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Comment by Day1 | Hacker News Reader

This is generally how socialist govt programs work. Give money to the rich and advertise it as helping the poor.

Please don't post generic ideological comments to HN. They make discussion more predictable and therefore more tedious. Also, they evoke pushback from people with opposite passions, and the result is usually nasty and boring. We're trying for something different here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Only beat by non-socialist government programmes, which give money to the rich and advertise it as such.

While all the while dangling that "And won't this program be awesome when you're one of the rich ones?" cookie in front of everyone. "Sure I might be poor now, but I am fully against any sort of wealth or inheritance taxes because it harms my fantasy that I'll be living on a private island by the time I die."

We give money to the rich and advertise it to the rich and hopefully temporarily poor.

Conversely, it also seems to be how capitalist designs work.

I ask: What designs actually help the working class?

Universal Basic Income.

UBI has the potential to shift the cost of ubi into everything else, then you are back to the starting point

This is not very great logic. People try and argue the same about minimum wage and it falls in its face, because economists who practice critical thinking note that when minimum wage has been raised historically, inflation generally did not follow.

After reading about the history and impact of minimum wages it is a policy that I vehemently oppose. Minimum wage started in most places as a way to price a group of workers out of the market so some other group could keep their jobs at the pay they liked. Additionally, minimum wage fails to deliver on its promise of helping low income groups. It makes less jobs available to low skill workers making it more difficult to acquire skills that would increase the pay they could demand. Finally, as with any price fixing scheme a black market arises. This would be cash under the table type jobs. What is wrong with two people agreeing on a price for some work that is below what some far away bean counter thinks is acceptable?

I wonder what exactly you’ve been reading or get to this conclusion.

A few years ago I would have wondered the same thing. After reading Basic Economic by Thomas Sowell I searched for more information to counter the book's claims on minimum wage. In the end I came to the conclusion that Sowell is right. Minimum wage is a net negative in society. Minimum wage is harmful to the low income groups the policy is supposed to help.

Example of job protection origins:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carriesheffield/2014/04/29/on-t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Bacon_Act_of_193...

https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bl...

Australia protecting jobs from Chinese workers pg 17

British Columbia protecting jobs from "Asiatics" pg 68

South Africa protecting jobs from "colored" workers pg 74

Index it to inflation. Increase taxes on the rich to pay for it. Replace a ton of other costly-to-administer social programs too.

All designs help those in power

None, because you can't get around markets even if you try to regulate them out of existence. As seen in the article countries with good unemployment benefits also have higher rates of unemployment during normal times. And don't forget every job being outsourced to China/Vietnam/Africa.

If you confiscated all of Jeff Bezos' net worth you'd get something like $1000 for each American, once.

The way to help the working class is to ensure economic growth happens, because a rising tide lifts all boats.

> The way to help the working class is to ensure economic growth happens, because a rising tide lifts all boats.

This is just trickle down economics. The same catchphrase as "grow the pie to share it".

It simply fuels money to the rich as well, in a larger proportion than to workers. We are actually experiencing the results of 40 years of that ideology and it doesn't look pretty.

Growth is also looking like a very unsustainable way to support civilization.

We haven't had real economic growth in the US since the 70's when deindustrialization first began. If you discount by the real estate market's return instead of CPI you have negative or flat real growth. CPI includes a lot of goods that are long run deflationary like TVs, food, and cars.

I'd point you to China for an example of what "rising tide lifts all boats" actually looks like. And to add to that - it matters a lot what kind of growth is driving GDP increases. If you're just powering growth by increasing immigration (aka working population) that's not increasing per-capita GDP.

> Growth is also looking like a very unsustainable way to support civilization.

Again, depends what kind of growth you're talking about.

> "grow the pie to share it"

Wealth redistribution has never worked in history. In every case where it has occurred there has been a flight of capital leading to underinvestment and poverty, or war.

> Wealth redistribution has never worked in history. In every case where it has occurred there has been a flight of capital leading to underinvestment and poverty, or war.

What do you classify as wealth redistribution?

"Wealth redistribution has never worked in history."

Are you sure about that? Do we still have kings and barons owning entire states as personal property?

