King Charles' first Christmas speech reflects cost-of-living crisis | Hacker News Reader

King Charles' first Christmas speech reflects cost-of-living crisis

bbc.com

31 pointsrntn26 comments

"Wow," I thought, "this is going to be an interesting slice of 17th century history."

Why this flagged? It's a simple news article that reports what he said.

Oh if only we had a super wealthy patron of sorts who could eliminate food banks with one squiggle in a cheque book

Looking at the current estimates from the UN, if you completely liquidated the British monarchy and got good value for all the seized assets, you could feed the hungry for 6 months.

They cost 345 million a year in money that we give to them.

If you give one million dollars to every person, a sandwich would cost one million dollars.

Because the farmers, truck drivers, slaughterhouse workers, butchers, truck drivers, would quit their job immediately upon receiving 1 million dollars.

It's a fallacy that giving money to people would solve poverty. It would simply force the system to recalibrate so that everyone asks for more money.

Food banks. People are living off food banks. No one is getting a million dollars but they be should at least be able to afford food.

That's a simplistic example with extreme inputs. If you gave the people earning the least, in a country like the UK, a sensible increase it doesn't follow that all prices will rise to match it, although they might rise a small amount.

The reasons being that the total income and spending power of those on minimum wages and benefits is small compared to the total economy, and that each working person in the supply line of sandwiches is only a small proportion of the sandwich cost, i.e. once you get to a certain scale you can churn out a lot of sandwiches per worker.

Sure you can cite silly and extreme examples like "give everyone 1 million dollars." But how about an analysis of "raise minimum wage by 5 dollars per hour and increase benefits by 50 dollars per week"?

How about we take the things that are necessary for a functioning life, and make them provided to each person based on a universally understood base tax layer.

Things like food, shelter, electricity, heat, water, healthcare, etc.

Just… start there. That there are hungry people in the same world as there are people with such billions amassed and through exploitation… is just deplorable.

Then you would be artificially raising the population capacity, causing population to grow exponentially until reaching the new capacity, determined by the point in which you cannot keep providing those things for free anymore. This creates a much bigger problem than the one you initially tried to solve and would lead to a total catastrophe.

Economic hardship is the population feeling the backpressure from what essentially is the reality of living in a world with limited resources. You can decide to ignore those limits but that does not end well.

sure: if you extend things to the extreme. Ignoring that illogical connection between “feeding people” and “pop growth” - there is no, that I have read, indication that an increase in pop will become untenable, under a system designed to take care of its people. (Not under capitalism, for instance.)

Under a system that ensures housing, food, health, education, you also need some form of population control.

The premise is that if you lower mortality rates you lower birth rates, but that's because once enough people survive you reach a capacity, which is established through economic pressure.

Where do you (how do you) connect housing, food, essential services to a lower mortality rate and further, how do you connect more people (consuming yet paying taxes) to a capacity as you mention it?

Charles, give your families wealth back to the people you took it from and resign.

Why was this flagged?

Perhaps some consider it off-topic for Hacker News.

I think it was a positive message, worth listening to. And I am not from the UK and I don't belong to the Church of England.

The video production was good too. I much rather watch this than any garbage from TikTok.

Well it is an awfully rich person telling us how bad he feels for our lot in life, much like a lot of the startup founders with rich parents trying their luck with multiple moon shots and sympathising with the state of the world they don't actually live in. So right up HN's street I would say.

I'm not sure Mr. Charles knows what cost of living really is: he's neved had to pay for anything.

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