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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> Can you provide more details why you don’t want to live in a world where everyone is more or less equal?

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.

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In particular, you can only create a world where everyone is equal by taking away the freedom to not be equal.

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.

But that's not how any of it works to begin with. Inequality isn't caused because people produce proportionally more or less. The very wealthy generally own property that has appreciated in value, or have inherited it. Among working people, the differences fundamentally come from labor markets, not our productivity. An engineer might make more or less than someone else on their team, but they both make multitudes more than the people assembling beams for an apartment building.

You should totally enjoy the freedom to be a productive member of society, that's not where inequality originates.

> An engineer might make more or less than someone else on their team, but they both make multitudes more than the people assembling beams for an apartment building.

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 want to have more than you, and I can get it by [exploiting labour and existing material resources]... why 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.

> The world which he imagines... with some a little richer but not too much so, is not one in which I want to live.

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.

>Creating equality usually ends up involving taking away freedom and oppressing people.

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?

You're talking about making people politically and legally equal. But attempts to make people economically equal are what the rest of us are discussing here. Your example of the Civil Rights movement is therefore rather irrelevant.

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.

No, I was talking about economic equality.

[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.

You're projecting Stalinism onto people who are fundamentally seeking more democracy. It just shows your own ignorance, wilful or not.

> fundamentally seeking more democracy

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.

> 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.

This reflexive comment regarding any sort of resemblance of socialism?

We're not talking about socialism, or Stalinism. You're reading words that we didn't use. And I didn't say there's anything wrong with socialism - I didn't even mention it! I live in a country with many socialist policies such as socialised healthcare. It's almost universally supported here. But I don't think most people here would want to try to force everyone to be more-or-less equal.

So what are you referring to with that sentence?

Are you asking what the whole topic of the thread is? People trying to radically force everyone to be equal.

Why are you being deliberately obtuse? The sentence I quoted:

> 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 being deliberately obtuse?

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.

So which "whirls" killing millions are you referring to?

Have you really never heard of any https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...?

If you're going to deny these things happened then I think you're crazy and I'm out the conversation.

Finally. So it's just about the USSR and its off-springs as I thought.

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.

People aren't arguing for democratic ideas though, they're arguing to enforce more-or-less equality. People don't try to achieve that through democracy. They seem to pretty much inevitably decide that 'just to get started it's ok to force it because the ends justify the means...' then before you know it - oppression and totalitarianism.

It's played out like this again and again and again.

Maybe it's just not such a hot idea?

Could you be less vague and specify examples of people and ideas that you are referring to? It's hard to reply to these vague generalizations.

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?

> It's hard to reply to these vague generalizations.

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.

What a pathetic non-reply. Those are direct questions to vague statements you made in that comment.

It's clear now that you're not going substantiate anything since it would just display your ignorance.

You're just being abusive now. I'm not sure why you feel the need to resort to this kind of language.

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?

Sigh, and we're back to vague generalizations with zero effort nor intent to go beyond superficialities:

> 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.

It's not 'tone policing' to ask someone to not use personal abuse!

Please check the site guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

Ultimately this is only because such systems are forced to take on responsibility that our current system completely ignores. Public opinion seems to be that if you can't do something well, it is better to not bother.

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.

Yes this is all true the current system is also bad, but I think anytime someone tries to go in and fix it radically enough to have everyone more-or-less equal it's an absolute shit-show, and seems to open some kind of hell-gate of deliberate oppression, which yes I do actually think is somehow morally worse than apathetic oppression.

> Ultimately this is only because such systems are forced to take on responsibility that our current system completely ignores.

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...

> Because every time someone tries this to create a world like this... it ends up a living nightmare.

How would you describe the US now, out of curiosity?

For all the complex and serious problems the US has, I think it's still generally a stable and safe place with plenty of opportunity and nice people. I'd feel safer there than many other historical places that had aimed more aggressively at more-or-less equal societies. Few people seem to risk their lives to defect from the US. And they wouldn't even have to because the US lets you leave!

> I'd feel safer there than many other historical places that had aimed more aggressively at more-or-less equal societies.

...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 in general moving towards allowing people to achieve equality themselves is good. I think going hell-bent on more-of-less-equal starts to bring out the monsters in people.

I’m sorry to belabor the point, but the US fails wildly on this metric as well. Voter suppression, gerrymandering and other anti-democratic tactics are widespread, the two party systems limits democratic choice to very narrow, right-leaning bounds, far less than that available in other representative democracies. Protests from the left are almost uniformly met with violence. By what measure in the US is one allowed to “achieve equality”? Even if we consider the advancement of civil rights, the average material conditions for the poor and most minority groups have been on the decline for decades. Likewise, the number of incarcerated people in the US far surpasses explicitly authoritarian regimes like China.

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