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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Guillotines might have worked well in the past, but with modern weapons and technology, you can use a much smaller portion of the population to suppress a much larger portion of the population.

You can pay 10% of the population well enough that they support the top 0.01%, and the top 10% can pay the next 20% to 30% well enough or provide a sufficient probability to move up (or illusion) that they are incentivized to help suppress the remaining 60%.

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That cuts both ways, so to speak. Drones and even more advanced technology can replace guillotines as easily as it can be used to have a smaller police force of the kind you mention.

I think some people don't quite understand what people are capable of when they are truly desperate. Right now, in most of the western world, people aren't at that point. But when they get there, billionaires' ability to hide on islands or yachts or whatever won't stop the inevitable. Any violent revolution is going to be very bad, even for the very wealthy who think they're insulated/protected.

System controls internet, phone network, electricity, food and oil delivery.

IF you want to stop a revolution in 21st century just shutdown everything and blockade roads. How long till people start dying? A week?

What are the rebels gonna do? Assauls tanks and machine guns? Or starve/freeze/cook to death without electricity/oil/food?

The American delusion of aremd citizens defending constitution is just that - a delusion. In real life army mops the floor with small minority of suicidal rebels, and the rest begrudgingly return to their usual jobs because it's much better than starving and fearing for life every day.

This "delusion" is also mostly a straw man in my opinion. Most people who talk seriously about armed rebellion in connection with the second amendment are not talking about attempting a coup, marching on the capital, engaging the military.

They're talking about holing up in scattered rural dwellings and ignoring the law, with maybe the occasional terror attack mixed in. The Taliban has made a decent go of such a strategy so I don't it's an altogether risible position as you're implying.

The Taliban live in a failed state with barely any civilization for decades already. What's to lose?

I highly doubt average American will be OK with that.

On the other hand, you have seen the mighty US army not being able to suppress a few guys wearing flip flops in Middle East. So, if things get real nasty you won't have people "begrudgingly returning to their jobs". If that thing is possible to happen, there would BE no revolution in the first place, as the conditions would be not harsh enough.

Army would at least make things so that us isn’t a laughing joke to the world unlike what the current administration is doing

Seems very difficult to evade location and transaction tracking, both which governments have very easy access to, but the rank and file do not.

That’s assuming a French Revolution style uprising, which is probably unrealistic. What is very realistic, however, is an increase in “lone wolf” terrorist attacks targeted at rich and/or powerful people. You don’t need a thousand people rolling a guillotine down the street when one person with an off-the-shelf drone could inflict just as much damage. Sure the police would find them quick, but one thing the American military is really bad at is fighting an enemy that doesn’t dress in military gear and shoot back with military weapons in military formation.

We’ve seen it recently, where a single man shut down CNN and I think some other news stations just mailing poorly-made bombs to the media and politicians. We’ve seen it decades ago with Oklahoma City.

Could a Western population stand up against their government in a real fight? No. Could they inflect the same amount of damage without actually having to stand and fight? We’ve seen it before.

Individual assassinations don't change the system. How many rich people do you think have to be assassinated for the economic system that allows accumulated wealth inequality of this scale to change? Would killing Bill Gates or Warren Buffet somehow magically reconfigure how American society works? It's much harder to kill a system than it is to kill individual people. Like you hinted at, the American military has had a grand old time trying to kill off radical islam.

How many rich people need to be assassinated to change the balance? Looks like it's about 3: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/11/08/billionaires...

In any case, assassination is probably not the most effective means of wealth redistribution.

Just reverting the tax cuts for the wealthy would already do a lot of good. I also think a steep inheritance tax for inheritances over a certain amount (1 million? 10 million?, 100 million?) to preventing these concentrations of wealth from creating a new aristocracy.

But 3 billionaires owning more than the bottom half of the country doesn't have to mean if the bottom half owns nothing:

>> "Their $264.1 billion in holdings outstrips the combined net worth of an estimated 160 million people"

Simply redistributing that would mean that everybody in the bottom half gets $1600. That's not going to fix poverty. It only underscores just how little that bottom half really has.

The problem with high inheritance tax is that it only hurts the rich when it catches them off guard. In otherwise free economy there are so many legal ways to circumvent inheritance tax for the lowest rate tax that is available.

That's true. My point is just that inheriting massive fortunes is a problem because it keeps wealth concentrated across generations. But there are so many loopholes around inheritance that it's not trivial to address this.

Hypothetically, if assassinating Gates, Buffett, and Bezos were a viable method of wealth redistribution, I don't think the idea would be to give everyone $1600. It would probably be more like "we're going to look at the median and top everybody up to that level."

I'm just looking at what the bottom half of the population gets. There's on average $1600 per person available. And that's apparently also what the average person in the bottom half already has, since together they apparently own as much as these three billionaires.

