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Comment by devilshaircut | Hacker News Reader

I am no sociologist, but I think it would be rather safe to say that to it is going to take a lot for this to change. We've clearly adapted to the divide between the mega-rich and the "middle" class, so I am not sure it is a matter of survival so much as a matter of principle.

I think it would take a lot of people collectively thinking and acting differently than we do now. I am just one person, but it is my goal to live my life with the intent of turning this situation around. I believe the spirit of entrepreneurship, which is generally well-supported on HN, is a piece of this - designing and building the next generation of companies who choose to conduct business in ways that support (rather than exploit) the middle class. Hence, I am an entrepreneur.

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> Hence, I am an entrepreneur.

Petite bourgeoisie. How wonderful, everything that was old is new again.

I suppose that is a derogatory remark, but I never claimed that to be an entrepreneur is a new thing. It is demonstrably not. What I did try to suggest is that it is perhaps a good way to deconstruct this problem.

He didn't say that being an entrepreneur is a new thing. He made a reference to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie ("Petite bourgeoisie ... is a French term (sometimes derogatory) referring to a social class comprising semi-autonomous peasantry and small-scale merchants whose politico-economic ideological stance is determined by reflecting that of a haute (high) bourgeoisie, with which the petite bourgeoisie seeks to identify itself, and whose bourgeois morality it strives to imitate.")

Ultimately, I think business, whether you're talking about small ones or big ones, socially responsible ones or irresponsible ones, are neither the problem nor the solution. In a market economy, the health of the middle class is function of the supply versus the demand for labor.

Being a well-intentioned entrepreneur isn't going to have any impact on the equilibrium. The minute you become big enough to have a non-zero impact, you'll be big enough to feel the heat of competition from China, India, etc, and will be forced to adopt whatever labor-saving measures they adopt.

I understand the term. I was trying to underscore (unsuccessfully, apparently) that my original point was to be an entrepreneur whose principles depart from that of the current establishment. In other words, what I was suggesting was the exact opposite.

I could only interpret the response as a glib remark that to be an entrepreneur in any sense necessarily makes you an imitator of this establishment. My view on this, however, is slightly less cynical.

>Being a well-intentioned entrepreneur isn't going to have any impact on the equilibrium. The minute you become big enough to have a non-zero impact, you'll be big enough to feel the heat of competition from China, India, etc, and will be forced to adopt whatever labor-saving measures they adopt.

Well said.

Is there a game going on already.. once you get in, you are just another player that must play by the rules.. so how you could change the rules?

The way i see it, you need to create new games, with distinct rules, in a way this alternative game could get so big as the other one to make a stand against it in the first place..

Some ideas that can subvert the current rules for instance, are the ones like the social entrepreneurship.. companies that do profit, with a proper working economical engine; but are not for-profit..

The progressive left would solve this problem with increased taxation on the rich, which would ostensibly be used to fund more social programs for the poor. Take from the Belmonts, give to the Fishtowners. Raise the minimum wage, increase regulation, enforce stricter laws that encourage equity for all. Perhaps some form of guaranteed income.

The libertarians would solve this problem by eliminating barriers to success. Lessen business owner regulatory burdens, eliminate federal income taxes, eliminate the minimum wage, and impose as few hurdles as possible to whomever wants to hang their own shingle and provide a service.

I'm not sure what the Republicans would want, really, or at least not specifically enough to enunciate it here on their behalf, but let's say it's somewhere in the middle.

If you're able to succeed as an entrepreneur enough to be able to have some degree of influence on the problem, then you'd be a spokesperson for either the democrats or the libertarians. By your success, you'll be advocating the possibility of one to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, hang their own shingle, and become financially stable in the process, but by having attained that success, you would similarly be the target of progressive taxation, and would now be a sympathetic Belmont, from whom riches will be collected and distributed to Fishtown.

Basic income or a negative income tax actually generally seem to be libertarian ideas, suggested as a way to radically simplify the welfare system and limit how much discretion the government had over whom and how much to pay. They are also usually coupled with eliminating the minimum wage since everyone is already guaranteed an income.

