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Comment by ClutchBand | Hacker News Reader

Mobility is great but when on .001% of the entire global population gets to do it, and they get to do it much easier than anyone else would have (sometime skirting laws and requirements that normal people would).

The rich and elite get special treatment, when they should not. It leads to more unfair conditions.

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The question should be, how can we give the average person the freedoms that the elites have, not how can we enslave the Chinese elites in the way we've enslaved the average Chinese person.

Since the freedom in question is economic mobility, it's kind of a moot point for the huge proportion of the U.S. population with limited incomes and little to no wealth to move around.

The first point would be policies aimed at distributing ownership of property etc. So for example we could have a high tax for:

1. Real estate not directly used by the owner as his or her residence or place of work.

2. Shares of a business where he or she does not work (Zuck doesn't get taxed as heavily on facebook shares as the investors do)

A major part of the problem is that ownership itself is so heavily concentrated that freedom for ordinary people is not possible. But if we have policies which encourage smaller businesses, weaker concentrations of wealth and more ownership by more people that would be a major start.

For some context in case anyone was curious, it seems that approximately 1 in 30 of people worldwide live outside the country of their birth. (Of these, approximately 1 in 10 are forcibly displaced.) Also, "the largest international migratory flow from a single country of origin to a single country of destination is the 12.7 million Mexicans living in the United States"; this flow alone is approximately 1 in 600 people worldwide.

https://lif.blob.core.windows.net/lif/docs/default-source/de... https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/internation...

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