"At the same time, the wealthy sought to escape their social responsibilities – think of white flight to the suburbs as well as exit plans to oceans and islands."
Huh?
Huh?
When in reference to exiting to oceans and islands, wealthy people have benefited from the stable society in which their wealth grows in. Their properties are protected by police enforcement, etc. In return they are supposed to pay taxes to fund the society their wealth grows in. When they exit to oceans/islands, they take their wealth with them, and society doesn't benefit from the investment in allowing wealthy people to grow their wealth within them (eg. the policing of wealthy property vs the policing of tax fraud).
And while "white flight" due to bona fide racism certainly has happened, it seems like a low-resolution take to frame all such choices that way today.
I grew up in a fairly rural area, but I've lived close to a big city for the last few years. Am I also morally in the wrong by choosing to leave? How many months of living as a white person in a city does it take before we're morally culpable for everything that happened there? Is it just white people or other groups you don't see as privileged?
And it's really missing the elephant in the room to not acknowledge that these cities still have significant tax bases and revenues they benefit from, yet voters near-monolithically support the same candidates and policies that contribute to many of the worst problems. Being a "good" white person by shoveling more tax money into the system that's continuously affirmed by voters and leading to bad outcomes seems emphatically less moral.
If you don't want to do that then, in my opinion, it's better to leave than just sit around and complain hoping someone else will take care of problems. In my experience, San Francisco is a great example of this. A huge part of the population, many of them new, just complain incessantly without putting in any amount of effort to make it better. They'll vote and complain online and feel like they did their duty. It was by far my least favorite thing about the city and one thing keeping me from moving back.
No, gentrification is rich people moving to where poor people live and pricing existing residents out (often, leading to landlords evicting existing residence to remodel or sell units to a new class of residents).
Because of racial wealth distribution, it often has a racial/ethnic dimension, but that's not the essence of gentrification.
Whether it's immoral on an individual level to move to such a city is debatable. It's not unreasonable to want to raise your children in a community with low crime and good schools. On the other hand you could argue that choosing to move to a city with immoral laws is itself a way of supporting those laws, and in doing so you become partially responsible for their outcomes.
"Working class" is your designation, but I don't think anyone is entitled to live in any specific place (especially when they don't currently live there). Even drawing the line at the city level is arbitrary--should every neighborhood have all social classes of people mandated for living in it? Every apartment building? I just fundamentally disagree that laws reducing population density are inherently immoral simply because they might become desirable places to live that make it more expensive to live there.
> On the other hand you could argue that choosing to move to a city with immoral laws is itself a way of supporting those laws, and in doing so you become partially responsible for their outcomes.
Who's morally responsible for the laws and policies resulting in high crime, bad schools, rampant homelessness, and high taxes endemic to urban areas (at least in the US)?
You have a lot of options. You could blame the voters for electing the folks who make the laws. You could blame the politicians, since they frequently do things the voters wouldn’t know about or approve of. Since unintended consequences are a thing, maybe nobody is to blame.
Some theorize that a society where poor people live all together in one area while the middle class and rich live somewhere else naturally leads to those kinds of problems.
I cannot parse this statement.
The first claim is people are not entitled to live in any specific place.
Then it is clarified that people who currently live in a place are more entitled to live there than people who do not currently live in a place.
The former statement would imply that if you force someone off of the land they are occupying, then you can now occupy that land. The latter statement contradicts this sentiment. Which is it?
When a suburb becomes an island to retreat, and the populace there is established in order to maneuver against broader social support is it really that different than a single wealthy person leaving to an island and not paying taxes?
Additionally, not evaluating how this phenomenon affects today is quite strange. Redlining (the refusal of offering financial services to neighborhoods of black or brown people) is something that's being discovered as still happening as recently as a few years ago.
I touched on it. That's where I acknowledge it happened, but that it'd be a low-resolution view to apply it to everyone today. Unfalsifiable claims of racism are... unfalsifiable.
> When a suburb becomes an island to retreat, and the populace there is established in order to maneuver against broader social support is it really that different than a single wealthy person leaving to an island and not paying taxes?
Yes. Disliking high crime, bad schools, chronic homelessness, high taxes, and an unwillingness to acknowledge the policies that contribute to them is different from hiding wealth to avoid social responsibilities.
Your argument seems to be based on the premise that city governments are always doing what is good, moral, and effective for the best of society. They're not, though, and that's why people move elsewhere. Sometimes (shocker) there's more to it than racism and white supremacy.
> Additionally, not evaluating how this phenomenon affects today is quite strange. Redlining (the refusal of offering financial services to neighborhoods of black or brown people) is something that's being discovered as still happening as recently as a few years ago.
It's illegal and wrong, and anyone who does it should be punished severely. But it does not imply that someone today choosing to move to the suburbs is making an immoral decision.
So if you get stinking rich and then don't contribute back in the form of tax, you're shirking your responsibility.
The workers you employ didn't train themselves, and your profit wouldn't exist without them toiling their lives away.
Society, as such, doesn't exist. There is no corporeal "society". The only reality is other individuals, living their lives, interacting with you or not. In a civilized society they're able to interact - or not - by mutual consent.
The belief that every individual exists only to serve the group is false and evil.
Because actually, individuals as such do not exist, the only reality is there is just a bunch of living cells, interacting with each other.
The idea that cells only exist to serve the need of an individual is false and evil.
Thinking about Jeff Bezos. I feel that society as a whole has had a lot more to gain from his endeavors than he might be able to reap back from society in his lifetime. Unless he becomes an immortal meld between man and machine and rules the Empire of Mankind for millennia to come.
What value did you ascribe to a civilized non violent society, with sufficiently low theft rates, that allows a business to deliver door to door items worth hundreds and thousands of dollars?
Or a society that educated its populace to be sufficiently literate and develop a network of devices that can communicate so that Bezos’ website can operate?
The point is these types of comparisons are fruitless. There are numerous dependencies and benefits, both ways. The only thing that matters is what conditions lead to a better functioning society.
That’s fine. I don’t.
One of the core claims of capitalism being an improvement over centrally planned economies is that no entity is capable of making all the most efficient decisions without being an actor in the transaction. The decentralized nature of the free market is supposed to create efficiencies as the actors closer to the transaction and with better information, make more efficient transactions.
Mega rich billionaires are massive concentrations of wealth and as long as they control how it is deployed they are becoming closer and closer to the heads of centrally planned economies. The fact that they are private individuals doesn’t change that fact.
In my most charitable view, billionaires are a sign of a market failure, as in a competitive market they never would have had the margins to accumulate that much extra capital