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Comment by jasonv | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised how much rationalization towards the billionaire class is being employed to reason against sympathy and sustenance for the working class individuals impacted by this.

The billionaires have all the advantages, and often hold a moral and political posture that they promote socially that are at odds with these actions.

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Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideology. It always leads to repetitive, predictable discussion, which is off topic here, and usually turns into flamewar as well.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My mother just yelled at my sister this week telling her “she’s not mature enough to get married” because her personal trainer job is currently on hold and my mom is paying her rent. This is something I’ve seen quite a few “conservative” parents do to their kids: they don’t think about what the kids are dealing with they just see that they aren’t making money and scream at them. It’s something she used to do to me before I finished college and it made getting out of bed and other every day things super hard. I used to be conservative but the total and complete lack of empathy people have even towards their own kids pushed me away from it.

I'd suggest that yelling aside your mom might have a point. The fact that she is paying you sister's rent sounds extremely generous and unless your family is independently wealthy probably a financial hardship for her. Had you ever considered that the empathetic view of her side might be that she is being put in a difficult position of having to choose between paying her child's rent and being in a financially stressful position hence the yelling? Chalking it up to the by product of political leanings seems like a rationalization.

I happen to know they’re not in a remotely financially stressful position.

There is a very old saying: “conservatives have no hearts, but liberals have no brains.” It’s quite apt during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lots of people have plenty of (very warranted) empathy, who can’t wrap their minds around what it really means to be spending $2 trillion a month keeping the economy shut down. Innumerates who think “the billionaires should just pay for it.”

What does the “billionaire class” have to do with this? The total cost of bailouts in the US so far is $6 trillion. That is 45 times as much money as all US billionaires earned last year. It is as much money as all US corporations earned in profits in the last four years.

99% of all income isn’t earned by “the billionaire class.” It’s earned by the rest of us. We’re the ones who will be paying for the COVID-19 economic shutdown, because we’re the only ones with enough money to do it.

B/c billionaires got everything, they also want to feel good about themselves & righteous too. Thus you see a lot of virtual signaling

Concentrated wealth (i.e. The 100 or so billionaires that exist in the world) is able to more nimbly direct their money to change the world. However, when they're wrong, they're using 1/100 of the world's wealth/productivity to be wrong.

Less concentrated wealth (i.e. Some form of socialism + wealth redistribution) is going to be much more likely to be caught up in red tape, meander, and not reach consensus. On the other hand, being wrong isn't as impactful.

You get to choose between the 2012-2016 US Congress (nothing gets passed - good or bad - because no one can reach consensus and no one has the power to unilaterally decide) and FDR (nimbly navigated a war but definitely overreached on a few decisions and imprisoned the entire US Japanese population lol).

Are you using FDR, a democratically elected president, as an example of a nimble but unaccountable billionaire?

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