Maybe not, but we have no better a system than ancient Rome where votes were bought by wealthy politicians from the upper class. But even if you limit examination to recent history:

- apartheid South Africa land redistributions led to "most of the farms [failing]" [1]

- Great Leap Forward in China confiscated huge amounts of wealth from landowners, gave it to the government and peasants, and caused massive famine

- "There is no wealth to distribute" in Venezuela [2]

- USSR literally killed millions by forcing individual farmers to work in large scale collective farms

- socialist reforms in other Latin American states coincided with periods of economic stagnation

I will also leave you with this link [3] to a breakdown of Swedish government tax revenues. You'll see the majority comes from taxes on labor and products (VAT) rather than taxes on capital and corporate revenue. So even in so-called democratic socialist states there is not a lot of wealth redistribution happening.

[1]: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-nov-21-la-fg-so... [2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/7/8/there-is-no-wealt... [3]: https://www.oecd.org/ctp/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-swede...

One need only to look at san fransisco to see how a rising tide lifts some boats but drowns many because there is no incentive to lift all boats, and all the incentives in the world to make sure a favorable few boats are lifted so very high

You wouldn't even get $1000 per person because confiscating Bezos's wealth involves no significant re-allocation of actual resources.

You just bump inflation up for a quarter and then everything goes back to normal.

A rising tide may lift boats that were sound and seaworthy to begin with.

If your economic boat has holes in it then a rising tide will drown you.

There are always people left behind by the rising tide. Sometimes you have to focus on fixing the boat instead of waiting for the tide.

Democratic socialism seems to be the label for the best mix of elements we've founds so far.

"Capitalism" doesn't mean "anything to do with markets", and tells you exactly who it's for right there in the name. Capitalism vs. not letting free markets exist to any substantial degree, is a false choice. Relying on that label as if approaches that aren't at least pretty close to what the US does are all diametrically opposed to capitalism and necessarily share nothing with it, is a way to end up arguing over things that aren't real and don't matter.

War (taking place somewhere else, that you're winning)

That seems like a zero sum game. For you to be winning there has to be an similar working class somewhere that is losing.

Outside the problem definition

And that's how we end up with refugee crises.

(amongst a plethora of other moral, ethical and humanitarian issues)

Nobody denying that

Available jobs with no unemployment recourse.

"trickle down economics" for general economic policy, and straight bribing the rich to act well during social programs.

The problem is "a fool and their money are soon parted", and the rich don't stay rich by parting with their money easily.

I don't see an easy answer.

Please enlighten us what proud plan that is brazenly American would you have enacted to keep the country from collapsing when everything was closing?

Maybe we shouldn't have closed down the economy which was the reason why these programs existed in the first place.

Well, the best option at the time would have been to not lock down at all and just carry on as usual: lockdowns appear to have had almost no effect on Covid deaths (https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...)

Even if that is an accurate assessment, the l goal if lockdown s was not only to stop people from getting sick, but to them from getting sick all at once & overloading the healthcare system in ways that would have caused more deaths. Getting the same number if people infected over a longer period of time is a useful tactic.

> keep the country from collapsing

Unless you have odd ideas about healthcare and hospitals, I think you overlooked a key part of OP’s question. Have you forgotten the horror that went down in NYC, Italy, etc? Hospitals were overwhelmed, patients piled up all over the place, the dead packed into refrigerated trucks, staff working endless hours, equipment shortages… and you suggest not locking down would have been the better course of action?! Wow.

Were you around in March 2020? You could have been banned from most communities for suggesting this.

A ltierature review by economists is possibly the least-valuable class of paper you could cite short of actual blog posts.

This specific paper throws out anything that even mentions any effect but mortality, any paper that compares real-world results to predictive models, and includes papers from various dumping grounds an non-peer-reviewed outlets. Any paper which attempts to introduce rigor is dismissed. Some of the papers cited are actual blog posts. This paper itself is self-published by one of the authors. The second figure disagrees with its own source (it cites six specific weeks early in the outbreak, during which time the stringency index did not change, but the x axis is a range of unsourced claims). It cites the GRADE handbook to support its hyperfocus on mortality rates (to the exclusion of literally all other considerations) but fails to note that the GRADE handbook is a health care guide and healthcare institutions were in the process of being overrun during the period they investigate, basically making the now-classic "but it only has an x% death rate" misdirection we're accustomed to hearing from Facebook propagandists.

In short, this document is almost but not entirely worthless. It is worthless as a public policy resource, but it is highly valuable if you want to make noise about how the Danes should have followed Sweden's example in 2020.

It's just as well they don't seem to have bothered minting a DOI for this, because web forum comments are the only places it's going to be cited. It's sloppy work, basically cherry-picking datasets, and then using them to affirm the consequent. I'm embarassed for the authors.

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