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Comment by e-dant | Hacker News Reader

The market is perfectly efficient, value is well attributed, lobbying is a social good, being rich means you’re smart and should have special privileges, optimizing for returns on investment is equivalent to optimizing for a better society

Obviously I’m kidding, and something is rotten

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We let capitalism run too far. Need to swing hard towards socialism or the whole thing will collapse

As pointed out by Rosa Luxemburg, the choices are socialism or barbarism. In the US, barbarism seems to be a far more likely outcome.

Insane binary choice fallacy. The choices are more akin to centralised control or free-ish markets. We see from experience how centralised control has completely butchered healthcare, both in the US and also my country of Canada. It's time to drop the insane authoritarian control and let people freely chose their own destiny, so to speak.

More than likely, it's daily reality.

Americans often confuse socialsim for handing out money freely and letting people commit crimes without going to jail, both the left and right, so its this wierd catch 22 going on or something

> and letting people commit crimes without going to jail

So US is the most socialist country by far. Both rich and poor commit crimes without going to jail

I live in Spain and that’s what socialism means basically. At least here.

> and letting people commit crimes without going to jail

Looking at the administration, the feudal internet lords and other megacorps, the US is deeply socialist then.

But, see, there is a fundamental difference.

We prefer to let capital (and its representatives) commit the juiciest crimes...

"handing out money freely and letting people commit crimes without going to jail"

Sounds pretty much like Trump and the modern GOP

The actual problem is how do we give people things that are way more expensive than those people will ever be able to cover themselves?

The answer is to make someone else pay for it. But man, have you ever gone to dinner with your large tech salary and been advised you have a moral obligation to cover 80% of the table's bill, and then be demonized for scrutinizing what people ordered?

Socialism is great when you can get yourself to believe that the government is a bottomless money pit fed by evil people with infinite money harvested from captive forced labor.

Capitalism is great when you can get yourself to believe that the lives of people who cannot carry (or did not carry) their weight don't matter.

I think you’re a magnitude or two off in the current state of wealth inequality. It’s more like people are asking you with a 400k/yr salary to pitch in to buy candy bars and you’re upset someone picked out a king size for fifty cents more.

Socialist policies would be decidedly less popular if people knew that most of the money to fund them would come from middle and upper middle class earners.

While those people as individuals have nowhere near "billionaire" money, they as a contingent have the most wealth.

While the "1% have more money than the bottom 50%" is true, they have less than half the money of the 70%-95%. America's cash cow is in the suburbs, not the Hamptons. Kinda forbidden knowledge to know that.

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