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Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm crazy but this seems like an argument for communism. Basically he's saying success is due to luck and that the playing field will never be equal when some people can be lucky and others can't. Take this quote…

"This can lead to some awkward philosophical conclusions. If you have succeeded by doing something relatively simple, you have to ask yourself why everybody else hasn't done the same thing. You could tell yourself that they simply value different things and thus chose their lives. You sacrificed and worked hard-and even if somebody else looks like they've worked hard without the same results, they must be secretly lazy."

He's basically putting forth two premises: (a) 2 people can work equally hard and get vastly different results and (b) that there's something inherently wrong with that. But if both those are true than there's really only one solution which is communism. That's the very definition of communism in fact. Government is the only entity that has enough power over people to make things fair so it should control all the resources because it will act fairly and distribute rewards evenly.

I don't mean to accuse him of holding a belief he doesn't hold but how else could the world create the environment he desires?

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Communism? I certainly didn't read it that way. Have you considered the idea of a basic income - it's been mentioned before here, most recently http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=756880

Via the inspiration for that thread: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income: "Winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics that fully support a basic income include Herbert Simon[24], Friedrich Hayek[25][26], James Meade, Robert Solow[27], and Milton Friedman[28]."

Hardly communists, or even Marxists. It seems to me that the original poster is not arguing for government enforced fairness (and communism isn't any better at delivering that than capitalism IMO), but for mitigation of the worst inequities. Over in Europe colege education is heavily subsidized by the state, on the understanding that the state will collect a rather greater share of subsequent income in the form of taxes. This is by no means perfect, and indeed European college graduates are not assured of a job or promising opportunities on graduating either, far from it; but at least they graduate without enormous debts.

On the flip side, America provides far better business opportunities for entrepreneurs, not least the simple fact of a single market of 300 million with a single dominant language and a national media landscape, which is not to be sneezed at. Indeed, in 50-100 years, when China or India have caught up with the developed world in terms of GDP per capita, the potential entrepreneurial gains from being able to market to a Billion people at once will make US business fortunes look modest.

I think the point being made here is not that communism or any other system is better than capitalism, but that diligence and loyalty are socially exalted but economic rewards flow more towards opportunists and rent-seekers.

> Indeed, in 50-100 years, when China or India have caught up with the developed world in terms of GDP per capita, the potential entrepreneurial gains from being able to market to a Billion people at once will make US business fortunes look modest.

I don't know about India (but I'm sure it's a similar situation), but in China you have vastly different cultural groups across different regions. It's a large country. And I'm talking a larger cultural divide than "East Coast" vs "West Coast" in the USA.

I doubt that you'd be able to having a marketing campaign that included all 1 billion people... It might be viewed by close to a billion people, but you'd have to be targeting a smaller demographic.

Quote of the day.

> But if both those are true than there's really only one solution which is communism.

No. Just because one extreme position is wrong it does not follow that the opposite extreme position is right.

But the only way to remedy his concern is the opposite extreme. Because no matter how hard the Mexican immigrant works he's never going to achieve anywhere near the same amount as the guy whose parents sent him to Harvard.

Again, keep in mind this guy started out by saying "I'm 20, I went to all the right schools and I didn't get a great job so life is unfair". So he's not arguing for lifting those who are profoundly disadvantaged out of poverty (which I have no problem with). He's arguing for fairness among the upper classes meaning everyone should be equal. I have no problem with making sure the kids of the Mexican immigrant can go to college but this guy's arguing for equal treatment for all and that's just not something the Government should be trying to do (because it will profoundly backfire)

* I have no problem with making sure the kids of the Mexican immigrant can go to college but this guy's arguing for equal treatment for all and that's just not something the Government should be trying to do (because it will profoundly backfire)*

As a matter of fact that's exactly what the government should do. Equal treatment at the hands of the government wherever it interferes is precisely the point of a democracy.

I'm really just being a weenie, though; I understand perfectly well that where you wrote "equal treatment" you really meant "equal results", and I agree with that point.

However, I don't think that was really the main thrust of his argument, anyways. What I got was "If you've succeeded, that's great, but stop being so damn smug about it and don't you dare try to pretend that anybody could do the same if they just worked hard enough - things could have just as easily gone the other way, and the same efforts could have left you struggling just like me."

Which has some validity, in my opinion. Hard work is merely a necessary prerequisite to financial success, it does not guarantee it (and as time goes on, things like college play less of a role since everyone does them, and there are fewer straightforward ways to shift the odds in your favor).

The very rich tend to mistakenly assume that chance played a negligible role in their ascent, which is almost never the case. Bill Gates probably never would have been poor, but absent a few lucky coincidences he could easily have ended up as a senior programmer making a middle-of-the-road wage instead of one of the world's richest men...

