Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's hard for certain people with certain backgrounds to understand.

What I see as someone who grew up in a very working class family surrounded by those on benefits:

I see the janitor who busts their ass day in and day out to provide for their families totally lost in these conversations. They are expected to take money out of their check - doing a very difficult, thankless, and not all that well paying job - to even today help pay for a whole lot of people who are incredibly more privileged. I know quite a number of people who have college degrees but experienced "failure to launch" who see themselves as too good to go work in a kitchen, as a janitor, or what have you - but are quite happy to accept various form of public benefits due to their part time cushy employment.

I cannot square that circle. Having someone work themselves to a bone with no real hopes of retirement, so you can have other people live a much easier life than they are.

If you ask those taking said benefits who are working part time in a arts field or whatever, they will of course state that they are not the problem and "rich people" should pay more in taxes so the janitor also doesn't have to work. But now who is cleaning toilets or taking out trash? At some point the work has to be done and you run out of rich people to tax for wealth redistribution.

Considering how widespread this "condition" seems to be in my human experience, I cannot see a widescale implementation of "to each of their abilities, to each their need" ever working out simply due to how selfish humans appear to be. I love the idea - and I have often dream of starting my own commune of sorts of well-curated individuals who all have roles to play, but I just can't see it working out either in reality or in scale. The only reason such a limited scale commune might work is that you could rule with an iron fist and vote people off the island who start to take advantage of others and no longer pull their own weight.

I am quite convinced that if you implemented UBI or other means for the average person to never work you'd simply get a whole lot of people doing effectively nothing, if not outright destructive (for society) things with their time.

> Having someone work themselves to a bone with no real hopes of retirement, so you can have other people live a much easier life than they are.

But isn't the real problem that the janitor isn't being paid enough to save for retirement _and_ pay a 'fair' share of taxes? I read about the fear and complaints of high taxes to pay for the lazy, but the actual tax load on countries with strong socialist policies is not really all that much higher than in the U.S.

This sort of thinking reminds me of the old cartoon with three people at a table, one obviously rich person with a whole pile of cookies on his side of the table, and two other ordinary-working-class people each with a couple of cookies, with the rich guy saying to one of the other guys - watch out, that guy wants to take away one of your cookies!'

There are so many working class people convinced that the problem is the other poor people around them, instead of the very small number of people with > 50% of the resources. Those super-rich have somehow convinced everyone that the current balance is best.

I'm not some revolutionary; far from it. I've always hoped that technology would be the thing that allowed virtually everyone to rise up out of poverty (and it has to some degree), but what I've seen instead is the gains from all of this tech we've created in the past 200 years primarily going to a small class of people, and that just makes me sad.

> I read about the fear and complaints of high taxes to pay for the lazy, but the actual tax load on countries with strong socialist policies is not really all that much higher than in the U.S.

Many of these countries are going through the start of a lot of social upheaval in part due to these tax loads paying for social benefits that are simply not sustainable from a demographic perspective. There is an undercurrent of resentment for those who work non-enjoyable jobs and look at others who have it easier than them. This is from the blue collar/menial labor camp vs. the white collar/laptop classes who imo are totally and entirely out of touch with reality at this point.

> Those super-rich have somehow convinced everyone that the current balance is best.

While there is a little bit of truth to this, I don't really believe this is truly the case. Folks compare themselves to those around them, and socially speaking those you are in contact with are what generally matters from a societal standpoint. It's sort of like shoplifting. Sure, it's not "worth it" for any single retail clerk to take the personal risk to tackle a shoplifter vs. just watch it happen. But it's corrosive to society as a whole when that retail working a job they likely do not get much enjoyment out of is forced to simply stand by and watch someone just ignore the social contract and get ahead the easy/illegal way. So there is definitely truth to the trope of "don't defend a billion dollar corporation while being paid retail wages" - at scale it's incredibly damaging to society as a whole.

Same goes for living with folks on my block growing up who decided to take the easy route and loaf off the backs of others. In the end it's labor. You could redistribute the top 10% of wealth but you'd still have the same (or even more!) labor that would need to be done. Someone has to do it. Many kids growing up in that environment saw that and decided to not even put the effort in. Those who somehow rose above it almost universally escaped the poverty cycle.

I am not against taxing the rich more - but I'd argue that the systemic reasons why the top 10% or whatever control over 50% of the wealth of the nation need to be corrected before anything else matters. You can't really fix that with post-redstribution in my opinion. It needs to be fixed at the point of value creation so workers can somehow capture more of their labor surplus. Everything I've seen in life does not point towards "redistribute the rewards evenly regardless of personal effort or sacrifice put in" being a sustainable answer. This doesn't even work on a small scale in small companies - if management allows "lazy" workers to exist for very long, it becomes corrosive to the entire culture of the company and you eventually fall apart as those putting the effort in either stop or move on to greener pastures where they are not dragging others along via their efforts. Same goes with society.

> but what I've seen instead is the gains from all of this tech we've created in the past 200 years primarily going to a small class of people, and that just makes me sad.

This we can certainly agree on. Although I'll point out that the average HN poster is in this class of people.

Yes, I certainly don't think taxing the richer is the only dial available. that was my point about the problem being the wages - the labor or non-capital portion of the pie is one of the key things that needs to be adjusted. But the entire system is designed to reward the risk takers. I don't really have any answers. I'm just naively hoping that the the real wealth that technology creates (real-world efficiencies) can somehow benefit everyone, not only the risk takers. That's one of the scarier parts of the AI and robotics boom - it seems virtually all of the benefits are going in one direction. I know we've seen this type of thing before with the industrial revolution, and we somehow got to a point where most of us really did benefit with higher living standards (including the poorest) but it hard seeing most of the really rich ones not doing much to balance that out (most trying their hardest to keep the scales unbalanced).

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