Hacker News Reader

If A's stabbing of B causally led to B's descendants being poor and B's descendants being rich, then we should obviously transfer some wealth from A's descendants to B's descendants. That's just good economic/political incentive design.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not claiming anything about this Dutch case, I'm just playing along with your contrived example.

View on HN

You would struggle to establish that "A's stabbing of B causally led to B's descendants being poor". It's not enough to argue that A stabbed B and B is now poor therefore A caused B's poverty, which would be a post hoc fallacy.

I'm pretty sure you posted this after my edit, but in case you didn't, please read that. I'm not the one that came up with this contrived "A stabs B" example, and I never claimed that "for any A that stabs B, then B is causally at a financial disadvantage in the future" (though I would claim this effect in the real world, on average, but that's off topic).

What happens if B got their money by being so effective at stabbing that after stabbing Z, they got Z's money and Z had no descendants? You can't give B's money back to Z's descendents, but you can't give A's money back to B without treating B's genocide more kindly than A's oppression.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com