There are many types of “fair” and equal. One thing that makes our system unfair is the failure to communicate what happens, not just how the system actually works. (You must spend lot's of time and money to find all the available tax breaks.)

With my version of “fair” you should rework the federal tax code to be as simple as possible. Everyone get’s 700$ / month from the government, free health care and pays ~35% in taxes with zero tax breaks of any kind and no minimum wage of any kind. Donate to charity or retirement and you get no help from the government. You are still protected from starvation, but there is no unemployment insurance, social security or medicare.

The real advantage is the simple system is easy to understand and does what most “social” programs (SS, Medicare, Medicaid etc) try and do. There are also just 2 numbers to debate, the tax rate and the government subsidy.

PS: A true tax code would need to be longer than that, but the goal would be something that could be printed legibly on a single sheet of paper and understood by most people with an 8th grade education.

With my version of “fair” you should rework the federal tax code to be as simple as possible. (snipped)

And you've hit the crux of the problem. Everyone has their own version of "fair". There's a whole spectrum, even if we just restrict it to taxation:

(Note well that I don't claim most of these justifications are reasonable, only that a case could be made)

- Poor people have proven that they don't effectively use their money; rich people have proven that they do. So we shouldn't tax the rich at all, because an optimal allocation of resources would dictate that they should be concentrated where they are most effectively used.

- The poor tend to use more government money than the rich, so the poor should pay higher taxes in dollar amount than the rich do.

- Everyone has the right to consume roughly the same amount of government resources, regardless of what they actually use, so "fair" means to charge everyone for their share, i.e. everyone should be taxed the same dollar amount.

- Poor people shouldn't pay as much dollar-wise as the rich, because that's a bit cruel, but they do consume more "free money" from the government, so should pay proportionally more than the rich; to be "fair" we should tax poor people a percentage that is a bit more than the rich.

- "Fair" can only mean that we take a given percentage of everyone's income, and that this percentage is the same for everybody.

- "Fair" should mean that everybody hurts the same, and it hurts a lot more to lose 10% of $1000 than it hurts to lose 10% of $1 million. So we should have an income dependent rate that goes slightly up the more money you make.

- The last entry is right, but income doesn't effectively estimate how much a tax hurts, because the real pain you feel from tax is that relative to your total wealth. Rich people tend to have far more non-income wealth than poor people, so since we can't really measure wealth, we need to tax their income even more aggressively.

- Fuck Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and the Google guys, they have more money than God anyways, let's just tax the living crap out of the top 5% progressively (i.e. a billionaire still pays more tax than a millionaire) and leave everyone else alone. There's still a small incentive to make more money, and most companies don't grow based on the personal greed of their most wealthy members anyhow, so our economy will still do just fine, thank you.

Unsurprisingly, people's beliefs about fair taxation tend to correlate fairly strongly to where they lie along the income curve. But the point is, there are a lot of different ways to evaluate "fair" in this context, and "flat" is not necessarily the best answer.

FWIW, if you look at tax rate relative to total wealth, the curve is fairly flat, and it turns out that the middle class actually makes out the best - both the poor and the rich get just about equally screwed.

Which is precisely what the tax burden distribution should look like in a democracy, since the majority of people reside in the middle of the Bell curve and apply downward pressure on the wealth-adjusted tax rate there. The only surprise is that the highest 0.01% doesn't get hit harder than they do, since so much of the wealth is there; that's an indication that our democracy is not person-weighted, but at least partially dollar-weighted.

My point is complexity is often used to hide people being fucked over. An example of this is the US tax code.

If you include SS, Medicare, and Tax breaks a single person in the middle class is totally fucked over by the tax code. Warren buffet has even said his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does. But, by hiding specific truths you can make it look like the tax code says just about anything you want.

PS: I think most people would look at my suggestion and think, they would get a worse deal, which says more about how little they understand the tax code than it does about what's actually happening. Lot's of people would be worse off, but plenty of people who think they would be worse off, would actually come out ahead.

Edit: Back to his original essays, devoting a lot of time and money to an ivy league education is risky. So, is starting a company. The average ROI might be good, but the worse case is horrible. Ignoring outliers is disingenuous, because not all people find themselves on the happy path to heath and wealth. And it's hard to separate drive and intelligence from luck.

I didn't read it as an argument for any particular environment or world view. I read it as an argument that certain people online need to pull their head out of their ass when they're proclaiming why others would be as successful as them if they only tried.

Only if the original author believes in complete inaction. I didn't take the author's point to be that life's unfair but that's cool because it's ok that way. I took the author's point to be life's unfair and it should be changed.

