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Comment by tw1010 | Hacker News Reader

So what? Inequality should only matter to you personally if it means the lower bound on income, the poorest of the poor, is going down. If the richest is getting richer, maybe that means the poorest are becoming poorer as a consequence, but not necessarily, in fact, most likely not.

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It matters to me personally that a small group of people have such a massive amount of power. It's already completely uneven regarding voting power - I can vote once in an election, but if I had a trillion dollars I could vote once, and then I could pay lobbyists, and fund advertisements, etc. I, as a single person or small group, with a trillion dollars, can have a massive influence.

This is regardless of how poor anyone else is.

No one should have this kind of money, it's really absurd.

Didn't Trump get elected with 1/7th the budget of Hillary Clinton?

I don't think boiling any single political event down to money is going to be meaningful.

I can't imagine anyone denying that lobbyists exist and that large amounts of money can buy you a lot of political power.

> large amounts of money can buy you a lot of political power.

That is not true. Hillary spent the most money in any American campaign (nearly $1 Billion) and still lost. Strategy matters more than money

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/8/14848636/hi...

See the post you replied to for the same response.

Looks to be half. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/trump-spent-about-half-of-wh...

The situation is more complex than candidates' election spending. For example, many of the groups in [1] influence various radio and television programs, and through those, elections.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Ko...

Katy Perry has a massive amount of political power compared to you as well. How should we handle her and other celebrities? How about unions and union bosses? News media heads?

If we're going to be fair, shouldn't we control anyone at all who has influence?

What is this argument even?

Some people are more influential than others. Money is only one vector of influence. He's rhetorically asking whether we should regulate the other vectors with hope that no one person has more influence than anyone else.

For purely practical reasons, we should make efforts to disperse power within society away from severe concentrations. Not uniformly, not absolutely, but we should work to keep the trend from becoming too strong in the direction of concentrated power. Otherwise, the vast masses are liable to suffer and experience reduced capacity to alleviate that suffering. See: All of human history

Then create a better company then those people and give away your wealth.

Because with large amounts of money comes enormous power -- especially in a mostly unregulated free market system. Power to influence the political conversation through media. Power to directly influence law makers through lobbyists and donations. Power to buy your way out of punishment ($100 speeding ticket or parking ticket is nothing to someone with millions or billions of dollars. It provides zero disincentive.)

When inequality gets high enough and power concentrated enough, Democracy decays towards oligarchy, social mobility grinds to a halt, what was a free and relatively classless system becomes an ossified aristocracy and freedom slowly devolves to a dystopian tyranny.

We're already seeing the beginning of this process in American society. Already, we have substantial evidence supporting the idea that Democracy has decayed into Oligarchy -- and it did so several decades ago. [1]

This matters if you value a free and just society. It matters a lot.

[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

>>Inequality should only matter to you personally if it means the lower bound on income, the poorest of the poor, is going down.

Wrong. Inequality of wealth results in inequality of political representation and therefore power. And even though wealth is not zero-sum, power is.

The riches they amass come from exploiting the people. Its not something that should be taken lightly.

Did Bill Gates exploit you? Please explain how.

His wealth came from siphoning off profits from his employees and charging exorbitant prices for his products. The monopoly microsoft held was used to strangle smaller companies out of the market. None of these actions were directly targeted at me but the world is much larger than you or I.

Yes

He used his power to push shitty and proprietary software into my industry, thus limiting the impact that properly developed software could have created. I had no choice in this and he used everything from back-room deals to flat out lies to achieve this.

> I had no choice in this and he used everything from back-room deals to flat out lies to achieve this.

And a couple of well documented crimes.

I'm likely to believe that, but can you provide sources?

Microsoft's crimes have been well documented, no need for me to provide sources if you're not familiar with any of this, Google is up and running.

The poorer are getting richer, too. But the rich gets richer faster. I don't see a problem with it, but it's funny to see how besides having more regulations, higher taxes and more government intervention (most of the time in the name of making society more equal) increases inequality at a faster rate just to see the very same people saying "we need higher taxes and more government intervention!"

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