Comment by akuji1993 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akuji1993 | Hacker News Reader

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> What would be interesting is to force rich people to invest in social efforts with their money.

Ever heard of tax deductible donations? Also, what makes you think that a private person is better at deciding where to put their money and has less inclination to donate this money to a social cause that has direct positive outcome for them (for example, investing in their already well-financed community and being the 'hero of the town', gaining also political power that way) instead of letting a state, capable of overseeing ALL of its people redistribute the taxed money to the poorest communities or those that need the help the most in some area?

Edit: And I didn't even touch on this point, because it's a whole other discussion but:

> Another way to say it is that the top 10% got there because they use their money to make more money.

Wealthy people are increasing their wealth through financial tools without contributing anything to society. Also, except for a small number of family or solo entrepreneurs, they didn't get rich on their own. They had employees. Most of those people did not benefit like the business owner did, while they actually did the work. So is it really that unjustified to tax this money and redistribute it to the poor and the workers?

> Ever heard of tax deductible donations?

Tax deductible donations have the same intent but is a poor policy implementation for rich people who already pay so little in taxes. It doesn't accomplish the effect of redistribution of wealth because so little redistribution actually happens. We want our wealth to return social good, not extra wealth -> that's the point of the policy.

I should have been more explicit that I was proposing a wealth transfer alternative to UBI, which is to create privatized social funds that rich people are effectively forced to contribute money to or lose their wealth significantly over time.

> Also, what makes you think that a private person is better at deciding where to put their money and has less inclination to donate this money to a social cause that has direct positive outcome for them

> instead of a state, capable of overseeing ALL of its people redistribute the taxed money to the poorest communities or those that need the help the most in some area?

Uh... who do you think runs the state? Rich people.

And if you really think the state is the perfect ideal father figure that cares for all of its people... please tell me where you live so I can move there too. "The state", in most of human history, is woefully inept at making good, centralized decisions, and it's decentralization (which is btw a UBI principle) that has given us equal rights, fairness, and societal mobility. For most of history, anytime you aggregate power to a central state, bad things happen.

Back to my point though, the interesting thing about social funds is that they can be privatized and form their own market economies. For instance, Elon musk could use his social fund to combat climate change. Bill gates is already doing this to tackle large humanity issues. Warren buffet will probably use it to help middle america. Jeff Bezos... will probably give half of the fund to his wife.

But it's a pretty interesting policy that goes with the spirit of the American ideal which puts the power of changing the world into the individual's hand rather than centralizing it into the government, which is why I described wealth transfer to a government as "un-American".

Social funds with a committed vision towards non profit activities is really not a bad idea the more I think about it. Some rich people will definitely fund UBI with it.

> please tell me where you live so I can move there too. "The state", in most of human history, is woefully inept at making good, centralized decisions

Germany. I'd also add that the countries doing the most for their citizens are probably the Nordic European States plus Germany and France. All of them Social Democracies, so what Americans would probably call a "strong state" oriented approach. I have a lot to critize about my own country, but the social support structures are probably still among the best in the world only toppled by aforementioned Nordic countries like Norway or Denmark.

I really don't think we should rely on the goodwill of millionaires and them running the state is, on a scale, mostly an american issue. Of course we also have lobbies, with which I have a problem, but our European countries are less controlled by wealth than the US for sure.

Regarding "good" billionaires, I'd suggest you listen to this: https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-45-the-not-so-be... You seem to support Chicago school style approaches, with which I will disagree, being a pretty standard Frankfurt school believer. I'd still like to discuss this further. Find my email in my profile, if you want.

Hard to comment on societies I don't know well. Instead I'd like to offer this explanation of my point of view:

There are two competing ideas of governance. One is the umbrella (ie. Godfather) and one is the public servant / slave (ie. Jesus).

- The godfather creates an empire and everyone who lives under him lives really, really well.

- The public servant is an invisible figure that solves all the problems of its people and serves the people, meeting their needs.

The US has most likely lived under a godfather system for the last 70 or so years, after WW2. Like it or not, our billionaires have created empires (their companies) and we live really well because of them. If the people of the US want to continue in their standard of living, they need to keep propping up the billionaires' empires because it's those empires that create the umbrella for the high standard of living we have.

