Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% | Hacker News Reader

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

vanityfair.com

37 pointsexit10 comments

> Yet in our own democracy

We are a republic, not a democracy.

Edit: I don't know why the down votes, this is a fact, not an opinion.

There are many true facts that are not important or relevant to the subject at hand. This strikes me as semantic quibbling, and slightly deceptive in that the term "democracy" is used for more than just direct democracy. That definition completely ignores the idea of a representative democracy. But I'm jot sure it really matters that much to the bigger picture which is more painstakingly accurate.

My guess would be that the downvoters believe your comment adds nothing of substance to the discussion (though it appears to be up to positive score again).

It's not a "fact" since, as your link acknowledges, it's nothing more than a pedantic and rather archaic take on the word "democracy", as if only the Ancient Greek view of the world matters. Here's a modern definition http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy

I've heard that before and I'm genuinely curious. Why does it matter?

A democracy is mob rule where minorities can't win unless they persuade the majority. A republic (we're a democratic republic) elects a moral governing body (congress) to make informed moral decisions. Only part f their decisions are based on the whims of the public. In theory, the rest should be based on expert witnesses from all sides of any issue (hence why people testify in congress). This allows for immoral majorities to be shut down and vice versa.

Yes, rent seeking behavior is bad, I think we can all agree on that. But it's unclear that the increased inequality in America is due to increase in successful rent seeking.

The statistics doesn't tell the whole story though. Global inequality is down. [1] Even the poorest Americans are rich by global standards. The author cites globalization as a cause for lower middle-class income in America. But globalization actually has a inequality reducing effect, at least on the global scale.

It's also unlikely that capital-gains taxes has resulted in the top 1% getting richer considering that the stock market has had negative returns over the last decade.

[1]: "We find that various measures of global inequality have declined substantially and measures of global welfare increased by somewhere between 128% and 145%." http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15433

Please keep this type of thing in /r/politics

This article for some reason is too jumbled up. It is like somebody in a forum giving a wall of text full of many claims and statements that would be hard to verify in one reading.

Maybe I'm splitting hairs but saying something like "The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military . . ." without pointing to any data gives me an allergic reaction.

Is that true?

The closest I could find is:

"Members of the all-volunteer military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods. Only 11 percent of enlisted recruits in 2007 came from the poorest one-fifth (quintile) of neighborhoods, while 25 percent came from the wealthiest quintile."

To be fair the above data is measuring the top 20% (quintile) vs 1%, but that group still earns 50% of the overall wealth in America: