Hacker News Reader

Comment by willitpamp573 | Hacker News Reader

I like how it's a foregone conclusion that inequality is a "problem" that needs to be "fixed".

Because it is. Ask yourself what is the point of any society? Capitalism is not a goal unto itself, it is a tool to reach another goal.

Now different societies might decide on different goals. Let me use an exaggeration to clarify my point. If one man in a country is fantastically rich while everybody else is dirt poor, then that society is a failure.

My assumption would be that most societies would decide that happiness and well being for as broad set of people is that is the goal of society.

en massing piles of wealth with nobody to spend it on is rather pointless.

Of course some inequality is fine, but that is not the point. The point is that ever increasing inequality is a problem.

I don't think anyone but the most extreme socialists would say that everyone should be completely equal. The rest of us just can't agree on how inequal it's ok for us to be.

This statement is misleading, no one is advocating a flat distribution of wealth but why should some families lack access to clean water if we can give it to them.

I don't think anyone but the most extreme libertarians would say that some people should starve so we can all feel better about how little we have.

And I don't think that anyone here is suggesting that our society shouldn't have to provide clean drinking water to people who can't afford it.

Again, my point is we need to find where the happy medium is.

That society is still a failure if you remove the rich guy.

Attack poverty, not success. Redistribution is probably the best way to do that in many cases, but calling the problem “inequality” suggests we can fix it by dragging everyone down to the same level instead of lifting others up.

This ignores that wealth is relative. Your argument can also be used to argue that the U.S. has solved poverty, because poor people today can afford to eat, which wasn't true x years ago. It's not just about the absolute purchasing power, it's also about the relative social status and power. Not being in poverty doesn't mean much if you still don't hold any social or political power.

> Not being in poverty doesn't mean much if you still don't hold any social or political power.

Really? So if you can't have power, why bother not being poor? Having been below the poverty line and risen above it, this seems very bizarre to me, to say the least.

Maybe my wording was imprecise. Not being in poverty is better than being in poverty. Still, that's not the entire story.

>Ask yourself what is the point of any society?

Protection of the lives, liberties and properties of its citizenry. What does wealth inequality have to do with it?

Guess we can do away with all corporate structures, then, and the protections and benefits thereof. Plus a ton of other stuff necessary to a modern economy. Those things definitely don't (strictly) fall in any of those categories.

Rather than the point of any society, if that's rubbing you the wrong way, how about: why have an (if you prefer, a modern, industrial/post-industrial) economy?

While we could do away with all those, it wouldn't serve much of a purpose. But yes, ultimately corporate structures are not the reason society exists.

>why have an (if you prefer, a modern, industrial/post-industrial) economy?

Well, because it's a more efficient engine for increasing the property and prosperity of the people and the society in general. Again, what does that have to do with inequality inherently being an issue?

The structures necessary to support crazy-high incomes in the modern world are governmental creations of exactly that sort. If we stick to a by-the- and for-the-people kind of ethos, then adjusting how the government manages all this stuff it's creating on their behalf in order to increase the prosperity of the lower classes at some cost to the higher is entirely sensible and just. If inequality additionally means less-equal outcomes in the justice system and lower systemic stability then even more so, on both counts.

Alternatives include: abandoning that ethos and embracing Rule of the (economically) Strongest; or strictly sticking to a government that doesn't engage in that stuff at all and living with the fallout (until every sensible state re-organized under a new federal government that did that stuff again, and/or sought annexation). We do an awful lot of the former, in practice.

> If we stick to a by-the- and for-the-people kind of ethos, then adjusting how the government manages all this stuff it's creating on their behalf in order to increase the prosperity of the lower classes at some cost to the higher is entirely sensible and just.

That kinda flies in the face of one of the main purposes of society I pointed out, though - protection of property. I'm not saying it's wrong, though.

You mention 'if inequality additionally...' that doesn't mean inequality is bad on its own merits. Do you believe inequality is bad on its own merits?

While those two you listed are alternatives, they are not the only alternatives. Hell, you didn't even point out the 'we can do nothing and keep things as they are' option.

> That kinda flies in the face of one of the main purposes of society I pointed out, though - protection of property. I'm not saying it's wrong, though.

When you're protecting property that only exists because we all agreed to have a certain kind of system, adjusting the rules of that system to suit the desires of "we all" so the prosperity (or property) said system creates is distributed slightly differently isn't exactly a failure to protect property.

> You mention 'if inequality additionally...' that doesn't mean inequality is bad on its own merits. Do you believe inequality is bad on its own merits?

Since the things that wealth gains a person (material, influence, opportunity, psychological/ego support, health, and so on) are the entire reason anyone cares about wealth and not meaningful separable from "its own merits", of course.

> While those two you listed are alternatives, they are not the only alternatives. Hell, you didn't even point out the 'we can do nothing and keep things as they are' option.

We largely willfully ignore (it's someone's will, anyway) that our political system includes the rules that allow our economy to prosper as it does, and that those rules ought to be there to serve us all, since we all have a say in them and they exist for us—if we hold as important the ideal of a government by and for the people. So again, I think we effectively abandon that sphere of public policy to the wealthy under propaganda that makes many believe it's immoral to change the rules of government to suit one's needs or wants when those changes happen to disadvantage the rich in any way. In such a case the modifications are said to constitute class war (boo!) and stealing (boo!) and are just so unfair (boo!). A position which might hold if our government weren't responsible for the edifice that allowed such wealth to accumulate to begin with, and I don't remotely just mean protecting property—so if we want to get rid of all that stuff and its benefits, then maybe there's an argument for making addressing inequality beyond the proper scope of government.

>When you're protecting property that only exists because we all agreed to have a certain kind of system, adjusting the rules of that system to suit the desires of "we all" so the prosperity (or property) said system creates is distributed slightly differently isn't exactly a failure to protect property.

Yes, yes it is. If it was voluntary, it wouldn't be, but what you're talking about is involuntary transfer of property from A->B.

>Since the things that wealth gains a person (material, influence, opportunity, psychological/ego support, health, and so on) are the entire reason anyone cares about wealth and not meaningful separable from "its own merits", of course.

So influence, opportunities and health are all negatives? I don't think I am understanding you.

The problem is not just inequality in of itself; it's the scale of that inequality that's a problem.

When 1/4 to 1/3 of the population is vulnerable to a health accident or can't provide for themselves/their family, AND half of the country's wealth goes to ~ 2% of the population, we have an inequality of many orders of magnitude.

What it boils down to is this: do we as a society simply write off those who struggle to meet basic human needs, or do we try to help them live?

I could also write an article about how you can make two lengths of rope the same by cutting the longer one and tying it to the shorter one. I don't think it'd be news though.

You also strike me as the person who'd write an article about how printing money makes everyone richer, because it's like "lengthening a rope". Economics is far from intuitive, and using a metaphor to hide all the complexity doesn't change that. This is typical HN arrogance at its finest.

https://xkcd.com/1831/

also: https://xkcd.com/793/

The foregone conclusion is that the amount of inequality we have is far beyond the level that balances private incentives with public good. Too much inequality traps money outside of the economy, and doesn't properly reward labor and effort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com