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Comment by henvic | Hacker News Reader

Focusing on reducing economic inequality is silly. Some people being wealth doesn't mean other people must be poor.

Society has never been as rich as now, and people are getting out of misery faster and faster.

Drawing attention to the fact that some outliers have an insane amount of wealth has been shadowing the real problem: politics is in getting in the way of eradicating poverty.

Many people, mostly fueled by envy, misses that and instead focus on asking for taxing the wealthiest rather than noticing that poor people lives could be vastly improved by reducing taxation on them (rather than increasing the taxation of richer people, which is a silly take on the matter), removing economic barriers created by political forces, etc.

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This comment is so out of touch with reality.

It matters because our political systems are influenced by the wealth. More wealth equals more political power in a system where political power is supposed to be assigned via democratic vote.

It also matters because wealth is not created in a vacuum. Elon Musk could not build his rockets unless his employees were educated by the public schoold system, and fuel trucks filling his rockets could use public roads, and 10,000 years of agriculture made it efficient for him to pay for his beef instead of having to go out and hunt an ox. Nobody owns anything but we all own everything.

It also matters because our tax systems are set up primarily to tax labour and not capital. So working people pay for the public infrastructure that wealth then sucks up.

Your privilege is showing my friend. If you were born in a favela in Brazil or on the streets in LA I guarantee you that you would not be making as much money as you are now. And when your mother dies from a preventable disease you may have a harder time dismissing wealth inequality.

More wealth gives you more power in different ways, including political.

That doesn't mean that society stands where it stands now because of political power. If anything, we've evolved in spite of it.

And you assuming that I was born rich is hilarious. I come from the northeast from Brazil, and my parents weren't by any means rich growing up. Now, on their 70s, they're finally financially stable after a lot of hard-work, and despite the government doing their best to destroy their wealth. And to clarify: besides attending a really good private school, my childhood was quite poor (luckily, I always had a computer about 5-10 years older than the current models back then, at least; I could've newer, but your loved statism made it harder to have access to tech).

You're full of prejudice. You think someone who isn't on the same page as you politically is privileged lol

Wealth inequality doesn't cause people to die from preventable diseases. Your commie mindset does when they can't afford to have access to wealth, medications, leisure, access to good resources, etc.

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