The Right Kind of Class Warfare: Workers vs. Looters | Hacker News Reader

The Right Kind of Class Warfare: Workers vs. Looters

danieljmitchell.wordpress.com

6 pointskareemm6 comments

sigh This again?

> The problem isn’t rich people. It’s looters and moochers, regardless of their income.

This is the economic version of responding to "Black Lives Matter" by insisting that "All Lives Matter". Yes, there are terrible people in every sufficiently large demographic. That's just human nature.

However, just like how saying "all lives matter" ignores[1] how racism is still a problem that most black people face every day, insisting that we shouldn't focus on the rich and instead target all "looters and moochers" is saying we shouldn't look at problems like the growing wealth gap[2] and the institutionalized corruption that is making those problems worse.

Besides, the idea that a few people (it's NOT a significant amount - certainly not "millions") scamming California's food stamp program out of $189/month (if single) or $632/month (family of four) are somehow responsible for any of our economic problems is no only pure fantasy, some might call this kind of false accusation class warfare.

Billions are scammed in the name of "defense" and it's hard to even quantify the damage done by the numerous "finance games" invented in the last few decades, yet somehow we're not supposed to focus on those problems and consider a wave of welfare fraud (without any real evidence it even exists) as the same kind of problem?

    "...ain't the same [fsck]in' ballpark,
     it ain't the same league,
     it ain't even the same [fsck]in' sport."

[1] https://www.reddit.com/comments/3du1qm/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...

You would in fact prune some of the branches from the capital apple tree if that tree was strangling the people harvesting it[0] or poisoning the water supply[1]. None of his trite simplifications[2] of complex systems stand up to reality.

0. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/09/03/is-immigrati...

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-horn/dimock-penn-lawsuit...

2. https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2015/04/14/tax-policy-...

From a societal perspective, is it better for us to go after one person who stole $100,000,000, or million people who stole $100?

I really like the cross section though. Currently conservatives seem to be obsessed about cracking down on welfare fraud.

The problem with 'going after the the million people' is that the bureaucracy it imposes on people with real needs destroys the effectiveness of the system. This imagined problem often leads to huge wastes, like the $23,000 spent on drug tests for welfare recipients in Tennessee that found a less then 1% positive rate.[0]

0. http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2016/02/12/tennessees-drug...

Its easy to sell the demon of the welfare faudster. If you live in a rural area, you probably know more than one family on welfare. Most of them you may not know is even on welfare. But you do know the one family with too many kids, new iPhones, and paying for junk food with food stamps, because they stand in front of you at the check out line. Most people on welfare probably deserve it, but the ones who do not deserve seem to be the most obnoxious about it.

This doesn't change how we debate solutions. We do not have a magic-bullet policy instrument that targets "looters". We have lots of instruments that target easily categorized groups like "rich" or "poor", or people who break certain rules, which may or may not correlate with being a harmful person.

At the end of the day, agreement or disagreement on which bad people are the worst rallies a base, but does not produce ipso facto good governance. Careful consideration of the "liberty vs. security" question, while incorporating a multitude of perspectives on which liberties and which securities are of genuine concern, does. Win-wins are possible but not easy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com