This does turn the US economy into... either you serve in the empires and live well, or you live poorly not enjoying the empire's provisions. So you have a dual economy - those in the US who are running the empire's money printing machines, and those who can't help those companies print money. And the dual economy has two results -> really well off people, institutions, and society, and poor people. The poor people are actually rich compared to the rest of the world, but are poor because the rich economy has inflated the prices and expectation for a normal standard of living for those poor people, and they are getting squeezed by both income and cost of living.

Both capitalism and socialism alludes to this kind of situation, with differing opinions of what to do about it.

Capitalism says we should use godfathers to make everyone live well. Prop up the godfathers enough and everyone can live better off than they used to (very key point is relative to the past).

Socialism says no we need to move towards the public servant model to make everyone live well. Remove all the umbrellas and replace them with servitude and everyone can live in an ideal and fair society (also a key point, standard of living is not relative to the past, it's relative to the ideal).

In capitalism moral judgment is based on if you live better than you used to. If you want to see where we started from, just watch BBC's planet earth - you'll see starving lions with rib bones showing, trying to catch gazelle in scorching heat in Africa in order to eat, since they haven't eaten in weeks. You'll see eagles and dozens of birds fighting over dead carcasses that are rotting. From a capitalist point of view, going from having to hunt for your next meal 10,000 years ago to robust supply chains for groceries and upgrading your iphone every year for practically everyone in the world is what they consider moral accomplishment.

In socialism, moral judgment is based on if you live in society as close to the ideal of fairness that it can be. It looks at the relativeness of the current structure of society instead of the relativeness of standard of living improvements over time. If rich people are enjoying more things than poor people right now, that's considered immoral. If everyone has the opportunity and privilege to live a decently comfortable life, that is moral.

The US is very capitalist in mindset. Keep in mind that in capitalism, companies also help those not within the company by creating better quality goods for consumers (everyone else), so the more empires grow, the cheaper/better the consumer goods are, and the better quality of life is for everyone, not just those who work for the empire.

The US is so capitalist that it cannot imagine a world where standard of living and company growth stagnates. That's how dependent the US is on empires and on capitalism. In some ways, if you accept the capitalist moral judgment as a good moral judgment, the US is trying very hard to be moral even when it's practically impossible to do so!

But then again, tell US citizens that their standard of living is going to go down - that they will not get everything at the quality that they expect, that their income is going to shrink, that their livelihood will take a slight hit - and that's too much to bear for the US population's ego because we've never had to tighten our belts in the history of the US for that past 70 years.

But that's exactly what needs to happen for:

1) healthcare costs to come down (doctors and hospitals need to earn a lot less, like maybe 50-60% less)

2) income inequality to stabilize (basically 10% wealth transfer for GDP every year)

3) climate change to be mitigated (reduce carbon emissions which is basically shrink GDP by 1-2%)

4) housing prices need to go down (basically tell everyone that their primary asset needs to depreciate by 30-50% or even more)

So yeah we live and die by the godfathers and their empires - that's the way the US is. And it really doesn't matter who is in the governance seat - neither rich people nor a strong state will do a good job making policy to cause the above to occur - you first have to change the willingness of the American people to willingly accept systematized and distributed personal loss.

To be fair to Americans, social fairness is growing on the importance scale - but you have to tailor the changes in a way that aligns with existing US values and behaviors. You can't just say "oh, implement the way the Chinese/Germans run their government in the US", it's just too foreign to get any traction or pragmatic action (which is what Frankfurt school eschews, right?).

Implementing policies where rich people keep their empires and wealth but instead are forced to use their empires to not keep printing money but to solve other problems - that's very American sounding to me. No one is saying that Bill Gates is a beloved figure btw; we are saying that he's effective at investing into getting rid of malaria though. Same with Elon musk, he ain't no saint but he can sure get us to the moon. He might also get us to clean and renewable energy if he put his mind to it, you never know.

A lot of my inspiration for my thoughts on these issues comes from the waitbutwhy blog. The whole series on the story of us is fascinating, but especially chapter 4 talks about the American view of consumer capitalism which I recommend to read.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/enlightenment-kids.html

> our billionaires have created empires (their companies) and we live really well because of them

I'd disagree with the statement, that most of the US citizens live a good life while 40% are in danger of being evicted right now. That's only the first example coming from the top of my head. You could easily make an argument how most people living paycheck to paycheck is not a great status also.

