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Comment by dzonga | Hacker News Reader

Those that are okay, with this are 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires' who don't have millions yet. Fact, remains only people that love capitalism are capitalists themselves. for the rest of us we're doomed, if we don't embrace BI, Unions and a massive welfare state. Also full 100% inheritance tax.

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I disagree, I happen to love capitalism though I'm just a student. Its brought about incredible changes, and raised the standard of living for billions across the world. I've lived in post-soviet countries, and I've lived in the west and I'd much rather live within a capitalist system. Socialism and its derivatives do little to replace inequality as they merely replace trackable, earn-able financial capital with an amorphous social capital. One gets jobs based on who they know, who their parents are or perhaps what tribe they come from. No one can reasonably aspire to the the child of the nomenclatura. One can reasonably push toward the middle class, or upper middle class. Further within a racially stratified country, it seems likely that ethnic class-difference would be reinforced rather than alleviated.

Have you lived in any of the progressive social-democratic nations? Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, Canada, Norway?

I think their societal structures are much better suited for the technologically advanced world we live in today.

If that's the case, then why are none of those countries leading in actually creating technology? For the most part they are benefiting from technology that gets created in the US or Asia.

Also, those are all very homogenous cultures. I don't think you can map what works there onto a very large, very diverse place like the US.

I know that the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" rhetoric is supposed to frighten or shame me into supporting liberal causes (most notably wealth redistribution), but although you're absolutely correct that I don't have millions and likely never will, when I compare how I grew up to what I've been able to carve out for myself by just educating myself and doing the best job I could against what I see in places like Venezuela, I continue to be more concerned by people like you than people like, say, the Koch brothers. It's a shame that traditionally left-wing causes like humane working conditions get bound up in really dangerous suggestions like universal basic income and single-payer healthcare, because there are a lot of areas where America could stand to improve if only we could stop being so back-biting and divisive.

"Hard work" will pretty soon not be enough to achieve whatever American Dream you might have achieved for yourself. The bar is getting higher and higher. In the 1950's any half-wit with a high-school degree could get a decent factory job and raise two kids in a 2-car-garage-picket-fence-in-the-suburbs. A lot of those jobs are just gone now and never coming back. What are people who can't go into STEM supposed to do now? What about in 20 years, after advances in machine learning and AI eliminate even more jobs that used to put food on the table? Work harder?

Yes, those of us in software can just be smart and work hard and be successful, but millions of others will not be, and it will be harder for them to get to where we've gotten to. Telling them to suck it up and "work harder" is exactly how you get wealth distribution, in fact. On terms you really won't like, just ask the Romanovs.

Millenials are the first generation in a long time to be worse off than their parents, and no, it's not because of avocado toast or iphones alone.

The "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" rhetoric is indeed meant to frighten, but your "anyone can make it if they work hard" is so mid-to-late-20th century Reagan-era rose-colored-glasses adorable, it's positively quaint. Let's just ignore automation and globalization and supply outstripping demand and tell those lazy kids to just get a job, eh?

I don't think I will ever be as rich as Bill Gates but I would still rather live in a capitalist country as a middle class person than in a communist country as a rich person.

The middle class in the US is shrinking fast.

What about a social-democratic nation?

There are more than two alternatives. And there are many flavours of capitalism. Some great. Some not so much.

I'm not a capitalist (if you define that as someone who makes the majority of their income from investments). I in no way feel "doomed". I was able to lift myself from poverty by dedicating my life to a craft I love (software development). The system we inhabit in the West allowed that to happen. Quite the opposite of doomed.

I feel the same.

> Also full 100% inheritance tax.

Everytime I see this proposal it's of the "burning bridges" type. To ensure that everyone starts at the same crappy starting position. There are never any considerations what to actually use the tax revenue on. It's only intended purpose is to take away money from the "evil" rich parents. The justification is that the income is unearned but the flaw with this type of justification is that the parents clearly earned the money and paid taxes on it.

So far I haven't seen any proposals to redistribute the money to actually decrease inequality other than by making everyone equally poor. How about distributing that money back either in form of a UBI or some kind of trust fund that children can withdraw from at the age of 18. I haven't seen anything like that and therefore I'm against a 100% inheritance tax.

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