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Comment by porsager | Hacker News Reader

Definitely! And yes, it will be a stark awakening for many. Many who for years have made their income, not by productive means, but by political means. The amount of people that can rise out of poverty instead will outnumber them easily, and so, the rest will adapt in the end. The 40+ year old with children were already hurting. They will hurt less.

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The system favouring certain sectors and millions building their career for these sectors is not the same as being employed by political means and being unproductive.

All the Russian engineers who become unemployed with the collapse of USSR were not leeches, they build some of the greatest machine mankind ever build and the scientists made huge contributions only to become taxi drivers. Those who can suck up the system will be able to suck it. No matter how libertarian, they will find out that infrastructure doesn't spontaneously occur in nature and there will be huge government spendings and the leeches will leech those.

I've been through this twice, I don't have faith in revolutions. If they actually manage to the things they say will do and govern properly and have sane government, it will take decades before it stabilises for the society. This is because people live around 80 years and they have different abilities and different capacities to adapt at different ages. It's very fundamental to human nature.

Well it of course depends on - if those sectors were massively propped up by goverment. That was most certainly the case for the engineers in USSR you mention, but even so - had there not been state conflict, and more open opportunities for foreign investment, how are we to say they couldn't have fared much better? We should catch up in 10 years and do a rain check on this ;)

Ten years? You guys should catch up in ten months.

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