Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think • Hacker News Board

Re: Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think

#181

Post by Frondo » Wed, Apr 01, 2015, 8:56 PM UTC

nap wrote: post #179

Frondo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxation is not robbery. Taxation is a way to pay the bill of being a citizen of a place. Your confusion may arise from the following: In a robbery, someone takes something from you. With taxation, an organization takes something from you. The difference is, in a robbery, you get nothing back. With taxation, you are getting something from the government, so you're actually just paying for that.

> bill of being a citizen of a place. I'm never sign for that. > The difference is, in a robbery, you get nothing back. If robber give you something back - it will not be a robbery? > so you're actually just paying for that I'm actually just paying for government spying me, for forcing me to not to having ownership of myself and other "government goods".

"I'm never sign for that."

Correct, your parents chose that for you, when they chose your place of residency when you were born. As a child, your parents had custody of you and the legal right to make that decision for you.

As an adult, now, you may renounce your citizenship and move to another place with no social contract; that is how you may terminate your obligations to the government where you live.

Re: Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think

#182

Post by efuquen » Wed, Apr 01, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

dandare wrote: post #131

efuquen wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate this type of argument because it completely circumvent the point. The point isn't that if you're rich that means you've stolen something from the poor. It's the belief that the way our civil society is organized is broken, and plenty of riots have occurred for that reason in the past. The idea is that increased concentrations of wealth to an increasingly smaller percentage of people leads to a less innovative…

Gosh, strawman is such popular word these days .. hey, at least look around you before you start speaking about what others believe. Here, right in this forum: "Unjust wages", "business is benefiting from work of others", "the filthy rich", "top 1% have made the rules to their favor", "economic output of the planet", "if they claim to own it then you can't freely use it anymore", "People don't get rich in a vacuum",…

Were you commenting on the article or some specific comments here? I'm not sure, but I thought your comment was talking about the article ...

If you want to take issues with someone specific views, then do so, but don't make a generalization like you did on a viewpoint that wasn't really even stated by the original post.

And posting some out of context quotes give me very little go on, the discussions you can have about this should involve a little more nuance than random text bites from user comments that come from people from all sorts of backgrounds and political leanings.

My general point, which seems to have been completely ignored in favor of attacking my use of the word 'strawman', is that discussing income inequality doesn't have to devolve into an us vs them argument, that it has a lot more to do with what sort of society we wish to foster and build. But you seem content in holding on to the former view.

Re: Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think

#183

Post by joeclark77 » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 1:03 AM UTC

sgift wrote: post #176

joeclark77 wrote: post #44

Nothing in the article explains why "economic inequality" is a bad thing. Which seems to be a logical pre-requisite to declaring it to be "worse than you think".

"Nothing in the article explains why it is a bad thing that x. Which seems to be a logical pre-requisite to declaring it to be 'worse than you think'" It's quite simple: Some things you have to accept as a given, it's a shared social norm. No one will bother to write a paragraph why rape is bad each time an article about rape is written, no one will bother to write a paragraph why police brutality is bad each time an…

If you have twice as much as I do, and both of us see our real wealth doubled, we would undeniably both be richer and happier. However, the entirely abstract, purely-on-paper metric "economic inequality" would also double. That, in a nutshell, is why the premise is dubious. If you would argue for sacrificing real-life prosperity in order to prioritize a purely abstract "KPI", you have to prove it.

Margaret Thatcher had the last word on this: https://youtu.be/rv5t6rC6yvg Worth a watch.

Re: Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think

#184

Post by thecopy » Thu, Apr 02, 2015, 1:18 PM UTC

SigmundA wrote: post #52

thecopy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that the state is taking, not the rich (which are not the only people with money invested in the market).

That would be like arguing your landlord is taking your rent.

Not at all. Your relationship with the landlord is voluntary.