So that means if you completely equalize the wealth of the bottom 50% of the population after redistributing the wealth of these billionaires, the average person in that bottom half will still only have $3200.

So maybe they can get their car fixed, but they still can't send their kids to college.

> Individual assassinations don't change the system.

Franz Ferdinand’s assassination changed a whole lot of systems.

It was the spark that ignited the fire, but the kindling was already there. It probably still would have happened without his assassination, though possible a few years later.

There's also plenty of kindling in the world today. Plenty of current top players and upcoming top players butting heads(China and Turkey being the most news worthy to Americans), plenty of players that are sour about past/present conditions (Britain with Brexit, Germany/France over their influence in the EU), and players that are seeking allies to become an upcoming top player (India being the easiest to point out).

Plenty of friction indeed, but the big difference is that (almost) nobody wants to go to war. Just before WW1, everybody was itching for another war. China definitely does not want war with the US; they want to expand economically. Nobody in the EU wants war over anything. The US has always been the most eager to go to war, but even they seem to have learned that wars are expensive and have little benefit. Russia wants to control (pieces of) their neighbours, but again without an actual war the EU or NATO. Turkey is primarily interested in crushing anything that might start to look like a Kurdish state, but also doesn't want a war with a big player.

Wars today are mostly cold or proxy, and rarely direct.

WW1 was going to happen anyway, it was just the first good excuse.

First, the military did eventually do quite well vs. isis, once proper resources were directed.

Second, look at history to tell you what will happen if the rich get disappeared. This happened in many communist nations. Doctors, lawyers, professors, bankers, wealthy landowners were mostly murdered and their wealth stolen from them. Did it work well for those nations? Are they thriving today?

France did quite well after killing the aristocracy. Most 'communist' nations on the other hand did a lot more than kill the rich and take their wealth. Compared to the vast economic, social and political changes that happened in Soviet Russia or China etc., it seems that the part about what happened to the rich is unlikely to be very consequential in its impact.

Huh? How can you just write off the unrealized potential like this?

Nobody ever won a war of occupation without local support. I have no doubt the US population could stand up to it's government but with the current levels of polarization I don't think that's a realistic scenario.

> We’ve seen it recently, where a single man shut down CNN and I think some other news stations just mailing poorly-made bombs to the media and politicians.

That case always struck me as really odd. That guy was under surveillance the whole time and was caught in a sting operation. I think they even helped him build the devices. For what reason did they actually let him mail them? Surely, given that they were in on the entire plot, they could have simply arrested him before the devices were actually mailed.

He only has to take some material step forward in terms of the plot to get arrested for conspiracy as far as the law goes. Letting those reach the mailbox seems like a major failure on their part.

They were rewarded with promotions, published news items celebrating the arrest and increased budgets.

Don't forget this is also the country where multiple right-wing militias came out of the woodworks and engaged in a standoff against rangers for multiple days over a herd of fucking cattle. And then proceeded to do the whole thing over again in a month long siege over some cabin in a national park.

My point being in any destabiliztion event these groups are certainly going to be active, and being that they also have the exact opposite political ethos to the average gulliotine advocate, I'm willing to bet any uprising is not going to be so simple.

Think less French Revolution, and more Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia

History repeats itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_bombing

This approach works well particularly well if the masses are decapitate by identifying anyone with high intelligence and “inviting” them into the 10% via education.

Angry masses without a leader are not going to do anything.

It doesn't have to be intelligence but really dissent in general. Check out the Hundred Flowers Campaign where Mao and the Chinese Communist Party encouraged debate and general criticism of the regime.. and then a few months later, rounded up all the dissenters and disappeared them into labor camps.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

I think you're overestimating the value of high intelligence. I don't believe we have any accurate means of identifying potent leaders, not even a 10% slice they might belong to.

Strip the wealthy if their wealth and most will probably become wealthy again. If you don’t call it intelligence what would you call it.

American wealth is closely tied to how wealthy a given persons parents were [0]. Given this, I’m skeptical that the wealthy would become wealthy again.

The counterpoint is the richest Southern families quickly recovered their positions in the years after the Civil War [1]... but that relied heavily on racist policies, and of course these families still owned capital like land.

0: http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2015/07/fsm-irs-repo...

1: https://www.nber.org/papers/w25700?utm_campaign=ntwh&utm_med...

But intelligence is directly connected to it, too. And I'm not even speaking about generic aspect: it's the cultural thing of how important education is perceived to be. In Russia, two generations after the revolution you could still guess where did the family originally come from originally by this cultural divide alone.

Wealth is (obviously) corralated with many properties that make it easier to gain wealth. To look at the effect of parents' wealth (and solely that) on children, you need to look into lottery winners or Bitcoin/APPL holders.

There is no significant relationship between any measurable attribute of someone and their wealth, except for the wealth of their parents. So no.

There are a few relationships between IQ and conscientiousness and wealth, but they break down towards the extremes are not strong enough in magnitude to account for even single-quartile mobility.

