Society is very quickly becoming obsessed with turning Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" cautionary tale into reality.
I have noticed this trend though, of reacting to justice movements by claiming it'll tear down people. Why do you believe this?
I imagine it’ll soon be transferred to talented people as well.
Soon we’ll be right where the story predicted, everyone wears handicaps to make themselves equal.
Part of the problem is that our current property regime does not distinguish between property acquired through accession [1] and property acquired through extraction.
There is this weird philosophy that all "market transactions" are equally legitimate and that market price is the correct (and only reliable) indicator of economic value. This view ignores the fact that market prices are as much a product of market structure as they are a reflection of people's preferences.
As a rule, few wealthy people extract 100% of their wealth and few earn 100%.
The wealthy that extract 98% sure try to downplay that part and try to pretend that they're among the miniscule number who earned 90+%.
Most manage to self delude themselves that vitriol against the wealthy IS vitriol against talent. Their egos demand it.
I think it should be likely obvious from my statement above, I want there to be talented people, and I really don't see a substantial movement to pull down successful people.
What are examples of things people are doing that make you think we are going in this direction?
This absurdist remark is just to point out that just because people get paid to do a job, it doesn't mean it's a job we as a society want people to have.
The only absurdist remark here is your comparison of Yacht Builders to Murderers.
Nom nom on those roasted almonds and slurp that almond milk, but keep in mind that yacht builder is having less of a negative impact on the planet.
Yes, that is exactly what I said. I made an absurdist remark ...
But your point is merely valid in a very narrow window of your own morality. I wanted you to reevaluate your perspective and think that perhaps yacht builders, or vulture capitalists, or any number of things that are considered legal, might not be good.
I'm not even trying to say that Yacht building is bad, but a system/society which has yacht builders in it could use a look.
I also think I wouldn't shed a year if Rolls Royce went out of business. There are manufacturing, design, welding jobs out there on markets that actually make sense to scale up. Some things in life you can currently buy don't provide enough value to justify them existing at all. They simply exist as a middle finger to everyone with less, propped up by the idiots that but them.
I'm not saying make anything illegal, I'm saying I judge people who support this and would encourage everyone else to do the same.
It's not absurd and stupid to display wealth, it's a function of being a social mammal. Moreover, it does contribute to society by way of employing legions.
When next you flip open your laptop, or publicly use your phone, or dress nicely, or discuss your vacationing, consider your own words about flaunting your wealth.
Thinking collectively is what created civilized society and enabled the modern world.
I agree that consumption has created a lot of good in the world, I absolutely believe in capitalism, successful ideas need to triumph over bad ones.
I also understand that many innovations start out as extremely expensive luxury goods that are eventually commoditized. This is an important part of why I don't believe we should make excessive consumption illegal.
I know there will always be people who submit to these urges and buy fancy crap, and sometimes them doing that will help society at large more than it hurts. Some things are just objectively not helpful and are just gratuitous displays of wealth. I am happy to hear otherwise, but I just don't think that Yacht building has trickled down to a bunch of consumer goods that help the world.
High end fashion and beauty products I think reasonably belong in the same category. I think there are plenty of opportunities for more decentralized markets, local designers, that would be possible if rich people weren't buying so much mindshare and influence. And that's not to say I think the government should regulate everything, some if it just has to be individuals talking about things and changing consumption behavior.
I do not see what is objectively unhelpful about buying a yacht, or similar. Trades persons are paid, wealth is redistributed, utility and enjoyment is extracted from the product of their labour.
In all luxury consumption there is a redistribution of wealth; and _unlike_ with investment, there is no expectation to extract future wealth from the labour of others after the point of purchase.
In their own way, investors are parasites. They leverage their hoarded wealth to extract value from the labour of others.
> should get them to pay their damn taxes and fair share
what constitutes a 'fair share'? Who gets to decide?
it's easy to criticize yachts. Let's say a billionaire did something "you might like" like throw a ton of money into a basic physics project. But what if that basic physics project is looking for superluminal neutrinos? Or maybe you'd criticize that the billionaire just wanted to get their name out, which is, essentially vanity, an obviously negative character trait.
Or we could get into sketchier territory. What if the billionaire spent tons of money in "development" in an "underdeveloped country". Is that bad or good? Who gets to decide?
I mean the ironic thing is that on many metrics, buying a yacht could be the least bad thing of the three things that I have mentioned, at least the likelihood of buying a yacht actively hurting someone else is relatively low.
