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Comment by r_smart | Hacker News Reader

The Pareto Principle is a bitch. There's no way to remove inequality without trampling on the rights of the few lucky people.

|If money flows to those who own things more easily/readily than those who do things

The vast majority of people with a lot of money are doing things. They are not idle, and it is not through idleness they wound up in their position. At least in the US.

This is doubly true for their money. It's not in a big swimming pool for them to paddle around in Scrooge McDuck style. Well, at least, most of it isn't.

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Is luck a good criteria for some people having more and other less?

At the very high end (top 10, 1, 0.1 percent of incomes), is progressive taxation on income a tax on lucky breaks more than any other factors?

(other factors = intelligence, hard work, lack of bad luck like disasters, unexpected medical bills, etc.)

|other factors = intelligence, hard work, lack of bad luck like disasters, unexpected medical bills, etc

How many of those can you attribute to luck? Winning the genetic lottery is one of the best things you can hope for. You have no control over it, and it greatly influences your outcomes. Born stupid and ugly? Tough luck, maybe in another life.

If you want to be the best cyclist in the world, training for it isn't enough, you need that extra 1% advantage genetics.

But for most everything else in life, you can be plenty good at what you want to do if you're willing to train for it. You don't have to be the best programmer in the world to make quite a good living by programming. It's hardly necessary to be the best businessman ever to run a good business. Etc.

Oh, and on the internet, you can be ugly as a mud brick and it won't have one iota of influence over your success or failure.

Maybe take inventory and look at what you can do, rather than obsessing about not looking like Keanu Reeves. Even so, Peter Dinklage, Danny DeVito, Kathy Bates, Bette Davis, are not the beautiful people. I've met a few movie actors in person, and without the makeup, lighting, and director, they look like ordinary schmucks.

I think you missed the point my post. I'm not one of the people on this board that like to decry success as just being a principle of luck, like it's some kind of lottery.

We're specifically talking about the wealthiest people in the world. The people who got that 1% advantage. I apparently made a mistake in describing those people as lucky (just meaning that there are only a handful of people that will sit at the top, so being one of those people is lucky; it's against the odds).

My whole argument is you can't just take their shit because you want it, and them having a lot of shit isn't a sign that they've done something wrong that allows you to trample on their rights. I think people concerned about inequality have lost the plot. Instead of helping people pull themselves up, they focus on taking from those at the top. Granted, we'll all be more equal financially, but it's hardly a utopian outcome, and no one's lot will be improved, only worsened.

It’s not about rich folks Scrooge McDucking it — it’s that if a rich person does a unit of work and a non-rich person does a unit of work, the rich person accumulates more wealth than the non-rich person as a result of the work. “Rich person work” is “decide how to allocate my capital”, which isn’t an option to many, but for those who have it as an option, it’s vastly more rewarding than actively making things.

The vast majority of people doing things do not have a lot of money.

Right. The Pareto principle is the observation that large amounts of resources tend to consolidate in a few 'hands'. It's observed in natural systems as well as human created ones.

So, back to your original point. You seemed to be saying that in order to reduce inequality (a good thing), you must trample of the rights of people, specifically the wealthy (a bad thing). But then you admit that it's largely luck which determines whether or not a person is wealthy.

I don't think it would be a big problem to redistribute a small portion of their wealth. Or, similar to what you said in a nearby comment, if society as a whole decides to redistribute a portion of your wealth then "tough luck" (although remember that you are still better off than most when considering how "tough" your luck is). So the original problem with reducing inequality seems to have been solved. It is not a great trespass on the rights of the wealthy to redistribute some of their wealth.

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