> So you have a dual economy - those in the US who are running the empire's money printing machines, and those who can't help those companies print money.

Wouldn't you consider this amoral from the start? There is proficiencies that won't ever be able to get out of poverity for this exact reason. Most artists, writers, philosophers, social workers, health care workers won't ever be able to get out of poverity / low middle class, because they are not "worth" as much, as people working IT, finance, governance.

> The poor people are actually rich compared to the rest of the world

This comparison doesn't really matter when they can't live where they are right now. If you want to analyse their quality of living you have to only consider their material conditions where they live, not how their money would be able to make them live in South Africa or Swasiland.

> The US is very capitalist in mindset. Keep in mind that in capitalism, companies also help those not within the company by creating better quality goods for consumers (everyone else), so the more empires grow, the cheaper/better the consumer goods are, and the better quality of life is for everyone, not just those who work for the empire.

In theory this would lead to better lifestyles for others, but as the capitalist tries to minimize cost and maximize profit, they are moving away from US based production and produce cheaper in China, South East Asia etc. leaving their US workers behind with no wage to buy their products. Capitalism has reached the stage of maxizing profit through globalization, chasing for the cheapest production possible around the globe. This is why US poverity is increasing and unemployment becomes a more and more desperate issue. The capitalist, in the end, doesn't care about the people outside of his profit scope. He should though, since those people buy his products. If nobody is left buying product, their is no profit. Some people argue this can be corrected by "ethical capitalism" which I think is a dream castle, but you might disagree.

I'd argue that we can reach those goals easier, through socialist companies where not one capitalist is controlling the company, but all the workers collectively. They won't go oversees with their production, as they protect their own jobs. They won't cut safety measures for the same reason. Same for health care etc. Workers will protect themselves way better and lead the society to a more balanced way of living this way in general.

I kind of have the feeling you're not that big of a proponent of capitalism as I thought in the beginning... You have some interesting analysis with the appended criticisms.

> you first have to change the willingness of the American people to willingly accept systematized and distributed personal loss.

We agree that this needs to happen. I don't think the numbers have to be quite as drastic as you proposed, if we just take 80% of the wealth accumulated by the rich (there will be enough left for them) and do a sensible tax reform targeting the Top 10-20% correctly. That would be a start. Going the way of reform, we'd start with that and health care reform and see what's the next step from there. The alternative of revolution is an existing alternative, but costs lives and can hurt the system for the next 20-30 years, so not really desirable. The first step towards reform would be getting Biden into office and then pressuring him to actually take the steps he promised after talking to Sanders.

Regarding instead of taxing, making it so that billionaires need to redistribute privately, I don't agree that that's better than a for example workers council deciding what to do with tax money. The Gates Foundation has distributed their donations 96% to US and European organisations and just 4% to African owned and run organsations. I appreciate them trying to help, but I think you need to put more of this money directly into the hands of African orgs as they for sure know best, what their citizens need.

I'll check out your link later today, thanks. And also thanks for not making this an aggressive, unproductive conversation.

> I'd disagree with the statement, that most of the US citizens live a good life while 40% are in danger of being evicted right now. That's only the first example coming from the top of my head. You could easily make an argument how most people living paycheck to paycheck is not a great status also.

My point is that minimum wage in the US -> ($16.50 / hr in many states), is really high compared to many other countries. For instance, the median wage in Taiwan / China is 1/3 of the minimum wage in the US. Why does the US have the minimum wage so high? Why do bus drivers in the US get paid 10-100 times more than bus drivers in India? It's because of "trickle down" economics - because the US economy is so strong we can have really high wages for the lowest skilled jobs in our economy.

> Wouldn't you consider this amoral from the start? There is proficiencies that won't ever be able to get out of poverty for this exact reason. Most artists, writers, philosophers, social workers, health care workers won't ever be able to get out of poverty / low middle class, because they are not "worth" as much, as people working IT, finance, governance.

I wouldn't consider it amoral. The reality is that creating great environments for people to grow up in is hard work, and not a "universal right" by any means. Nature does not give everyone super comfortable and fair lives - consider the cold north or the scorching deserts and you'll realize that this assumption that everyone deserves the same life is... not grounded in the real world. Life is fundamentally unfair. You have certain populations of animals growing up in fertile galopagos without any predators, and you have other animals growing in 10000 ft deep oceans with extremely harsh environments to survive. That's life.