Finding those people is harder than the Yacht idiots, but that's why we have watchdogs for public charities and can make laws regulating what people can do with a charity.
If people are making investments not as part of a public charity, we have journalists to hopefully keep some high level accountability, but yeah youn can do bad stuff with money in a lot of ways, go figure.
Even people doing lots of good can still be seen on a spectrum, I love a lot of the work Bill Gates is doing around the world, but I think he worked really hard to fight FOSS, and I think the world is worse off in some ways for it.
I'm saying buying crazy expensive luxury goods is never a good thing, it's just a waste of resources to prop up someone's shallow ego.
But at this point the capital gains rate is absolutely in need of change. Taxing the rich is really politically popular, across the political spectrum. If someone has to pay %39 on a million dollars of earned income, the "job creators" making billions can pay something closer to that on their income too.
It is already, and the logic is something like: talent is largely a function of practice and access to education. Having the means and opportunity to practice and be properly educated is a privilege.
You can find _plenty_ of words written regarding the inherent racism, sexism, ableism et al in various hobbies due to unequal access; from GitHub hobby repos to enjoying nature through hiking and camping.
Black Lives Matter is not fighting for cops to shoot more white people to equalize the numbers, they are trying to show how it is possible in lots of similar situations to deescalate situations without killing anyone, even with violent offenders if training is good, and officers don't have a bias (explicit or subconscious) against the type of person. It is also very obvious to show that minorities are being over-policed and often harassed for just living their lives.
I think similarly with this issue of the leg up that attractive people have in the world, the only way we can fight it is by acknowledging it exists and trying to actively re-evaluate every decision we make about who we choose to interact with, and how much it is informed by these types of bias. This is not the same as giving the attractive people a -10 on whatever evaluation they are a part of. It is always going to be true that correcting for these types of bias will be inexact, welcome to life, but saying we just shouldn't give a shit about less attractive people is a worse outcome for all of society, and its not like author is asking for infinite effort from everyone to correct this. Talented people exist everywhere, if we don't push those of disadvantaged groups up, only some of them will "pull their bootstraps" hard enough to overcome things on their own. People need to be introspective to correct for their biases, there really isn't a way around that, we are imperfect beings quick to pass judgement.
I have a distinct memory of a part of the confirmation hearing of Sonia Sotomayor, she had written about her need to actively review her background when starting a case, to see if she might have prior experiences that would color her judgement. Republicans tried to spin this as, she acknowledged she is biased, obviously she can't be an objective judge. But she defended herself well and asserted it is effectively impossible, to just be objective without this kind of evaluation. Effectively the same argument that people correctly make about the virtual impossibility of just being "race-blind", we all have things we have experienced that color our perceptions of different people, ideas and places, we cannot ignore that fact and just go on asserting we are good objective decision makers with no special effort to account for these things.
Remember this when people go on and on about "equity". In the grave, all men are equal.
I don't fully support removing magnet schools, but you can bet that if rich families had to send their kids to the same schools as the poor kids, they'd be lobbying all day for better funding. Apportioning funding per-head from state taxes rather than property taxes would be a good first step.
Seems obvious to me that the issue isn't that private or magnet schools are high quality, but rather that public schools are low quality. Basically, the goal is still, bring people up. The "bringing down" in this case is not only temporary, it's only actually "bringing to baseline."
A bunch of rich people and state congresspeople's kids being forced to go to "shitty public schools" sounds like a great way to force the issue.
This sounds suspiciously close to "hold other peoples' children hostage until they give me what I want"
Again, if going to a public school is so bad as to be considered "holding a child hostage," the issue isn't the making-rich-kids-go-to-public-schools, it's the public schools.
it's the oldest playbook in humanity.
Masks? A government backed hotornot.com that issues beauty bonus points to improve ugly hiring outcomes?
People who are good with numbers approach financial situations from a position of privilege, surely that's an equality killer? Do we impose Financial acuity tarrifs in addition to standard taxation?
Obviously these are absurd examples but there is a point of diminishing returns and even negative outcomes in the pursuit of TOTAL equality.
Here’s a good meaningwave playlist with the full story - https://open.spotify.com/album/1zG8gwbkJIZU8Ki3fQqIUE?si=a0L...
Basically it amounts to taking audio related to self development and layering over electronic beats. I like the format and think it's a really cool way to spread ideas.