I think Varoufakis is trying to paint a future where the gap between rich and poor isn’t as wide as it is now.
Do we need billionaires for our society to function? Is having 100,000,000 USD not enough?
He makes a good point about equality in merit but people often misread the scales on what a meritocracy should be.
It's not what you do produce, it's what you can produce. And in this egalitarian world, people who need access to resources should not have to hurdle to get them.
Nobody knows. Maybe yes. Maybe no.
Notice that billionaires can't spend all their money on themselves. They can't exactly buy a billion dollars worth of cheese and eat it all. They can sink whatever they like in to property but realistically they probably only spend a few million dollars on property and the vast bulk of their wealth goes in to directing the economy via shares and real estate.
So if all the billions of dollars was removed from the billionaires they will experience a very modest (potentially no) change in quality of life and there will be far reaching economic consequences because the control structure was just reworked. It is totally unclear if it would be a win or a loss for most people.
Because every time someone tries this to create a world like this... it ends up a living nightmare. Creating equality usually ends up involving taking away freedom and oppressing people.
Maybe it's inherently not such a hot idea for some social reason we don't yet fully understand?
I don't know but I'm not sure we should keep trying as millions of people end up dead every time someone gives it another whirl.
Now, if we want to take away the "freedom" to be not equal on the downside, I'm not sure that I have much problem with that. If people aren't "free" to live in abject poverty, to have to choose between there medicines and their food, to not have air conditioning in summer or heat in winter... yeah, I don't have a problem with removing that "freedom".
But I have a problem with removing the freedom to be unequal on the upside. If I want to have more than you, and I can get it by producing more than you... why not? If I can't get rewarded for producing more, I probably won't produce more. That leaves less for everyone. Who does that help?
Thus those who try to prevent inequality on the upside remove freedom, and make everyone worse off. Worse off in two ways. First, society doesn't get the extra that some people would have been motivated to produce. And second, they made everyone less free.
Less free plus less stuff? Sure, sign me up... not.
You should totally enjoy the freedom to be a productive member of society, that's not where inequality originates.
That is, an engineer produces more of what society values than an assembler does.
And why does society value it more? Scarcity. More people can assemble beams than can do solid engineering.
You can say that society isn't valuing the right things. That might be a defensible position. But in general, attempts to "fix" that problem run into the problem that the fixers don't know enough. The results are sub-optimal - not just theoretically, but in very concrete ways.
But even if you put everyone on roughly equivalent wages... the people who enter YC aren't doing it because the wages are higher. They're trying, with a very small number of people, to build something useful to many people. That's productivity. Why do they do it? Somewhat because they believe in what they're trying to do, but also because they see it as a chance to make a lot of money. They're not doing it by owning property. They're not inheriting it. They're making it by building something.
Now, are you going to let them become inequal? Or not?
>If I can't get rewarded for [exploiting labour and material resources], I probably won't [exploit labour and material resources].
>First, society doesn't get the extra that some people would have been motivated to produce.
"Society" doesn't get that extra anyway, if we are talking about billionaires keeping hold of an 11-figure income. The same labour and material resources exist in the world either way (perhaps moreso, if they are not used up unsustainably to the point of scarcity); the "extra" only accrues to the person doing the exploiting.
He specifically says people will not be equally remunerated in the article; this whole thread is basically attacking a straw man of some other position that he is not himself advancing.
This is hyperbolic and false.
The first and most relevant example that I can think of in the West is the Civil Rights Movement. People were more equal following this. (And, in wealth terms, the US has become less equal again since then).
What freedoms did that take away; what oppression did it create; how many millions died?
Attempts to make people economically more equal can succeed, if they are partial and gradual. Attempts to do so radically and quickly seems, historically, to quite often result in oppression and disaster.
[As did the Civil Rights Movement concern economic equality, e.g. "We have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check."]
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...
"[The United States had a] 30-year period of relatively lower [income] inequality between 1950–1980."
Records of wealth inequality pre-dating 1989 are hard to find, but wealth inequality has got consistently much worse in the US since that date.
