Hacker News Reader

Comment by sul_tasto | Hacker News Reader

I’ll be interested to hear who you decide to send a portion of your paycheck to every month.

This is called charity. It turns out voluntary charity by individuals isn't enough to redistribute enough worth from the wealthy minority to the poor majority. Charity as a system is only really capable of keeping the poor majority from rebelling. To make it work, sending a portion of your paycheck every month needs to be mandated, and we call that taxation.

I always thought taxation should be for services that benefit the common good: utilities, first responder services, roads, food safety, etc. Are we being taxed as a way to prevent an uprising against the 1%?

One of society's purposes is also to ensure that all of its members are provided for. That's basically the exchange: contribute to society and society will make sure that your needs are met.

Therefore, I would say that taking a portion from those who have an excess and giving it to those who do not have enough is within the legitimate role of society.

I think you may have replied to the wrong comment - parent didn't mention anything about sending somebody a portion of their paycheck each month. Maybe a different thread?

>"There needs to be a redistribution of esteem as well as money, and more of it needs to go to the millions doing work that does not require a college degree."

I could not agree more with this statement.<

Money has to come from someone's paycheck, hence the redistribution of money mentioned.

Sure, I'll bite. It should come from the paychecks of people like CEOs who have gone from making 30x the average worker to 900x in the past 70 years.

I completely agree with you. My concern is that most of the super rich are effectively out of reach, because of their ability to shelter their wealth and income. If memory serves, most of the more recent progressive policy proposals involve raising taxes on the middle and upper middle classes, despite what the political candidates claimed.

You also need to consider that 70 years ago there weren't giant global companies with 100K+ employees like Apple or Amazon. CEOs of companies with < 1K employees are probably still making 30x the average worker. Unfortunately most studies I see of these things are written by authors that seem to have a political point to make and are not unbiased. It would be interesting to see the comparison though.

A prof of econ stigler (Nobel laureate) made a decent argument that the discrepancy arose with the a movement somewhere in the 60-70s (US) I believe that corporations do the best good by increasing shareholder value measured by stocks and options on same. That's an important factor in real wage growth discrepancy.

I mean, that's simply not true. In 1955, GM had 576,000. US steel: 268,000. GE: 210,000. If the number of companies with huge amounts of employees has ballooned, well that could easily be a function simply of population growth.

I think the argument you're trying to make is that CEO's of larger companies should make more money comparatively. That may be true (you want the best people in charge of the most people), but you would expect that wage growth to be more linear in number of employees, rather than exponential.

The point is, no C level executive has squared their performance metric, at least not in an individually attributable way, and especially if you consider the negative externalities those "performance gains" have introduced.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com