Comment by jojojaf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jojojaf | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What you're telling me is a more explicit part of the capitalist promise. My statement is absolutely part of it too.

Governments predate capitalism. They don't predate wealth inequality. Part of the purpose of the original formation of governments was to tackle wealth inequality in a feudal system.

One of the things that stops people at the lower end from innovating and forming for example small businesses is lack of resources. Redistributing wealth would allow mean more resources available to wider range of people. I'm sure improving bureaucratic processes for small business startups is also great thing to do.

I have a PhD in particle physics and I think that cold fusion is basically completely unviable in any situation. I may be proven wrong. I agree that taxation is a complex problem to solve, which is why I was advocating allocating more resources to this earlier on. 'Rich people who have far more resources than they have any need for and live wildly extravagant lifestyles don't need to redistribute any of their wealth because one day we'll crack a high yield problem and everyone will be able to be wealthy' is a very dangerous viewpoint as far as I'm concerned. It's clear that the current stable climatic state that our planet sits in is becoming strained by human economic activity, and the capitalist promise of 'there will always be more' is becoming more complex to fulfill. There is a clear solution which exists now, and it is to redistribute wealth.

I don't think we'll likely to come to any kind of agreement about these topics so I'm going to leave this conversation here.

> I think that cold fusion is basically completely unviable in any situation

So do I.

> Rich people who have far more resources than they have any need for and live wildly extravagant lifestyles don't need to redistribute any of their wealth because one day we'll crack a high yield problem and everyone will be able to be wealthy' is a very dangerous viewpoint as far as I'm concerned.

It's a bad idea to base your emotional conception of capitalism on so few people they don't matter to the system. In fact, it's a bad idea to have an emotional view of an economic system in general. But I think this is also false.

(If you just want to say "steal" but use the word "redistribute", you'd be in plentiful company, but I'm assuming by "redistribute" you mean "tax".)

Whenever anyone spends money, it's repeatedly taxed. It's taxed with VAT (UK-specific, but this adds 20% to the purchase price already). It's taxed because of all the fuel tax paid to get the good/service going. It's taxed with all the income tax paid to the people who made/supplied the thing. It's taxed with the employee tax (National Insurance in the UK) for those employees. It's taxed via the corporation tax paid by the company that supplied it. So much tax is paid on every good.

Additionally, governments inflate currencies, so governments can tax savings by devaluing them.

Talking as though none of this is present, and we're somehow in a world where barely any tax is paid seems beyond ludicrous. So much tax is paid, at every level, all the time.

> It's clear that the current stable climatic state that our planet sits in is becoming strained by human economic activity, and the capitalist promise of 'there will always be more' is becoming more complex to fulfill. There is a clear solution which exists now, and it is to redistribute wealth.

We already tax people. If you think this is a clear soluton to the climate, you might need to elaborate as to why that is.

When I talk about the richest people living extravagant lifestyles I need to tone down my emotions, but when you talk about them being crushed by the weight of taxation you don't appear to have made an effort to do so yourself.

Thank you for this discussion. Goodbye.

I think people who are emotionally biased against people with this much money often do want to crush them. That's why the phrase "eat the rich" exists.

Maybe. Let me know if they're tasty. Best wishes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com