Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

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> many people like to issue catastrophic warnings about how wealth inequality destroys a society- then quickly change the subject when you note that the Nordics are more unequal than America

A missing piece of the puzzle may be regulatory capture and a strong political/legal structure that resists the worst ambitions of cruel people whether they be wealthy or poor.

You can think of wealth like the potential energy of a spring under tension. If used properly it is capable of powering the most amazing and intricate social mechanisms but if poorly regulated it destroys social fabric and the well being of every day people.

Things like Citizens United and lobbyists representing cruel wealthy interests running unchecked over American democracy are examples of the socially destructive potential energy of wealth.

I'm also curious if there's a selection pressure in play where the more cruel wealthy people in the Nordic countries move to the US because they see more opportunity to make money and be cruel in that environment while wealthy people who have some affinity with their nation and the people of it choose to remain and don't or can't lobby for terribly antisocial policies.

People need to start getting specific about their grievances. It’s not inequality per se. People don’t care if some people have more than them. There are specific concrete things.

For Americans the big ones are: a health problem can destroy your life and your life’s savings, housing costs are too high, and college is too expensive and leaves people in debt.

Housing, health care, and tuition.

Two out of three of those are better in Europe, mostly: health care and college costs. They are better even if things are on paper more unequal.

High housing costs are a disease across the entire developed world.

Unfortunately wealth hoarding puts power and influence in the hands of the few, effectively creating a new aristocracy.

That's why we don't get legislation to fix the issues you cite year after year.

Wealth hording leads to the government working more for the wealthy instead of the working class.

There will always be wealthy and powerful people, but as Spock would say (sorry) "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one."

> It’s not inequality per se. People don’t care if some people have more than them.

Actually it is. Inequality has been correlated with high crime, lower life expectancy and lower health (even for the rich subsection of the population, compared to a more equal country). In your example, high housing cost entrenches inequality and gives generational wealth a leg up.

Trying to make a country good but inequal is like trying to push water uphill.

High housing costs are a disease of major cities in the developing world; there's plenty of places where housing is quite affordable. Yes, many of these places are at least semi-rural, but this no longer much of a limitation, seeing as high-bandwidth Internet is now available literally anywhere on the planet.

>People need to start getting specific about their grievances

No, people need to start understanding the root causes of their problems.

History is replete with examples of rapacious elites trying to take peasant pitchforks and redirecting them.

>For Americans the big ones are: a health problem can destroy your life

Which is a problem because that destruction of your life is immensely profitable.

Which is a problem that wont be fixed while American government is plutocratically run.

Which is a problem that wont be fixed until wealth inequality is.

Why do so many voters in USA elect politicians that serve plutocrats? What's the root cause of that?

Because first past the post voting has entrenched a two-party system and both major parties enjoy massive inflows of money from the wealthy.

Then “he who pays the piper calls the tune” and here we are...

If you control the party machinery you can lock out most progressive candidates from the electoral system entirely.

Once you control the media you can just keep throwing mud at the few progressives that remain.

If progressives could wrest back control of party machinery and control a significant portion of the media then they would become "electable" again.

There's no escape if it is as you explain.

We didn't have any meaningful primaries in the last presidential election. The elites picked their candidates for a token vote by the people. Third parties are actively suppressed by those same elites.

Smaller state and local elections are better, but that's not where the power or money goes.

Getting specific allows people to go after their specific problems with pragmatic solutions.

The top poster was highlighting the fact that there are societies that are just as unequal (or worse) but better on many of these fronts. That doesn’t mean inequality is good. It means that it’s not a single underlying cause, and it’s not that simple.

Refusing to get specific leads to hand wavey populist demagoguery. In this case it leads to a broad unfocused crusade against “elites” and “the rich” that history shows often morphs into fascism (lots of Bernie voters went MAGA) or results in policies that land broadly on the middle and upper middle class and often spare the truly rich. Usually the result is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, since it’s easy to be a demagogue and pound the table about vague “underlying causes” without doing anything but virtue signaling and dog whistling to the base. No specifics means no KPIs for politicians, nothing to hold them accountable.

If you elect someone on a platform of making housing, health care, and tuition affordable and those things don’t become affordable, it’s hard to weasel out of that with posturing and bullshit.

>history shows often morphs into fascism (lots of Bernie voters went MAGA)

This is FUD that is very specifically DNC coded. The extremely plutocratic DNC-linked propaganda outlets that fed this absolute nonsense peddled all sorts of other nonsense conspiracy theories too (e.g. Russiagate, not that that one did them any good...).

Every single one of the DNC supporters implicitly backed fascism and Nazi-style genocide in Gaza by lending their support to the same DNC that backed it (even if they did not agree with it).

Again, plutocracy at work.

They paved the way for the equally depraved MAGA fascism that supplanted them. Trying to pin it instead on a bunch of powerless progressives, some of whom voted for "not more of the same shit" plumbs the very deepest wells of moral depravity. It is deeply shameful.

> I'm also curious if there's a selection pressure in play where the more cruel wealthy people in the Nordic countries move to the US

That's an interesting thought! It would make sense that the people who care less about others and more about themselves would find it easier and more beneficial to leave. I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the wealth, personality traits and political views of the people who leave.

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