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Comment by royaltheartist | Hacker News Reader

40 million people are on track to being evicted in one of the biggest economic downturns in history. Except, the wealthy just got even more wealthy.

This system is a failure for everyone that isn't in the 1%

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This system isn't a failure. People's incomes have gone up during the pandemic so the stock market has also gone up.

There is a dire problem around the collapse of small businesses, but rich people usually get rich through capital markets rather than small business.

The stock market did not go up because of the increase in people's incomes. It went up because of several trillion dollars worth of cash injections from the Federal Bank. For everyone else, unemployment has pushed to 10% on the low end and I'll repeat the part about 40 million people looking at evictions by the end of the year.

And "rich people usually get rich through capital markets" is just a fancy of way of saying they have ownership of everything and profit off of other peoples's labor

Incomes have gone up, including for the unemployed. Fiscal stimulus can accomplish much more than monetary policy through the multiplier so comparing headline numbers doesn't mean anything.

And yeah rich people own assets. That's like the definition of a rich person. Take your ax and grind it somewhere else.

Incomes went up only for the unemployed who got the $600/week unemployment benefit, which just expired. And that's just for the pandemic. Real wages, the actual value of one's wages relative to the expenses in costs in society, have been in a decline since the 80s. Yet, the wealthy have come to control more and more wealth.

This isn't some ax to grind. This is life under a system where the wealthy rule and the rest of us have no choice but to work for them or starve.

1. How's that the fault of the wealthy? Blame the politicians who are mandating crazy inconsistent policies of keeping big businesses open while closing the small businesses down.

2. A stock price going up is not exactly getting "richer".

> How's that the fault of the wealthy? Blame the politicians who are mandating crazy inconsistent policies of keeping big businesses open while closing

It's almost like capital ownership awards undue power that can then be used to further entrench power.

If we are blaming them for further entrenching power, then we are also to blame ourselves who voted for the politicians to allow this to happen and to fall for propaganda from those same "rich" people.

When the richest man in the US who happens to own the largest online shopping site and also uses his own newspaper to push more propaganda to push for more lockdowns - thus eliminating more competition from small businesses, is the richest man to be blamed or are the politicians listening to him and the people reading his propaganda newspaper and following orders to be blamed too?

When all the massive multi-national corporations that have questionable hiring, firing, healthcare, worker's rights, and safety track records promote and sponsor your cause and your Revolution has corporate sponsorship, you are not a revolutionary, you are a pawn.

It's just amazing how those who kept advocating for opening up small businesses and ending the lockdowns got called all sorts of names by the same people who complain about the rich getting richer.

Let me answer your question:

Yes, the richest person on earth is absolutely to blame for the decisions he makes to hold on to his own power and wealth. Hope that clears things up

Yay! Take all the blame off of ourselves and put it on the Kulak!

> How's that the fault of the wealthy?

It is the fault of leadership, but the US leaders in particular seem to be an extremely wealthy bunch (or at least they claim to be). It seems to be the key attribute now.

Well, the shorter answer is that ownership and control of capital is where their power derives from. Thus, they get to make the decisions of how wealth is distributed, and it mostly benefits themselves

> This system is a failure for everyone that isn't in the 1%

Honest question: compared to what?

Compared to the wealthy who have enriched themselves

The wealthy are not a system. Which system do you say works better for the 99%?

Any system which allows for communal control of the means of production and for people to make economic and political decisions for themselves.

No, that's wrong too. The "burn it all to the ground, then introduce anarchy" strategy meets all those criteria:

* everybody has equal control of the nothing,

* no value → no economy → no economic decisions made for you by others,

* anarchy → no political decisions made by others

yet is clearly inferior to what we've got now.

It sounds like whoever managed to get political support in that community is making the economic decisions, rather than “themselves”. Individual property rights simply devolves that control to the individual or the family. Communal property rights would place control of property into the hands of the elites. I’m not saying the current system is perfect, but I’m the system to you’re describing I don’t see how someone gets a new technology to market without the support of the elites. It’s at least possible today, and leads to the collective increase in standards of living.

The system we live in is one in which everything is in the control of the elites. Who makes all the decisions about technology? The CEOs of massive tech firms. Who makes all the political decisions in government? To a person almost exclusively the rich, those who hoard capital.

I’m not going to argue that our political and social economic systems don’t have flaws. I do think directly merging political and economic power into the same institutions would only make it worse.

A few countries have tried that and it’s hard to do without applying the jackboot to a few million people’s’ necks.

Have you seen the footage coming out Chicago, New York and Portland of police beating people in the streets? You might want to ask what country is putting the jackboot on people's necks to maintain social order

I have seen it. I see non-violent protestors and I see violent protestors.

I have zero problem with the cops stopping violent protestors. That’s a basic function of government.

Which countries have tried to distribute wealth? Most countries that people usually claim that about have actually done the opposite - they were trying to put the jack boot to a few million people's necks, and found that claims about redistribution of wealth can win you enough followers to actually do that. This is certainly true of Lenin and Stalin and Mao.

I'm not arguing they did a great job, but Russia, China, Vietnam certainly tried - land reform is a good example.

Of course, the most "loyal" communists got the best land...

What about the system we had between WWII and Reaganomics, when not only was income inequality smaller, but most of computing was also invented (using state money)?

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