Venture Capitalist Says "War" on the Rich Is Like Nazi Germany's War on the Jews | Hacker News Reader

Venture Capitalist Says "War" on the Rich Is Like Nazi Germany's War on the Jews

theatlantic.com

24 pointskillwhitey22 comments

Meh, I think this is probably not the best intro to a good discussion. I sympathize with the impulse to mock Tom Perkins (and he probably deserves it), and VCs being idiots is a time-honored genre of tech discussion. But judging by the Slashdot discussion on this same article that started an hour or two ago, it doesn't seem likely to be productive. Either we will all agree "yeah, that was a stupid analogy and also Tom Perkins might be crazy", or a few people will try to defend it and then those threads will trail off into argument, either way, meh.

Perkins' post has now topped David Brooks' piece on pot as the worst thing ever written. Well done Tom.

Relevant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

Mike Godwin called him out directly. https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/427253083966435329

(Godwin's Twitter has of course been melting. https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/427257508231532545 )

This is amazing thank you for sharing

I will say that that was actually a pretty strong response from KPC&B. "Shocked" is a hell of lot stronger than the usual "The views expressed by Mr. Perkins are not reflective of the values of this firm" type of response you usually get.

What's interesting about Perkins's letter is the fact that the WSJ thought it was worth publishing.

Also of interest is that the people (Googlers, a writer) that were mentioned as being harassed sounded more like "the 10%" to me than "the 1 %".

Deliberate misdirection of identity???

I think 1% is a ridiculous misnomer. You need to get to the 0.01% before you find people who are what you might call 'disgustingly rich.'

The 1% are doctors, programmers, accountants...

Yeah - those people - the ones that pay 30% of the nation's taxes.

I wasn't making a value judgement about the megarich, just a statistical one.

"Disgustingly" implies a value judgement, which doesn't necessarily mean one was intended but certainly explains the reception as such.

It does but notice I put it in quotes. Anyway hopefully it is clarified now.

Hopefully, yes.

Which is pretty much directly a function of 1) income tax based on a percentage of income (with capital gains taxed at a significantly lower rate) and 2) the VAST amounts of income accruing to the 1% (and above).

You can't squeeze water from a stone.

Some, though not too many. The household income needed to be in the top-1% of households is $380k, which even two-programmer households typically don't hit, unless they win the options/acquisition lottery.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121533

I'm sure Mr. Perkins thought that getting a $10k fine for killing a man with his yacht was "just like Nazi Germany" too. What an assclown.

Side question - to what extent was the attack on the Jews in Nazi Germany associated with their wealth? (at the time)

The vast majority of Jews in Weimar-era Germany were middle-class clerical types or tradesmen; however, Nazi and other right-wing propaganda grossly inflated the economic power of the Jewish community in order to whip up public anger.

Of course, the persecution of Jews in Europe was because they were Jews, not because some of them were wealthy; the shoah was basically the extreme culmination of hundreds of years of persecution, segregation, and pogroms.

Perkins' analogy is really, really ugly, because it both trades, perhaps inadvertently, in anti-Semitic stereotypes of "rich Jews," and because it dismisses the centuries of brutal persecution the Jewish community faced as simply the resentment of the disenfranchised.

I think mass delusions had something to do with the widespread use of amphetamines.

This is the reductio ad absurdum of a rich-guy's persecution complex...Therefore, criticizing the rich is akin to committing genocide against the Jews.

This Atlantic commentary is a ridiculous straw man. According to Perkins, criticizing the rich today is akin to criticizing the Jews in 1930 (8 years before persecution).

Demonize and dismiss - so much easier than attacking the actual argument being made (note: I'm expressing no opinion on that).

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