Out of curiosity, why former?
I don’t want to get more into that here because there be many dragons. But I’m easy to contact if you want :)
To people on the right it’s just completely naive. The first half is mathematically impossible and the second half is so wishy washy that it leaves room for everyone to claim they were born further back in one aspect or another on the proverbial board.
Because generosity is exploitable, it's better to exploit.
The point is not to force generosity on others. The point is to fight back against unjustified value extraction by the powerful and to democratize the workplace.
Socialists see charity as trying to patch over symptoms of an inherently deeper problem. It’s not a philanthropic movement. It’s a worker movement.
I guess everyone familiar with US history should find the quote to be utter bullshit, then.
The American Revolution, Civil War, Emancipation Proclamation, 19th Amendment, Great Depression, WWII, and Civil Rights Act were all major upheavals in society that brought on rapid change.
A lot of people died prematurely, but a lot of lives were later extended or saved to balance that out somewhat, and the system surely didn't collapse.
Politics is really just dividing up the shared resources, which is the root of that joke. Who cares about politics and doesn’t care about the resources part?
I guess after 30 people forget how to share per that quote. Never happened to me though. Personally I don’t even think it’s accurate, in my life I’ve never seen people swing from generous to… let’s just say “not”
The people who were always like that a little got more so.
You can tell online people isn't representative because they think it's a joke when this is actually pretty common among average people. (Who aren't on a single position on the political compass but are instead "cross-pressured".)
That's top left on the political compass... Is that not a thing in the US?
Not caring at all is certainly a choice I can see individuals making, but someone who is politically engaged and doesn't care about the resources, I can't even fathom it.
In my 20s I bought a house, started filling a brokerage account, started managing people -- so I certainly started to feel those incentives, but I am both principled enough to not act entirely out of self interest and wise enough to realize that I would have to be considerably wealthier before the capital-side incentives actually overtook the labor-side incentives in their importance to my bottom line.
Unfortunately, even these meager principles and this sliver of wisdom are rare enough that "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" abound.
I think societies, states and economies are emergent properties of people living together. But the more I know people, the less I believe overarching systems, models and grand narratives.
They are all wrong. Not only in respect of what should be. We can’t even agree on what is or has been.
When I was younger I was more confident that the world and institutions could easily be remade or replaced just by reasoning about them intelligently, and I was also more confident that everyone's interests and morality roughly converged, so not very much had to be done to allow us to get along and live together in harmony. (Nonetheless, I think it's likely that you'd have considered my adolescent beliefs to already be right-wing and to be lacking a consciousness of political theory.) Now I'm more apt to think there are things that we can't redesign, things we depend on that evolved with no one designing them, and lots of immutable constraints from human nature. Also that a great deal of the harmony we experience is fragile, and we might be much worse off without it.
(For what it's worth, I would also try to avoid making generalizations about people that imply what they're supposed to believe based on their age -- or making fun of people on the basis that their beliefs are supposedly out of step with their age.)
One response is to say we need to empower the State with more authority to regulate those problems, with the hope that it doesn't just cause even more problems.
Another response is to say we need less State authority, and find other ways of dealing with certain problems typically given to the State. Not every problem is a nail to hammer with the State.
Neither response is correct in all circumstances.
That sword cuts both ways.
The more you see of the world, the more you treasure what the current ideology has brought.