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Comment by AndrewThrowaway | Hacker News Reader

If you take any ancient or not so ancient civilization or kingdom, all the wealth including land and people's lives belonged to king/imperator which was appointed by god or something like that.

Isn't is exactly the same with the system we have now?

The question we have to ask is about 99% of population of peasants who work 8h a day same as they did in Mesopotamia. Do they have a living standard, healthcare, possibility to have social bonds, possibility to retire. Basically all the things to have a life.

If peasants are able to have all this, I really don't care if some King of ours has 20 trillion or 50 bazillion. In money or in gold.

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Peasants worked ~14 hours a day, and they had no healthcare or ability to retire. The reason you work 8 hours a day, have health care, and the ability to retire is because the 19th and 20th centuries saw an unprecedented transfer of wealth and power from the rich to everyone else, which manifested in labor laws, pensions, etc. Unless you can prove otherwise, the default assumption needs to be that consolidation of wealth will lead to all those privileges being erased.

> Unless you can prove otherwise, the default assumption needs to be that consolidation of wealth will lead to all those privileges being erased.

And the trend has already started. The latest budget big will make healthcare inaccessible to mire Americans.

This is very close to saying you wouldn't be against slavery. A slave could be given a decent quality of life. Does that mean slavery is acceptable? A person with 50 bazillion will be able to make you a slave if he wants to.

Slaves are free to think that slavery isn't acceptable. Always have been.

Oh, sure, you aren't a slave. You can't be bought and sold like property. But try going a few months without a paycheck and tell me how that goes. And if you happened to get lucky at some point and escaped wage slavery - you have to be cognizant of the fact that most didn't, and never will, by design.

Modern wage slavery vs whatever they had in Mesopotamia is just details of the perks that the owners decide to hand out.

Doesn't then a person with half a trillion have that ability? At what point does the ability start?

The question is why we have to work 8h a day to begin with. Or why we don't earn more.

If productivity goes up, something has to give. We either work less or we earn more.

If productivity goes up and we work the same amount of time for the same amount of money (and let's not kid ourselves, if anything we'll end up working more time for less money), the social contract has been broken.

I don't care how rich some outlier becomes, so long as it isn't at the sacrifice of our own self-actualisation. But that is exactly what is (and has been since the 70s) occurring. That trend is unlikely to reverse and it won't lead anywhere good.

We don't live in those times anymore. Just because something was a certain way for most of history doesn't mean anything about how we should shape our future.

So the past was shitty too? You don't care? Okay, well some of us do.

Wealth grants power. Opinions from money matter gain greater reach and traction, and these very quickly turn into influence and power. The current US administration clearly shows how wielding power for your own ends gives you money. It's a toxic cycle that rewards grift instead of work.

You don't care, but this is a serious problem for society because it's a negative aspiration. Don't be good, don't try hard, just be rich or die a peasant.

But the peasants have limited appetites for gruel and work when all they see is grift and abuse. They revolted until old money stopped stopped demanding fealty. Will the new masters learn before we peasants eat the rich?

Preach, brother! Because the ultra-rich surely weren't taking over the world under the previous administration!

This has been happening for a very long time. The current administration is just worse and/or more blatant about it than previous ones.

So I agree with your sarcasm and I also agree with the parent comment that the current admin is doing a better job "clearly showing" how this works to everyone.

You say blatant, I say transparent. In terms of scale there is no difference, but the honesty is refreshing.

The only problem is it's causing people to focus on the wrong thing (us vs them, D vs R) instead of the oligarchs who continue to line their pockets (and by the way do not get re-elected every 4 years).

I want a 4h day now.

Eventually that king will demand more and more. Humans are just fundamentally incapable of wielding that much wealth and thus power. And the pattern repeats again and again and again: billionaires actively lobby to destroy the livelihoods of huge swaths of people, destroy the environment, kill jobs or complete companies, do whatever they feel is necessary just so they can get even more money.

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