Fairness in life is a good ideal but a bad policy. It's like saying, I don't like how the world has deserts and tundra, I'm going to make the entire world have perfect weather and homogenous, ideal environments for everyone - the engineering effort would be astronomical and also probably cause a lot of problems to the environment. I'd rather have a policy that is grounded in how the world works, which I think capitalism is (as opposed to socialism).

> I'd argue that we can reach those goals easier, through socialist companies where not one capitalist is controlling the company, but all the workers collectively. They won't go oversees with their production, as they protect their own jobs. They won't cut safety measures for the same reason. Same for health care etc. Workers will protect themselves way better and lead the society to a more balanced way of living this way in general.

The assumption that collectives can allocate resources better than individuals is flat out wrong. The reality is that the decision making and skill of the person(s) in charge determine the efficiency of allocation.

This is basic business theory. You don't put a random joe to allocate budget and policy decisions for billions of dollars at the top level; you put a skilled CFO or COO who has 20+ years of experience and has done it many times before to make those decisions.

Capitalism naturally causes the people who have the best allocation skills to be assigned the seat of being the one to allocate resources. This is opposed to socialism, which has no policy or strategy towards who gets the control of the resources.

Where capitalism goes wrong is in hyper focusing on allocating resources to money making. You want the focus to be distributed evenly across money making, social welfare, and innovation.

If you told these CEOs and CFOs running organizations to allocate resources to build better communities instead of just making more money, they would have the skills to do a good job at it. We just don't tell them to do that... because I dunno, American ideals?

> I don't think the numbers have to be quite as drastic as you proposed

I think they have to be much worse than what I proposed. Bloat in the current system is really, really high. In Taiwan, they live the same standard of living as the US with basically 1/4 of the cost.

> if we just take 80% of the wealth accumulated by the rich (there will be enough left for them) and do a sensible tax reform targeting the Top 10-20% correctly.

Understand you may not be from the US, but its probably more accurate to say "for us" rather than "for them". If you're a programmer on hacker news, 95% chance you'd be in the top 5% of the US in terms of income generation.

> just 4% to African owned and run organsations.

It's because most African owned and run organizations are not skilled enough to be entrusted with the money to actually produce results.

If you've tried to run an organization before, it's extremely difficult to allocate resources efficiently to solve problems. That's the key bottleneck of economics and I suspect its the major perspective difference between you and me. I view resource allocation as the absolutely hardest problem in the world, where you think everyone can do it well. 99.999% of people, if given $1 million and a difficult mission, will fail that mission, not because they lack heart, morality, ethics, or understanding, but because they don't know how to use the resources given to solve problems.

I would've thought that government as a servant is prevalent under capitalism (the government is supposed to only provide services in the forms of courts, policing, defense, some infrastructure, some schooling). Whereas under socialism the government is like a godfather and is supposed to take care of you from cradle to grave, giving you tasks to do, providing you with entertainment, not asking you but telling you what to do and how to live, with an implicit guarantee that it would give everyone a decent life.

Companies are not empires - they are just free people associating with each other on their own terms to create something.

You mistake socialism with authoritarian socialism. Which is one form of it and that can be on a scale, too. Socialism does not inherently forbid the use of a free market, just as capitalism doesn't mean there is a free market available. Those things are two different characteristics of an economic system.

The socialism you speak of still involves the government taking from some and giving to others, and many people depending on the government to provide them with a decent life. The government is certainly seen as a "godfather", a source of livelihood, rather than as a public servant - a mere provider of certain services.

I'll agree to that. My issue is with this:

> telling you what to do and how to live, with an implicit guarantee that it would give everyone a decent life.

Why should I need to tell you what to do and how to live? There's gonna be things everyone will have to do from time to time (like cleaning streets, trash drives, maybe canal work, but most of those you can address by making the reward for doing such jobs higher than the average desk job), but other than that, you will have to work less and have more free time in which you will be free to do whatever you want.

I'd argue that our current system forces you way more to do certain things than a socialist system would. If you are poor, you need to work service jobs or hard manual labor, otherwise you die. The system literally forces you to work, otherwise you will not be caught by any social safety net. That's why leftists tend to talk about "wage slaves", because at the end of the day, you can either become homeless and sick, or work.

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