Hacker News Reader

Comment by surgical_fire | Hacker News Reader

> And it just so happens that the current system we came up with - a mixed market with a strong, democratically elected public authority, yet freedom for individuals to pursue taxable profits

This is naive to the point of absurdity, when the rich and powerful quite often are gifted loopholes for the profits to not be taxable, with a wink and a nudge from the "democratically elected public authority".

I would certainly love to live in your illusion that "we are privileged to live in a society where the powerful are so limited in what they can do with their power" when they are constantly bailed out from their mistakes and get literal "get out of jail free cards" from their misdeeds. Things that would get you in prison get them a slap on the wrist at most.

View on HN

> naive to the point of absurdity, when the rich and powerful quite often are gifted loopholes for the profits to not be taxable

This is not how I read OP. You’re reading a Panglossian “we’re in the best of all worlds.” I read we’ve found a good solution, but it’s a work in progress.

Democracy alone has evolved through the centuries, ranging from electoral fetishism to enlightened autocracy. Progressive taxation, meanwhile, is a mostly modern invention. Yes, it’s easier to take a cheap shot at how the rich are powerful, but that’s OP’s other point, the rich are always powerful. How they are incentivised to use that power, and how they accumulate it, is a much more productive (and intellectually challenging) discussion than pointing out we aren’t in a utopia. (We know that. Everyone knows that.)

The rich will always be powerful. The irony is that we do live in the best of all worlds, but it still sucks. There's no utopia, there's only dystopia.

And I disagree that democracy will ever be improved, at least not with humans at the helm.

> I disagree that democracy will ever be improved, at least not with humans at the helm

Again, this is an easy and thoughtless take without a proposed alternative. (Benevolent AI is just benevolent dictatorship with a veneer.)

It's also gratingly at odds with very modern history. History that, granted, is not part of our public education corpus.

I proposed no alternative because there is no alternative.

A benevolent AI would not work as humans will be the ones to define the constraints under with the benevolent AI operates. Make no mistake, the ruling class will define constraints that will give them more power.

My remark about "humans at the helm" may have given you the false impression that I am optimistic about technology solving our societal woes. I apologize for that. I state that there's no eucatastrophe to save us from ourselves. My remark was intended as a sardonic statement that while there are humans, nothing will ever be improved. These problems are as old as humanity, and will only cease being problems when humanity ceases to exist.

It's pretty easy to improve democracy, get better constituents.

Also it's pretty easy to list actual small tweaks. Does that count as improving democracy itself?

Education works, even if its "efficacy" is pretty low.

>It's pretty easy to improve democracy, get better constituents.

Simple solutions aren't the same as easy ones.

Education absolutely does work wonders on social and economic fronts, but it is unevenly distributed and the administration of it is easily subverted.

Everything from wage theft to dumping millions of gallons of crude oil in bodies of water is little more than a fine if you are a registered corporation.

Exactly. Democracies, it turns out, are actually very difficult to fully implement for a plethora of reasons. We, for the most part in the "west" live in a technocracy to which governing bodies are subservient and acquiescent. My personal desire is that as our current world continues to unravel, enough people wake up to this fact and say, "no more". That would be a grand step towards a better democracy.

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Applies to the democracy + capitalism combination, as well.

We can try to improve upon it, but should be carefull to not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

"Except for all the others, democracy is the worst form of government"

One can believe that the combination of democracy and capitalism is the best thing humanity could come up with, and realize it still sucks.

Humans are tribal above all else. We evolved to cooperate on small bands hunting animals in some African savannah, not to cooperate in large scale as the world we create requires. Any government system we come up with will become dysfunctional because we are unfit for the world we created.

My point still stands. The ruling class is as powerful as they always were, and operate on rules designed by them, so that they can better oppress the lower classes. And I don't advocate that a different system would be any different. There will always be a ruling class.

> the rich and powerful quite often are gifted loopholes for the profits to not be taxable.

Those loopholes aren't free and their nature is typically temporary. One example would be tax cuts in exchange for committing to provide N jobs.

Nothing is more permanent then temporary loopholes.

They exist only for long enough time until the next loophole is put in place.

> One example would be tax cuts in exchange for committing to provide N jobs.

Gotta love this one. Trickle down economics at its best. "Thanks for going through the trouble of getting richer by expanding your business. Here's some extra tax exemptions for your sacrifice. The silly peasants will pay taxes in your stead".

They’re not free, but they’re cheaper than taxes.

One counterexample would be Peter Thiel's Roth IRA.

They get a tax cut and commit to paying N people less than the value they create for their companies, what's the cost? You must have accidentally erased that part while editing.

> tax cuts in exchange for committing to provide N jobs.

Does this ever work? That is does it work better than not giving tax cuts in the long run.

Committing costs very little, especially if the tax advantages are not clawed back if the jobs fail to materialise. How does one really measure the number of jobs created by the tax cut versus those that might well have been created even if there were no tax cut.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com