Rich people get paid for being rich when there is growth.
If real growth can't be had, fake growth (inflation and debt) will do, since it serves the same ultimate purpose just as well: paying rich people for being rich.
The beatings will continue until the growth resumes.
People conveniently forget that the Terror soon turned against completely innocent victims and eventually led to establishment of an authoritarian military regime that set out to conquer entire Europe, creating vicious reactionary backlash from its enemies, which eventually stifled liberal thought and societal progress on the continent for two more generations.
I will take the English "let us have a non-violent gradual development" way anytime.
If Lavoisier could be guillotined because "the Republic does not need chemists", how much better do you think that programmers would fare in similar situations? There is plenty of people who resent them for just having bigger income than them. Once you run out of the rich, the mob and the guillotine will demand more victims, and neither will be particularly picky.
Yup [1]. If you're a billionaire, you almost certainly win in the aftermath of an American violent revolution à la the French or Russians.
The country would fall into chaos while we hung our academics, minorities and upper middle classes. Then they would jet back in with foreign backing to carve up America's riches while becoming even more blazingly rich than they are under a democracy.
Academics I could see being tried and hanged. Minorities you'd simply eliminate as everyone in every nation has done throughout history. There is no need to give a trial or hanging to minorities. You just off them. (But, I guess, to be fair, offing minorities happens in almost every nation revolution or no revolution.)
Upper middle classes however? I don't know man? They're typically the ones doing the hanging. Not the ones being hanged. In fact, the upper middle classes were the ones most responsible for the French revolution. The upper middle classes came out of the revolution with rights, which they didn't have before. As well as a much larger share of the economic pie. They actually did the best in the French revolution as a class. And it came mostly at the expense of the poor on one end, and the aristocracy on the other.
Still, terrible times. Nothing good ever comes of a society that hangs people who are deemed too learned, and therefore, suspicious. Nor of societies that off minorities. Historically, those societies typically meet their crashes much more swiftly. Only now the crash is met with no one left to blame but themselves. Add to all that chaos opportunistic people in the middle class denouncing their bosses in the aristocracy, and even each other, out of resentment. I mean, man, you're left with a place that's probably gonna be a really good place not to be.
Doctors, lawyers, low-level executives. The ones with single and double-digit millions in retirement accounts and real estate value. For Exhibit A, see Mangioni: mid-level executive barely scraping into the 1% by wealth who didn’t have personal security.
> Nothing good ever comes of a society that hangs people who are deemed too learned, and therefore, suspicious
Right. This is the story of violent revolutions. The masses are told fever dreams of riches ahead. But they generally wind up poorer than before because the single track to date of revolutions that seek to depose not only the head of state but also the elite is bloodshed for the poor and evacuation for the rich.
The French arisocracy mostly survived the Revolution not only with their lives but also their riches. Those that lost lands partly had them restored under Napoleon and the Bourbons. The degree of their survival is so great that it's debated whether the nobility benefited from the Revolution [1].
Today's rich and their wealth are more mobile. Idiots fantasising about violent revolution are mostly digging their own graves or playing into the hands of oligarchs unhappy with the democratic status quo.
What are a few factory owners going to do against thousands of workers who are completely fed up? They are losing their jobs any way, what is stopping them from burning the factory down? This is a country where violence is not unheard of.
Why do they need to, they'll just have the government print more money and give it directly to said billionaires.
I mean why bother resist against a tyrannical government right? sheesh. Relevant username.
I sympathize but am extremely frustrated at this defeatist idea.
Yes they run it, but only because people in general fail to coordinate around some other way of doing things. It's coordination plain and "simple". The rich doesn't run the world. They tell people what to do and people run the world as they command because there seems to be no better alternative.
Why have we stopped trying out better ways to coordinate? We somehow have come to believe that mass coordination outside of corporations can't be improved upon.
To a large extent because somehow "that serves no purpose", "any alternative is a scam" and "blockchain evil" propaganda have been very effective in an environment where greed has been distracting too many from the damn point.
We need to relearn and establish new ways to run perpetual and huge coordination efforts outside of corporate systems and government without fear or greed as necessary driving forces.
The first step is to start trying ans honestly explore options.
I also suspect that another factor is ever increasing acceptance of the immutability of debt. When most people are stuck in debt they have to keep running in the treadmill.
Imagine if there was a non-blockable way for everyone to vote on a universal debt cancellation event - "Should we all just from now on ignore any debt incurred before today? ¤ yes, ¤ no".
Just look at the student loan forgiveness debacle. It seems our population would sooner vote in capital punishment for not paying debt.
Well there's always the option of periodic debt cancellation. Such ideas are not untested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_debt_relief
Where? Genuinely curious.
Thiel, for one.
Vs the rich people, who can set aside a million, or ten million, or whatever, and pay people to propagandize on their behalf. A million bucks a year can pay 10 people to work full time and go on cable news programs to be "interviewed", or write think pieces in newspapers, or spread misinformation on social media.
And yeah, its defeatist. I don't know how we overcome this until people are fed up enough to prioritize it, and are willing to stick their necks out.