My understanding is that liberals prefer welfare programs with significantly more oversight and targeting. They want fine control over who gets the money and how they can spend it, promoting specific causes like education or environmentalism.

NIT and basic income are "libertarian" ideas only in that they could eliminate other welfare instruments. This would not happen in practice.

Pure libertarianism not considered with pandering to socialists would not propose a nit or basic income.

I think your assessment is more or less accurate.

I see it this way:

What practices have resulted in things being the way they are now? These practices are largely attributable to businesses whose policies are endorsed and enacted through government. Government politics are a complete morass and you've done an excellent job of painting how various parties might try and solve the problem.

So if government is a morass, how do you approach the problem? Certainly a career in politics is out of the question based on this presupposition. One might consider simply adapting how they act in their daily interactions with others. Personally I think this idea is too small-scale.

In my opinion, one strategy would be through the business side. Create a business whose policies create the type of change necessary for closing the gap between the mega-rich and "middle" class. The argument has been made in this thread that in order to compete, it is impossible to instate these types of policies. However, I believe this to be a false assumption. Certainly companies, even large ones, fall into a spectrum of "good" and "bad" practices. There appears to be no bound to either side. I take the David Deutschian view that any problem can be solved with the right knowledge¹. So the question is, can we think creatively, critically, and intelligently enough to solve this problem in business?

I believe the answer is yes.

¹ EDIT: Any problem whose solution is not explicitly prohibited by the nature of reality.

I don't know that it's a panacea, but at least pertaining to labor laws, Trader Joe's is fairly well regarded.

A couple of simple rules that would take you a very long way towards being the "right" kind of company:

- Pay better than minimum wage. Pay a lot better than minimum wage, in fact; even for the lowest employee.

- Pay your highest paid executives less than we're used to seeing. I don't know why, but people just absolutely hate it when CEO of such and such is making $x million dollars a year, while the cashiers of so and so are absolutely starving on minimum wage. Cap executive wages to some multiple of the lowest wage. If the CEO wants to make a $10 million a year, then the janitor would have to make $1 million a year; as an example.

- Don't cap employee position pay. Have starting wages, of course, and make them generous, but if a cashier has been with you for 172 years, she should have received raises (assuming they were merited) every year, or be let go, if she didn't merit them.

- Don't lobby Congress for personal / business gain. I've argued it extensively elsewhere on HN recently, so I won't go into it again now, but I think that people's problems with capitalism aren't actually complaints with capitalism, but a complaint with the crony capitalism that we have in America. IBM lobbies for increased patent protections, makes a billion dollars, pays the guy who thought of it $10 million, and now everybody hates IBM, and especially that guy. If the system were both fair and fairly applied, sure, the Fishtowners might complain, but there would be more in the way of income mobility for the motivated, which should elevate the lower class to a true middle class for those willing to earn it, which would act as a bulwark against unruliness.

When Warren Buffet complains that he's being taxed too little, the cynic in me thinks that he wants his less rich competitors to be taxed out of being able to truly compete, while he enjoys his largesse, knowing that no amount of taxation would really have any impact on his lifestyle. For as generous as progressive seems when taken away from the uber-rich, it actually is a penalty for those just on the cusp of wealthy, and keeps them stuck in middle class without an effective means of pushing past it.

I absolutely agree with almost everything you've said here. You've essentially described the kind of company culture I want to build.

In particular, you nailed it when you talked about the difference between "capitalism" and "crony capitalism". I personally do not have a problem with capitalism in its pure form (as I understand it). At the risk of sounding like I am parroting a platitude - perhaps I am - I think that capitalism is too often understood to be a zero-sum entity.

I believe that the best way to do this is to set a standard of ethics by which you operate your company and then to be as successful as possible within that context. Be competitive; don't use competition as an excuse to contribute to the American economic divide.

And now I really will parrot the Buckminster Fuller quote that many people are intimately familiar with:

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest."

The problem with Fuller's reasoning is that next generation, that ten thousand becomes a hundred thousand.

All around the world, educated women with a first-world standard of living are the weakest producers of babies humanity has ever known. Wealthy, educated people simply don't overpopulate.

