saying a raped woman "deserved it"" No, absolutely not. And it is self-inflicted, "colonialist BS" aside (there are colonial issues, of course) Religion and ignorance go a long way. You can't throw money to the problem Things may seem nice and it's easy to blame 'colonial overlords' from the armchair or from the sociology departments of universities. Very Easy…
> Religion and ignorance go a long way. You can't throw money to the problem Those places have been far more tolerant before they had colonial overlords and post-colonial interventions. Islam in particular was nowhere as strict and even more progressive that the feudal European populations of the time (and developed math, poetry, etc). (And it's not like the Bible Belt for example is a paradigm in the case of "religi…
Shaka Zulu? Mali Empire? The Aztecs? The Inca? ? Not really much like the Amish.
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But how much of the rest of the world can afford to give up a year of income? For the richest people in the world, that's a lot easier.
you can't force them though, right? you would want them to voluntarily give the money to you. good luck with that.
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> Dire poverty is self-inflicted. Self-inflicted? That is a bullshit western justification. Those poor peoples have been milked to extinction by colonial overlords and left do die. Not to mention that their very countries were designed and drawn on the map by colonial powers, like dividing loot, with no respect to local populations and tensions (or with full intent to exploit them, in a "divide and conquer" move). Or…
"Those poor peoples have been milked to extinction by colonial overlords and left do die." That's bullshit anti-Western propaganda. Those "poor peoples" as you call them are responsible for their own fates, just as all of us are, no matter the situation we're born into. Pity won't save them, and neither will trillions in charity as has been demonstrated for decades. There has been no improvement from the trillions in…
I recently spent 2 days working on a renovation project at a local slum here in Hungary. The slum is a couple hundred gipsy families, living in unfinished/abandoned houses without water, gas/heating, they steal electricity off the grid. This was during the winter, so most houses just had one heated room, using wood. The houses didn't have bathrooms, everything smelled of urine, thrash was left all over the place, ins…
The word "gypsy" is denigrating and they call themselves Roma. You don't call black people niggers, do you? It's kind of telling that you spent two days on an aid project for them without getting that. The discrimination against minorities like Roma and Jews in Hungary is severe. So it's not fair to blame all the problems on themselves.
You are right, the PC term right now is "roma". But the distinction between these two words here in Hungary is nothing like "black" vs "nigger", so your blaming tone is unjustified.
So, shall we just arrest the richest 100 people, confiscate their wealth, and solve all the world's problems at once?
Of course not; that is never the prescription. Because if you keep the institutions in place, gross inequality would simply reemerge. Like if you toppled the kings while keeping a feudal system, or freed all the slaves while keeping slavery intact. You have to alter the system to one which doesn't doesn't have these outcomes. Obviously, the powerful elites don't like this, as they correctly perceive this as "revoluti…
I don't think so. I know a number of wealthy people, and they are very open about how to make money, how to maintain wealth, and so on. Many of them have even decided that the best way to spend their time now that they're wealthy is to teach others how to get there too.
Of course, teaching 7 billion people how to behave in economically sensible ways is a pretty arduous, long-term task, so it'll take a while for the effect of this to be visible... but I don't think the "elites" are in the way of lifting everyone else up - so long as the method isn't principally to pull them down.
Equalisation by bringing everyone up to the highest possible level is a worthwhile goal. Equalisation by bringing every down to the lowest possible level is not.
So, shall we just arrest the richest 100 people, confiscate their wealth, and solve all the world's problems at once?
Holy straw man argument! In the linked report, Oxfam suggests even more radical things, like closing tax havens and taxing the capital gains. [sarcasm]Sadly, they do not want to arrest or kill all those rich people.[/sarcasm]