I get this but I'm not really talking about making sacrifices or having people who don't have time spending a lot of it. I'm just wondering why not even those that seem to have a lot of time and mental fortitude seem to discuss or be able to come up with alternative ideas that people pick up and can work with.
Why are there leftist newspapers 'fighting for the little guy', staffed by 1%ers, and owned by billionaires?
Why is the cookie cutter young adult dystopia book, sold by the millions, about a bunch of poor kids in a dystopian capitalist society?
None of this shit makes sense to me.
You're only questioning one half of these ideas.
There's a lot of hard working talented, and well-compensated people here. But that alone doesn't make you rich, merely well-off. What makes you truly rich is investing your wealth in stocks, real estate, or being in the right place in the right time, which is the difference between the guy who built the core systems at a successful startup, and the guy who owns a significant stake of it (which might be one and the same).
But being rich isn't earned in the sense that you work hard for it, you might need savvy, connections, luck, and need to fight others for money, but I'm sure most honest rich people wouldn't describe themselves as their money being the result of their hard work.
And this is for self-made people. People who inherited wealth are even less responsible for their success.
You should define what you mean by rich.
Colloquially, when speaking of 'eat the rich' its typically a reference to people with net worths exceeding 25 million or more with substantial cash generating assets there in[0].
Rather than some SWE's making 250-500K a year and perhaps retire with 5-10 million in assets with smart investments over the course of 20-30 years. This gets edged down into 'upper middle class'. Sometimes the term. 'Well off' is used (somewhat nebulously) to refer to people in that bracket.
Of course there are exceptions, but these seem to be the common trends in these discussions.
Therefore, I ask again, what exactly do you mean by rich? Because the most colloquial definition is unlikely to be common anywhere, even on HN
[0]: Whether folks realize it or not, this is approximately where the real difference between 'well off' and truly wealthy start to set in. It differs a bit by state (in the US) and country, but its a decent enough approximation for this conversation.
This is kind of like asking where one observes the promotion of the absurd narrative that white people are better people. It's rare to get an explicit source, but you have to benefit from it or be willfully blind to it not to believe it's there.
For one example of a reasonably explicit source, a very loud voice in the US agreed that those who benefits from government services are "the parasite class" (https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-musk-reposted-meme-120...). Leaving, therefore, only the wealthy, who (so the narrative goes) impose no burden on others, to be the virtuous, non-parasitic class.
Them being 'better' in any sense of the word is weirdly orthogonal and juvenile statement.
It doesn't matter if you are a breatthakingly handsome hardworking genius, or you are an ugly imbecile - it's about what assets you own - the whole notion of being better on benchmarks of what humans consider better is irrelevant.
And just because something is present doesn't mean it's an intentional or complete narrative being promoted by the author. This is simply an idea that's virtually omnipresent in Western societies, like the acceptance of capitalism or the system of colors. Things that challenge these sorts of deeply assumed ideas often seem like attacks on society itself. If you want an author who intentionally addresses it, Ursula Guin has made it a big focus of her works (e.g. Omelas, the hainish cycle).
https://oxfordre.com/religion/display/10.1093/acrefore/97801...
The idea of prosperity gospel is strong in the US, it doesn't take much more than looking at US elections and seeing the religious poor voting for Trump and using "because he is rich" as one of the reasons for it.
This also ties into Milton Friedman's "everyone runs on greed" idealisms that permeate capitalism.
I think some of this is because you don't live in the US and get to see behavior like this daily.
Curiosly, in Argentina a popular belief is that "nobody became rich by working" and variations. Being rich here is seen as either the result of luck (born rich) or corruption.
If you had, you would know that this practice is not West specific. Heck, spend more than a day in any African or Asian nation and they'll tell you all about how the rich and powerful are the root cause of all their problems.
I'm thinking it's human nature. Looked at from the perspective of human nature, it does kind of make sense. That's why politicians on the left and the right tend to say, "Look at that rich guy! He's the problem!" They just point at different rich guys and gals. They do so because it works to win them power.
Everything else is just propaganda to try and give a compelling narrative to these unintuitive groups. Because what we are actually talking about is essentially a classification problem in highly multi-dimensional space there really isn't a coherent narrative. The only way the propaganda narratives make sense to you is if you have shut down your critical thinking skills. Being confused means you aren't a brainwashed partisan.
They want to advance statism, and to keep getting richer by using privileges they have thanks to the State.
Well, not the only possible but one extremely simple answer to the second question is "they are evil" to the first. You can't separate them like this.
> Why are there leftist newspapers 'fighting for the little guy', staffed by 1%ers, and owned by billionaires?
What newspaper does this describe? None of the major newspapers are significantly left of the democrats, a center-right party globally. Jacobin? Mother Jones? They don't quite fit your description. Genuinely do not know what you have in mind here.
> None of this shit makes sense to me.
Like look around man it's not hard to figure out. Even if you like this I don't think it takes a huge amount of wisdom to perceive why some would not.
Because it's an easy line to buy. Hell, Trump was able to sell it! He's a billionaire!