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>... if we lived in such a world, would you still be upset that Mark Zuckerberg had a lot more money than you? Why?

That's a really good question. Theoretically, I would be fine with that kind of world, but I dont think that kind of world has ever existed or will ever exist. It is more realistic to attack the problem on both fronts - maximize social mobility and minimize the influence of wealth on politics, but also recognize that you will never completely succeed. Wealth will always equal opportunity and influence to some extent, so inequality will always be a bad thing to some extent.

For what it's worth, I'm not upset that Zuck has a lot more money than me. I just think that entrepreneurially generated inequality should not be a sacred cow, and I'm speaking as someone who has created a good deal of inequality with entrepreneurship.

> Wealth will always equal opportunity and influence to some extent, so inequality will always be a bad thing to some extent.

Perhaps, but we may all be surprised to how little extent. Instead of giving up, it's worth giving a better world a try.

I think you could make a strong case that would still be problamatic. Let me explain this by attempting to uncover what I think is the underlying problem.

Firstly economic inequality may or may not be a problem, so it is probably not worth talking about. It is only when the inequality manifests itself in terms of power between people. Were some people have to work for a wage in bad working conditions (even here in the US) because they have no other options. They may have kids. All the way up to: having to work for Google or Facebook et al. and hating it because you know on your free time you would rather explore your own creative ideas. But people who work at menial labor jobs are just as creative and should be given paths to allow them to pursue their creative interests too.

Language makes us creative beings, and if power constrains that in any way and it can not make itself legitimate (which the burden is on it to do so) than it is wrong for it to be there.

Thus because economic inequality illegimitately constrains the human capacity to express itself creatively it is therefore problamatic and should be dismantled.

PS I realize in theory this sounds all good, but I am more convinced that humans can organize themselves into these freer societies. And those future denizens will think of us as savage as we think of american colonialism and slavery and genocide (native americans) a few hundred years back.

> Paul directly addressed this in his reply to Klein (http://paulgraham.com/klein.html); Ctrl-F "the conversion of money into political power"; in brief, he says that if you're upset that economic inequalities leads to unequal political influence, attack that. Fight to remove the political influence that wealth currently has.

It simply isn't possible at this point. The Supreme Court has seen to that quite thoroughly.

A constitutional amendment to "fix" the problem is beyond the realm of possibility.

The reason we find ourselves so helpless in this fight is because our society's money has shackled us. Think about it: the rich only have power because people submit to their power. People accept their money to do harmful things because they can use that money to get whatever they want from almost anyone. This is the flaw in our money that makes our political system degrade from democracy to capitalism. Votes can be bought, so counting votes is a charade that disguises the fact that the tally of money on each side of an issue matters most.

To fix this, we must fix our money. When someone spends money they got from wealthy people for manipulating our politics, the person who accepts it is fulfilling the promise the money held in the first place. We must refuse to empower money used in this way. As individuals, we must reject money in our own lives when it came from political manipulation so we can remove the incentive to participate in political manipulation.

This is merit capitalism. The technology to make it work exists today, and it doesn't require the impossible task of winning votes in a Congress we can't afford to buy back from the rich. It requires tools to make it easy to reject dirty money and spreading the knowledge that rejecting dirty money is even possible. These are things that we can do. These are things that you can do.

http://meritcapitalism.com

This whole thing is about taxes and yet neither side is honest enough to acknowledge that fact. No one will begrudge PG, Zuckerberg or any of the other high earners continuing to amass considerable wealth so long as they're paying significantly more taxes than they are now.

When that happens, even though there are very rich people, there's also a healthy middle class and the social support systems (safety nets, education, etc) for poor people to reach the middle class. But what we have now is rich people hiding behind capital gains tax rates to actually pay less than people who earn significantly less that they do. And PG, as someone who earns his living primarily through investing, is no doubt taking advantage of this situation.

When PG says "don't address income inequality directly," it's the equivalent of saying "don't raise my taxes" since raising taxes on the wealthy is the method for addressing income inequality directly. IMHO, the reason he's gotten so much flack is that there is a very large proportion of the population that believes that we need to close the loopholes that the uber-wealthy use to avoid paying the right amount of taxes and increase the top marginal tax brackets to above 50%. And yet he wants to talk about addressing income inequality directly as if his critics want to keep people from earning that much in the first place.

I can't tell if he's being deliberately disingenuous or if he actually believes that's what people are suggesting, but the net result is a back and forth conversation at two different contextual levels.

Wait, did you read the essay? He talks about closing tax loopholes and even calls that 'stealing' (search for it in the essay). He also argues:

> For example, let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process. That's much more likely to work than attacking wealth in the hope that you will thereby fix poverty.

I believe, though I may well be wrong, that PG isn't against taxing the rich in order to provide social services and increased education, healthcare, what-have-you.

I think you're right, but this is indeed a large misinterpretation hazard. When he writes about this in the future, he should probably explicitly say, "Tax the 1% far more heavily to pay for the social mobility and equal-access-to-politics programs; that's the only realistic way to fund them."

This is a fair point. Thanks.

Perhaps you can enlighten me then...if he's arguing that we close loopholes (and the lower capital gains rate is a loophole) and increase taxes on the wealthy to an over 50% marginal rate, what direct attacks on income inequality is he arguing against? How are people attacking income inequality in any concrete way that isn't about taxation?

Because if there isn't some concrete attack on income inequality, then we're arguing about an abstract concept, which is just pointless.

You could tax big incomes in excess of 50%. Give them low inflation, no inheritance tax and pour all that extra money to defense. Congrats, you have fixed the position of a rich caste.