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Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

> I've learned the hard way that many people in this country do NOT actually care about democracy.

Our democracy has been eroding for decades. Congress collects paychecks while gridlocking progress, even on bipartisan issues that could help ordinary citizens. Super PACs and "campaign contributions" (aka bribes) ensure the wealthy control both parties. Democrats and Republicans both spend recklessly and divide the nation. Democrats won't admit it, but their approach has driven half the country to prefer what the Republicans have become: essentially a cult.

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How do you fix wealth inequality? That's what I want to know. I feel like we're so far past the point of no return. I'm sure they're all eagerly rubbing their hands together waiting to be a Duke in Peter Thiel's new global Monarchy.

The most reliable way that has been found is to make everyone poor. Once disposable resources appear someone always becomes a more shrewd trader, even if means if production is otherwise equal. Then they trade those things for a greater share of the means of production...

High tax on the rich. We did it in the UK in the first half of the 20th century with tax as high as 90%. But to do that you have to vote it in and it's not really popular with the electorate these days.

It's popular, but no party run with that agenda.

Preserving wealth is actually an uphill battle. It likes to leak; the wealthy need the help of systems and institutions to keep their largesse intact. If you want it to diffuse throughout society, stop guarding it, stop bailing them out, and tax them like you mean it.

So many policy decisions are about who to throw under the bus; flip the incidence from "mostly people without wealth" to "mostly people with wealth".

The traditional method is fairly ugly but if someones actions kill enough people at some point it is reasonable to kill them too.

> How do you fix wealth inequality? That's what I want to know.

This has been a topic of research for a long time in social science. Wealth redistribution via taxation, education, and strong social safety nets. There is some deadweight loss due to taxation in a single-shot model, but allows for more stable regimes when considering the long term.

Except the real issues are immigration and globalization.

The NYT did a couple of great podcasts about both issues: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/magazine/nafta-tarriffs-e...

A majority of Americans have never supported either policy, but the credentialed elites in both parties have done so for decades. And both things have been accomplished largely through executive action. E.g. turning H1B from a temporary worker program into a pathway to permanent residency, or free trade agreements.

If anyone else would simply commit to severely immigration and free trade, Trump’s hold on the GOP would evaporate. We have seen it happen in other countries—in Denmark the left capitulated on immigration and everything is fine again.

> Except the real issues are immigration and globalization.

The US is a country of immigrants, and has been so since it's inception.

H1Bs are not about limiting immigration at all. They are about having a workforce without basic rights and bestow corporations with the power of uprooting an employee's life and banishing them from the land if he even dares stepping out of line.

The axes hanging over the regular folk's head, such as corporate control over access to healthcare, is not enough to completely control the workforce. They still feel they need more control. That's why mechanisms like H1Bs exist, and why illegal immigrants are still widely employed and the ruling regime punishes workers but always protects the employers who insist in hiring them almost exclusively.

> The US is a country of immigrants, and has been so since it's inception.

As JD aptly put it, that’s wrong,[1] but, regardless, so what? America is first and foremost, a democratic republic. Sentimental 20th century notions designed to assimilate the last wave of mass immigration have no binding power on the electorate. Americans are entitled to decide that they’re done with immigration, and it’s the civil service’s job to put that into effect.

[1] The US is a nation created British settlers. Once that society was created, immigrants moved into it. There’s a fundamental difference between immigrants and settlers. https://youtu.be/ZpbYtZ5La8U?si=5gdZ-MGamBwZ4djb. Italian Americans speak English and live within a system of laws and civic customs inherited from a thousand years of English tradition and history. But English Americans don’t speak Iroquois or adhere to an Iroquois legal system or traditions.

> As JD aptly put it, that’s wrong (...)

That's a mind-numbing stupid take which is rejected by the faintest cursory ancestry analysis of the US population. The 2020 census alone points out that there is as many german americans as English americans, and I'm not seeing racist anti-immigration rants targeting germans. They are the predominant ethnic group in the Northeast and Midwest regions. If not by immigration then how do you explain their presence?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Americans

For a clue, check where Trump's grandfather was from and how he ended up in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Trump

The total number of european americans don't even reach 40% of the population, which is nothing new.

So if not from immigration then how do you explain that fact?

There’s many ethnic Germans in America, but there’s almost nothing German in broader American law and civic society. Thats the distinction between the settler population (British people and African slaves, with a relatively small proportion of Dutch, Spanish, and French) and the immigrant population (everyone else).

America is a country that happens to have a lot of people of immigrant ancestry. That’s an incidental feature. Because it’s a physically large country that was for a long time relatively unsettled. But that doesn’t define the country. There isn’t anything that commits the country to any particular policy re: immigration. In fact, the massive German, Irish, and Italian immigration of the 19th century led to a decades-long restriction of immigration staring in the 1920s, where the foreign born population dropped from 15% (similar to now) to under 5% by 1970.

> There’s many ethnic Germans in America, but there’s almost nothing German in broader American law and civic society.

Irrelevant. The disputed fact was that America was not a country of immigrants. The idiotic assertion raised in the parent post is a refresh of the argument that the Mayflower landed settlers and not immigrants, which is nonsense due to the fact that the bulk of the population of the US are undoubtedly immigrants.

Does that make America “a nation of immigrants?” Is it a defining characteristic or an incidental one? America is also a majority white nation. I wouldn’t say that’s a defining characteristic that should define our future immigration policies.

> Does that make America “a nation of immigrants?”

The vast majority of Americans are immigrants.

> Is it a defining characteristic or an incidental one?

Is this even a question? Again, the vast majority of Americans are immigrants.

> I wouldn’t say that’s a defining characteristic that should define our future immigration policies.

You can try to move the goalpost as far as you'd like and blow as many ignorant and ill-informed xenophobic dog whistles as you'd care to blow. You cannot outrun the fact that the US is a nation of immigrants.

I simply read your post to make it make sense. That is, you’re saying “America is a nation of immigrants” to refer to some articulated principle—like free speech or property rights—that should compel the electorate to adhere to some policy going forward.

If by “nation of immigrants” you mean merely the fact that most Americans have immigrant ancestry, your original post makes no sense. Why would that incidental fact have any bearing on what America’s immigration policy should be going forward? Mere accidents of history don't compel a democratic republic to maintain any particular course.

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