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Comment by euroPoor | Hacker News Reader

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> If you’re going to defend oligarchies (US, France, UK) I don’t know what to tell you but ‘consensus’ and ‘majority view’ are definitely not the keywords here.

The catastrophic effects of most (all?) revolutions that wanted to change that should really be emphasised more during history lessons in school. Without it, people are clueless as to the dangers of trying to change the status quo.

I wasn’t talking about revolution, just about acknowledging critique. I highly agree that capitalism brought the most prosperous period for humanity but there’s still lots to do and we all _have_ to listen to the poor, the disenfranchised, the ones getting the short end of the stick (ie Gilets Jaunes).

We should listen to everyone in a democracy. But France is not in the mood for what the yellow vests are selling. In the 2017 first round, 70% of votes went to center-left Macron (a banker who promised economic liberalization) or center-right or far-right candidates. Yellow vests are protesting because voters are rejecting their policy preferences.

I'm not sure I'd call France a free-market capitalism. They're dead last in Europe in many rankings regarding taxation, ease of doing business etc.

It can be argued that the protesters are actually protesting about the shortcomings of the system that France has - a highly rigid and bureaucratic welfare state with uber-taxation levels, which over long periods of time causes prosperity to dwindle for everyone. Of course, there are some fat cats that are profiting and doing extremely well - but every system, even the best functioning ones, has these people, which suggests that they are actually not the problem.

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