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Comment by newen | Hacker News Reader

That's why people build movements, why activism is a thing. Money shortcuts all of that and gives undue voice to people with the most money.

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By that definition people who want to voice their opinions shouldn't pay for any service which would amplify that voice. That could be a sign, megaphone, stage, internet, website, youtube channel (camera).

If I'm able to have more signs or youtube channels people will pay more attention to me and thus I'm using an advantage the other party may not have the financial ability to respond to.

I think this idea could go further but it seems obvious that money is another unbiased tool to promote your speech. Money doesn't have a political affiliation. People can use money in a biased way just like they can use a camera, tv channel, or sign to have a bias. The medium isn't biased the way it's used is.

But you are ignoring the difference in power that people have in this context. Especially in this age, when inequality is so high, it is naive to consider money to be an unbiased tool.

Especially when we already live in a massively unequal stage where a few coorporations have access to the most popular websites, magazines, newpapers, tv channels, allowing money into this equation as an unbiased tool will only increase this inequality in the ability to spread a message.

I think we as a society should make changes so that money has as little influence as possible. Of course, that battle will never end and there will be pushback from the small minority of people of have the overwhelming amount of wealth in this world, but changes such as banning political ads in twitter is a very good start.

Money is our best proxy for work/effect.

Removing money has been tried in places like Russia. People stop working and if they are forced will not try as hard.

Money has been part since the beginning. To vote you needed to own property which made sense because land owners paid the government in the form of taxes. Personal income taxes came after the war to pay for the war debts.

I don't see the parent's post advocating for removing money entirely, rather flattening the curve or reducing the winner-take-all effect. I think most of us would be happy with not a flat curve but a more gentle gradient, instead of a hyper exponential curve.

By the way every time there's an unrestrained hyper exponential curve, it leads to civil unrest pretty quickly. A lot of terrible things come in the wake of economic hardship.

I don't think you can eliminate inequality. So you remove money, then it will simply be replaced by something else. Then there will be someone who has more of whatever it is that replaced money, thus you create different kind of inequality.

Why does there have to be some permanent solution to a problem? There is no permanent solution to crime, for example. You just have law enforcement because we as a society decided that crime is bad.

Similarly, if we decide that inequality in terms of being able to politically influence people is bad, and money exacerbates that inequality, then we can ban political ads. And if something else comes along that does the same thing, ban that too in a way that makes sense.

Having such a small number of people wield such huge political influence is a shame, but what is even worse is when people accept that as inevitable and perpetuates that myth.

In regards to crime, i think you are talking about reducing crime, not eliminating it.

My post was just talking about eliminating inequality. I make no claim about reducing inequality.

That's really a motte and bailey situation then, isn't it? You say that you are talking about eliminating inequality, but then you use that to argue that reducing inequality isn't possible while still allowing yourself to retreat to the eliminating inequality position when challenged.

I say eliminating inequality may be impossible. No where I make claim about reducing inequality.

Is activism so pure? The activists I see have nice signs and people protesting during business hours when the rest of us are working. Printing good signs costs money. There is big money behind a lot of activists, just better hidden.

Maybe at least that's creating some employment opportunities? Especially in an auction model like Facebooks we are spending millions (billions?) in a zero sum game where people bid against each other to no benefit except Facebook's.

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