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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

Humans are the ones who own and deploy capital. It's ordinary people's savings and pensions. But people like to invent boogymen so that they don't have to take responsibility for their action, so they blame wall street and conveniently forget that its their own money that wall street is managing.

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Why does there have to be anyone held responsible at all? Couldn’t it be possible that given the present day’s circumstances everybody just does the best they can, and, nonetheless, it leads to regrettable results?

My example of Rome earlier want meant to point to their political elite as a Boogeyman. I meant it more like despite their best efforts an Industrial Revolution was virtually impossible in that environment.

Funny enough having slaves and oligarchy was exactly the kind of thing that held Rome back. I mean only to imply that in todays day and age, we have our version of that same situation, and similarly there is untold prosperity forever waiting to happen until the status quo changes.

> Why does there have to be anyone held responsible at all?

Because they were granted power, and responsibility was the other half of that equation.

Someone's having a "Are we the baddies?" moment :-)

Note that by "capital" meant material, not financial (although the latter reflects the former). Corporations are growing in power at a rate faster than people are. B2B grows faster than B2C.

Even then, private pension funds are a scourge indeed. State-managed PAYGO systems are far less destructive.

Beside, the distribution of economic power is heavily lopsided. Most people have close to none.

Those who have the brunt of it are setting up the system for their own benefit. Under the guise of FreeMarket™ we end up with an economy planned by the wealthy so that they can grow their fortune.

State managed pension systems are a pyramid scheme. Government shouldn't be involved in things that society can manage on it's own.

*can manage on its own well. The market manages - explicitly or through regulatory capture and toadies - a hell of a lot of things that the state probably should, like the Texas power grid. Markets are rarely efficient except in the very short term and very small scale.

The market is the best solution when the optimum is a maximum. Growth is absurd in many fields.

- Food => A steady state is optimal. Growth seeking directly leads to the obesity crisis

- Health => the sector should be working on planning its own obsolescence, not on growing.

- Housing => Ever increasing humanity's footprint is destructive and should be limited.

etc...

> - Health => the sector should be working on planning its own obsolescence, not on growing.

That's what it was before government intervention, at least in UK and US. Worker's organisations had employed their own doctors and managed very good, driving medical professionals wages down. Doctors associations asked governments to intervene, license their profession and used this licensing to punish doctors who would work for such organisations.

And now people see broken systems and think that even more intervention would improve things.

Technology itself has an emergent will that is independent of humans who create and operate it. A global technological system is not subject to rational human control.

Please see the book Technological Slavery by Dr. David Skrbina and the books of Jacques Ellul on this matter.

The book Technological Slavery is not "by" David Skrbina. It is by Theodore Kaczynski. Skrbina just wrote the "afterward" in that book.

Right, I thought the attribution was to him, since afaik he compiled Ted's writings.

No, Kaczynski compiled his own writings. He also wrote a second book, Anti-Tech Revolution. In Kacynski's latest edition of Technological Slavery Skrbina's introduction doesn't even appear. It was a shitty introduction anyway.

Ordinary people don’t have savings and pensions, at least not in the US.

Almost 50% of Americans directly or indirectly benefit from the stock market. You don't think they're ordinary?

That sounds like an argument that someone with an unusual amount of wealth and power might make to downplay the unusual amount of responsibility that wealth and power confers on them.

In today's economy power and wealth are not even close to evenly distributed.

Claiming that responsibility should be evenly distributed is therefore a highly disingenuous argument.

> Humans are the ones who own and deploy capital.

This is a silly argument, Hitler was human too.

> It's ordinary people's savings and pensions

Exactly, so my pention is being used to reward unrpoductive businesses that just do damage to society.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

No snowflake blames itself for the Moloch avalanche it creates.

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