I think that's likely untrue if you include connections, training, and education in your definition of wealth.

> most will probably become wealthy again.

Source?

There's a book that attempts to look at this called, "The Son Also Rises."

It tracks wealth by surnames and argues that the ability to gain (or regain) wealth is inheritable. This thesis is in contradiction to some of the ways I've experienced the world, but it is a source supporting the parent's claim. For my own political inclinations I'd be happy to hear many others that support the opposite claim.

http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/the_Son_Also_...

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691162546/th...

https://archive.org/details/CSPAN2_20151004_190000_Book_Disc...

https://www.worldcat.org/title/son-also-rises-surnames-and-t...

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=76BC054612F39ED6CBD...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)

I've only dug into the briefly, so forgive me if I'm missing something obvious, but it looks like his research was mostly just tracking surnames? How would you differentiate between family lines that actually lose and regain wealth over generations, and those that happen to maintain it over that span?

Like say the Smith family was traditionally privileged and wealthy, but my great-great-grandfather lost his fortune. Am I actually any more likely to rise in fortune than the Jones' family next door that have been generationally poor for hundreds of years? Or does it only seem like that because I have many distant cousin's whose families maintained their advantages?

It tracks rare surnames, so there aren’t many distant cousins to skew the results. The point of focusing on rare surnames is so that you can be more certain that people carrying them today are actually direct descendants of people in the old records.

Second thing is that the fortune is typically not tracked here, because it’s really hard to get any historical data about fortune of any individuals, much less those not so famous. What Clark et al do is track status, and average out: for example, you can look at the people who graduated Oxford hundreds of years ago. As it turns out, their descendants today are overrepresented among UK’s doctors and lawyers. On the other hand, people carrying common job-related last names, like Smith or Taylor, are underrepresented as lawyers and doctors. In fact, in today’s UK, people carrying last names of Norman conquerors are still overrepresented among high status occupations in UK, although not by much, given a millennium of a regression towards the mean.

I recommend reading the book, it’s great.

Maybe I was unclear because I picked a generically common surname for my example, but I was also assuming both people were descended from a common successful ancestor.

The core of Clark’s argument is that the advantage is not due to accumulated fortune, but rather is genetic in nature.

Did they look at societies where last names are passed on matrilineally but social status/family continuity isn't? You would get the same results if the ability to gain wealth were truly a matter of genetics, but not if it were simply a matter of environmental benefits conferred from wealth.

Being born in the right family is absolutely a major predictor of success. The wealth opens up opportunities, but even without it, the guidance and example of family members helps a lot. The name recognition may too.

This sounds like something that a study of Chinese upper-class and their 1949 pre-revolution family history could shed some very interesting results on.

Brand recognition

Uh, you can't just pay massive numbers of the population without the wealth creation in the first place. We do not have some centralized salary authority that pays people based on loyalty to some arbitrary payment distribution scheme. This is completely contrived.

It doesn't need to be centrally managed, the situation can emerge organically just based on how people are incentivized. Especially with the impact computers and scaling at low marginal costs has and how much more one person's labor can be worth compared to another person's labor.

Also known as the "Tyranny of the Majority".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

There is a much simpler alternative. The general strike.

Market could still go up. The Fed just has to agree to print money until the strike ends.

Which will be very useful when the utility workers of the stock exchange strike and the lights turn off.

Not when half the country is living paycheck to paycheck.

Mutual-aid networks could be set up to subsist strikers

This is almost a kind of income equalizing. The top fraction of a % will pay a bit more to the people they are bribing not to kill them and so forth. The smart thing is the people at the top pay it all, so they control it.

Oh how splendid.

Missiles are similar weapons may be useful against other countries (remember Vietnam, however), but they will not stop revolts inside the country itself. What would the US government do if 80% of the city of New York decided to turn against the government? Throw an atomic bomb in the city? Their time may be running out.

It’s not like police haven’t resorted to bombing its own citizens before.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/8/8/20747198/philadel...

The entire Civil Rights movement is littered with examples of a police state and civilian mobs shooting, lynching, using dogs, water hoses, etc against its own citizens. It doesn’t take much to rile people up against “them” and get people to look the other way or even participate.

What would New York even do? People here don't believe in firearms, let alone violence. In reality the city would starve within a couple weeks due to siege/blockades if it really united and tried to revolt.

Kropotkin's Bread Book is about exactly that! He claims any revolution will be as successful as its ability to feed everyone, and tries to outline a path to it.

To name it, "The Conquest of Bread". Very good read, kept me from snoozing off in my CS classes :p

> People here don't believe in firearms,

I don't know what that means. Guns are highly correlated with leathality and people believe in them completely. Generally, a population may not want to have possession of guns. That quickly changes for a large percentage in survival mode. Effectively, many criminals are perpetually in survival mode.

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