Fuller didn't say that the ten thousand were wealthy and educated, he said they wouldn't have to work for living.

Surely there is some limit to population growth. Certainly there are many countries whose populations are known to be in decline.

"For as generous as progressive seems when taken away from the uber-rich, it actually is a penalty for those just on the cusp of wealthy, and keeps them stuck in middle class without an effective means of pushing past it."

That is assumption somewhat based on the current marginal tax brackets. There would be no reason that a progressive tax could not be designed so that moderately wealthy individuals would pay a similar effective tax rates compared to the "middle class", and then require the to X% pay significantly more (those earning more than say 10 million, for example).

Or better yet, do as Warren Buffet himself proposes, which is harmonizing the capital gains and marginal tax brackets such there is a flat effective tax for all income levels. Buffet generally argues that he and his secretary should be paying the same effective tax rate, not that high-income individuals should be coercively taxed. (funnily enough, President Reagan made an identical argument comparing a secretary's tax rate to their boss).

A flat tax could potentially be lower for most or all taxpayers, there's nothing in it that requires it to increase the tax burden.

Those are some incredibly broad brushes you're wielding there.

I took care not to misrepresent anyone, but if you feel I've been overly broad, I'm happy to be corrected.

Ideas fly better if you don't slap emotionally loaded labels on them, like "liberal" and "Republican"

I was presenting the schools of thought available, so I felt it fair to attribute the beliefs to their bearers as best I was able. There wasn't any malice presented, as there wasn't any intended, nor were there any attempts at backhandedness so often seen with those sorts of examples (E.g., party A wants to lower taxes, party B wants to raise taxes, and party C wants to make sport of killing the poor.)

I'm not selling anything, nor trying to sell anybody on anything, so I didn't see the harm in being forthcoming.

You weren't "being forthcoming", you were stereotyping.

Even a casual read of your comment leaves one with little question which group you think are the "good guys", and which ones you think are full of shit.

Simplistic analyses like that are a big part of why politics in America are as fucked up as they are: because we've been conditioned to generalize about huge numbers of people on the basis of affiliation with one or the other of a more or less completely "forced choice" between political parties.

But, yeah, go ahead and assert that everyone in the progressive left wants to siphon money from investment accounts in Belmont and deposit it into checking accounts in Fishtown. Go ahead and suggest that all libertarians (note, small-l, per original) want to abolish the minimum wage, or Federal income taxes.

That's what I'm talking about when I observe the breadth of your brush. It's impossibly broad.

I don't think either ones are necessarily full of shit honestly. If the problem to be addressed is income inequality, or wealth distribution, or whichever particular categorization of the problem of "poor people are poor" you want to optimize for, they're both decent solutions in theory.

If you'd like to know my personal preference, I'd be happy to discuss that offline, but spoiler alert, it isn't either of the solutions I presented.

As far as the generalizations, if I miscategorized anyone's beliefs, then I'm sorry. None of what I presented was meant as a critique... really. But progressive taxation seems to be the prevailing theory coming out of the progressive camp, and tax abolitionism seems to be the prevailing theory coming out of the libertarian camp.

As for the stereotype though, I will say that I relied upon the reader to reject the assertion that "all" of any demographic wants a particular thing, because I agree that is an impossibly broad assertion. Again though, if I gave cause for offense, I apologize.

Sees it just works better if you say what you mean and leave off the useless labels that only serve to inflame readers one way or the other.

I disagree. In the five years I've been posting here, what I've found is that anybody that wanted to get offended would be offended whether I referred to the parties by name or as abstract schools of thought.

If I hadn't put the party affiliations, and had gotten something wrong, I'm not naive enough to think that anybody would have been fooled by that. Had anybody felt that I misrepresented either party, I'd have been corrected, labels or not, only instead of being able to respond directly, I'd have hard to parse through layers of obscurity to figure out which metric was even the topic of discussion.

People are going to be pissed if they feel that their positions are slighted; I just figure the better tactic is to avoid insulting the position vs. obscuring which position I insult. And, as I stated, each of the positions I referenced is, to my knowledge, equally as likely of standing a chance at solving the matter at hand as the other.

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