But there is no 'call to arms' for change. The only thing that he seems to be advocating is that 'techno libertarians' need to realize that "do what I did and you'll be rich like me" is a fairytale. It's a fairytale even if a libertarian's utopian wet-dream where to come true. Everyone in a society can't be highly successful, but most of the people he's referring to don't seem to think about their calls of "just grab life by the ball, and you'll be ok" beyond their own anecdotal evidence.

Yes, but I didn't read much about HOW it should be changed - just that life's unfair and the first step should be to admit that.

* Communism isn't inherently bad.

* There's a wide swatch of gray between the market and the government, and it's acceptable that society should fall between the two.

I didn't say communism was inherently bad. Admittedly I think it is. But I went out of my way not to make a value judgment so as to not cloud the point I was trying to make which is that the stated philosophy is communism. My intent was just to state the facts as I saw them and let others judge.

As for your other point there certainly is a wide swath between the two but if you want complete fairness than you have to go all the way to the Government side.

That depends on your definition of complete fairness. I see "fair" as including the opportunity for success; fairness becomes a matter of never letting somebody sink into a pit they can't rise from. That can be achieved without much of a socialist bent at all: All you need are nets.

Out of curiosity, why do you think communism is inherently bad? Do you take the angle of "Man is entitled to the fruits of his labor", or is there something else to it?

Because it's never, ever worked. There are a lot of ideas that seem smart from an academic perspective but which, when implemented, fail. In the case of Communism it only works if a whole society can manage to bury their natural human desire to achieve more than their neighbor and history has proven time and time again that burying that instinct is not possible and when you try you simply get lethargy.

Remember, the ideas of any age are that of its ruling class. To say that the goal of capital accumulation is the "natural" state of humanity, is to ignore each set of social relations imposed on the populace by the ruling class of each social epoch. In the Feudal period, it was the divinity of the monarch and the "natural" state of the peasantry being tied to the land, surrendering a tithe to the king and the clergy. Before that, it was "natural" to conquer and subjugate the enemy within a slave society like Rome.

Also, everything that was tried before was either smashed by state intervention backed by capitalist interest, e.g. the Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973, or Franco during the Spanish civil, or was a Stalinist dictatorship.

All the evidence we have suggests that human history and prehistory is primarily concerned with two things: firstly, people making stuff, and secondly, people taking other people's stuff and optionally killing them. This is widely true for societies ranging from stone-age tribal groups, all the way up to the present day.

Of course many beliefs are created and imparted by society at large, but not all are. The belief that our planet is roughly a sphere is more accurate than the belief that it is flat, and the belief that the Earth orbits the sun is more accurate than the reverse. I'm fairly sure we've hit on something with the whole "People would rather be rich than poor," idea.

For the majority of humanity's history, man lived by producing roughly enough subsistence to survive day to day. With the advent of agriculture and domestication of wild beasts, etc, man, for the first time ever, had the capability to produce a surplus of goods. From this society formed--as well as the oppression of man by another for the purposes for controlling said surplus. Due to the inherent need to innovate within capitalism, i.e. revolutionize the means of production for the purposes of besting the competition, we have over time, gradually built up the means to produce such a quantity and variety of goods unrivaled in all of human history.

We possess the material means to provide for the needs of all people across the world many, many times over. One simply needs to look at the fact that industrialized U.S. agricultural production is so efficient it can be run by an extremely small pool of workers compared to the rest of the working populace, and yet produce such a glut of goods, that many times, the surplus (the very thing capitalism is compelled to produce over and over again) is destroyed in order to uphold food prices via enforcing an artificial scarcity of goods, e.g. in milk production.

The issue is not about being simply wanting to rich or poor (no one wants to be poor), it's about seeing the system for what it is and what its productive capabilities could potentially be harnessed for.

They'd rather be "rich than poor" because we have a society that says rich is awesome, poor is terrible.

I'd agree with you if you'd said "comfortable rather than stressed", but there's a difference between the two. Everybody can be comfortable at once. Not everybody can be rich.

Everybody can be comfortable at once. Not everybody can be rich.

That's a poor criterion for deciding whether or not something is an intrinsic human desire. Whether or not something can be universally achieved is orthogonal to the question.

I don't doubt that we have a society that says rich is awesome, poor is terrible, but here's the thing: when we say that "society says foo", what we mean is that a large percentage of individuals are saying foo. Lots of individuals say "rich is awesome, poor is terrible" because they actually believe that they prefer the one to the other, not because some external "society" (I place it in scare quotes because any society does not have an existence independent from individuals) forces or tricks or brainwashes them into it.

But you can't separate a person from the context of their society. We had millenia of human existence without any idea of riches, so obviously it's not an intrinsic desire. Perhaps it's intrinsic in the context of a society that has things such as rich and poor, but that's different.

(I'm finding it hard to track replies in this thread, so apologies if I stop my side of the discussion.)

