Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

The ideals of a crazy person like me would be "hike up the minimum wage insanely high, pry money from the pockets of the wealthy"...

Ignoring the normative reasons why one might oppose this, how would it even work practically?

At the level of most of us, wealth is a claim on consumption. So redistribution of wealth among the middle class does enable redistribution of consumption

At the level of rich people, it isn't - wealth represents the ability to direct productive enterprise (e.g., the ability to tell Facebook to do more photo sharing or invade privacy more). Suppose you were to tax Zuckerberg or Ellison and then redistribute, and now every American owns a couple of shares of Facebook and Oracle. How will this enable you to increase the consumption of the lower classes?

View on HN

I hope more people realize this. What the rich have more of beyond a threshold is power not objects. If you take the "stuff they own" and give it to the poor, each person on this planet will get very little. They will become a little more freer from the tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies... but it is unlikely that their standard of living will improve at all. We need to have more energy and resources to actually improve the conditions of the masses. Just moving the money around will not get us there. Things like dematerialization: "Turning Gramaphones into iPods into a feature on a tablet" is an example. Elimination of books and paper is another. Education is slowly moving in that direction. To learn something, the student needs to spend time and effort.... not gobs of money to buy a piece of paper. Medicines cost pennies to produce. We spend an inordiante amount of human effort to discover them. If we get better at this, we can spend a lot lesser on health-care. Such changes bring huge improvements. If you need to work only 3 days a week. You save 40% on travel. Earn less and spend less. You will have lesser traffic woes too. Parents could participate more in the education of their kids and take better care of the elderly. Asking people to mine with spoons instead of shovels so that they can all be busy is silly. Jobs are a milder version of slavery for most people. Let us liberate the planet from this as much as possible. But if people had to switch to a 3 day work week, we need to ensure that the quality of life should not drop but improve by doing so.

>They will become a little more freer from the tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies... but it is unlikely that their standard of living will improve at all.

That's enough of an improvement for our standard of living for me.

We need more freedom from the "tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies" and less toys and consumer products...

>We need more freedom from the "tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies" and less toys and consumer products...

Many would say the two go hand in hand, or are ultimately synonymous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com