Hacker News Reader

Comment by whb07 | Hacker News Reader

Because a simple thought experiment disproves his point and criticisms of the West.

If the “troubles” of a society are really the disparity between the richest and poorest, then a country like Somalia would be a glorious example of liberty and prosperity. Yet everyone there is poor and with extremely limited options in anything you might want to measure.

Clearly this isn’t it. Maybe in order to get a healthy thing going you must have some extreme outliers as a result of the freedom/ability to let people do their thing.

View on HN

What makes you think Somalia doesn't suffer from rampant inequality?

If that is a reason, I think the downvote wrong. I think this is a place for exhange of views and debate, not an exam in which "wrongly" argued points are downvoted.

Because those points he’s trying to make are extremist and violent it seems. “The only fix is war” seems like the typical extremist sound bite by someone with those views.

Proposing violence to fix an issue with which appears your friend is not well versed on seems just like the mass mob lynching of a “suspected” person doing X. The mob feels righteous at the time, only to learn the person killed didn’t do anything at all.

That seems somewhat disingenuous, unless I've somehow completely misinterpreted OP's point. OP was not proposing violence as the fix, but merely stating the fact that historically only wars or other kinds of catastrophic events have reversed trends of increased wealth inequality [1].

Stating that as the basis for a debate is not the same as endorsing violence as the fix. It seems to be a tragic fact that different societies have not found a political way of solving this issue and that alone is worth discussing.

[1] https://voxeu.org/article/europe-s-rich-1300

If you look closely, you'll see that "fix" is in scare quotes, indicating that dnomad doesn't believe war to be an actual fix, but nonetheless an inevitable consequence of extreme inequality.

I think that's wrong, though. Poor people do not have the resources to wage war. Wars are led by people with resources against other people with resources, with poor people only serving as cannon fodder. That also holds for revolutionary wars, e.g. pretty much any Communist revolution was led by middle-class intellectuals. So I think that inequality might increase criminality and strengthen violent gangs, but it's unlikely to lead to actual war.

Somalia is a beacon of equality? Really? I must have skipped class.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com