I don't think anyone expressed an opinion on whether more democracy was a good thing or not? I think democracy is the best approach we have. And nobody mentioned Stalinism either. Your comment seems off-topic.
This reflexive comment regarding any sort of resemblance of socialism?
> I don't know but I'm not sure we should keep trying as millions of people end up dead every time someone gives it another whirl.
What is this sentence referring to if not trying to associate future attempts at egalitarianism with Stalinism?
Why are you asking me to explain things I didn't say?
> What is this sentence referring
It's referring to people trying to forcibly make everyone more-or-less equal.
You're asking me why I'm projecting Stalinism... but you brought up Stalinism, not me. If you think that matches Stalinism then that's something you've introduced to the conversation, not me. People opposed to Stalinism like Trotskyists were also in favour of dictatorship and violently forced equality. Stalin didn't have a monopoly on demonstrably shit ideas for oppressively and violently reshaping society.
If you're going to deny these things happened then I think you're crazy and I'm out the conversation.
Deny? I'm not denying anything, I'm saying that you're projecting those things onto people with fundamentally different ideas, a.k.a democratic ideas, not totalitarian.
It's played out like this again and again and again.
Maybe it's just not such a hot idea?
Who are these people that are not arguing for implementing their ideas democraticly?
What undemocratic ideas are they proposing?
What example do you have of something that started democratic but "then before you know it" ended up with oppression and totalitarianism?
Then stop trying if you find it too hard to contribute a serious comment!
You're asking me what I'm alluding to and what I'm projecting and asking me to explain things I haven't said and other backwards and inside-out things, rather than responding to the actual arguments I'm making myself. Seems like you're bringing some kind of baggage to the discussion that I'm not party to.
It's clear now that you're not going substantiate anything since it would just display your ignorance.
The original question was 'what’s wrong with trying to force everyone to be financially more or less equal'. What’s wrong with it is every time someone tries this it ends up hell on earth.
That’s it. That’s the whole point. No implications, no allusions.
If that's not good enough for you, sorry nothing I can do about that. Maybe move on?
> What’s wrong with it is every time someone tries this it ends up hell on earth.
No surprise that you latch on to tone policing either. I rest my case.
Please check the site guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
The current system of capitalism would also be described by some as a "living nightmare". The poorest would feel that they have little freedom, and a great deal of oppression. And while many millions will die under such a system, they will not be considered to have died because of the system, because the system is cleverly described as hands-off: they simply died, and it was unavoidable. Whereas any step towards socialism requires being more hands-on - and while a lack of policy is just as effective as a lacking policy, the second is somehow worse.
Perhaps. But there are too many examples of societies that, when they decided to take on that responsibility, were unequipped to do so without becoming horribly oppressive. And not being oppressive is part of their responsibility, too...
How would you describe the US now, out of curiosity?
...but almost every developed country with greater social safety nets and less inequality performs above the US on all measures of “safety,” whether you’re talking about actual violence or more abstract things like infant mortality. How do you square that material reality with the current state of the US?
I think so.
Since antiquity, the advantages and disadvantages of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy have been mooted. The Founding Fathers vested the efficiency of monarchy in the executive and its long-term orientation in the Supreme Court.
But there is unique strength in the union of long-term orientation and efficiency. It enables a portfolio of moonshots. Musk, Ford, Edison, Bezos and Gates each pursued long-term non-commercial (or semi-commercial) projects that benefited the public. The government could have done some of these things. But it didn’t. And it couldn’t have done all—there isn’t enough political bandwidth.
As long as that money doesn’t turn into military power, and its effects on our politics are checked, the existence of billionaires is a net positive.
You really have no proof that the govt could not have done these things, especially as govts has funded a lot of technology which has benefitted industry enormously (DARPANET, GPS, essential parts of Wi-fi).
Could you please account for all of the negatives that billionaires have caused and show us your arithmetic for how they come out as net positive.
>Since antiquity, the advantages and disadvantages of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy have been mooted.
No idea what this means to be honest.
Definitely not. They're exploiters, not producers.