Communism works fairly well - in small doses: i.e. for groups small enough for everybody to know everybody else. This allows for discipline of goldbrickers and avoidance of takeover by charismatics. See, for example, the Hutterites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite

Reminds me of Gladwell's little bit on Dunbar's Constant in The Tipping Point. He brought up GoreTex as a company that, by splitting its company into miniature groups of under 150, thrived despite nobody having job titles.

I'd like to see a nation try to work itself using Dunbar's Constant. A government based on the idea that people can all relate to one another in small groups would be radical.

I've often thought that a government based on proxies, given only to personal acquaintances, with a hierarchical structure where 12 proxies at one level would elect you to the next level, might work better than our present representation. (Then again, maybe the old Athenian idea of choosing legislatures as well as juries by lot might work better too).

Okay. I was thinking Communism more in the idea of "let's not let the market be entirely free," not Communism in the sense of "everybody is forced to be equal." I'd argue that a completely free market would be just as terrible.

Clearly there's a spectrum. I mean, the market we have now isn't completely free and I'm not one that has a problem with regulations. My only issue is the piece basically saying "I became 20 in a bad economy but others became 20 in a good economy so the Government should step in and fund me to the point that my experience is equal"

Some people are luckier than others and that stinks but I don't think the Government can fix that. But I have no problem with Government safety nets that stop people from falling completely down the rabbit hole either.

I didn't really think Squashed was suggesting he ought to get funding, I think he was stating that the system as it stands now, where hard work leads to nothing, is flawed. You can see the implied solution as "I need money," but from his older writings, I'd be more inclined to think it's "There's a problem with a system wherein happiness is so based on the economy, and where we're told we need a good job to be happy, so that our happiness is based on a fluctuating system." The problem isn't the lack of a job, in other words, so much as it's the emphasis on having certain jobs.

ALSO: Can we please stop downvoting based on who we agree and disagree with? I'm enjoying this conversation quite a lot and I hate seeing Tom and myself dipping into 0 and -1 while productive debate's going on.

I agree downvote-as-disagreement is bad.

However, at the moment, your only comment downvoted below 1 in this thread makes the claim "I was thinking Communism more in the idea of 'let's not let the market be entirely free'".

That's such an aggressive redefinition of Communism it borders on falsehood, so I understand the downvotes. There are many, many critiques of the free market and proposals for moderating market activity for the greater good. Very few of these deserve to be lumped under the heading 'Communism'.

The Communist critique of markets and capital/ownership is larger, and their program, in both theory and practice, different. 'Communism' means something, and that something is much more than the innocuous "let's not let the market be entirely free".

(For example, you could wholeheartededly agree "let's not let the market be entirely free" and still be shot as a counterrevolutionary by a dedicated Communist.)

I was referring much more to Tom's being downvoted. He was at a universal -1 for a bit, which frustrated me.

I kind of misuse terms a lot. I say Communism when I mean socialism, and vice versa. In reality, I'm just anti-extremism. (I once discussed with some friends forming a political party on the concept of "extremist moderatism", or the idea that the only thing bad is extremist worldviews.) So in my view, neither capitalism nor communism is a be-all end-all, and the real solution is murkier and in the middle.

Where 'Communism' has been most earnestly tried...

- there has been death and deprivation, which has only let up as societies turn back to more traditional organizing modes

- because of the clash between the high hopes and sad reality, those expressing preferences to live another way are often imprisoned, while under non-Communist regimes 'Communists' are free to write books, be professors, start communes and cooperative living/production units, etc.

There is a difference between the economic systems of capitalism/communism and the democratic state of freedom/tyranny

Sure, there are many axes of the possibility space, at least theoretically.

But you don't find many, if any, societies in the Communism + freedom quadrant.

The other three quadrants have many examples. And those tyrannies that have become more free over time have usually needed a dose of capitalism as the first step (ending collective enterprises, especially farms, and trading with capitalist markets, for example).

True, but I can't think of a country that tried Communism in good faith. And in this country when people tried the system in a microcosm like a commune, it works. So maybe it doesn't scale or maybe it requires different roots than the founding of most communist countries.

Everywhere Communism has been tried, the perpetrators really believed in it, really wanted it to do better -- for its predictions to come true, and for capitalism to be swept away by something better.

Even if there was cyncism among those who grabbed power, they then elevated Communism's texts and ideals in all official communication, celebration, and education. So generations were given every chance to try "Communism in good faith".

But it still didn't work. It turned out more corrupt, more polluting, more poor, and even in many respects less egalitarian than capitalism.

To claim all those proud earnest efforts weren't "in good faith" is at best a form of the "no true scotsman" fallacy.

> So generations were given every chance to try "Communism in good faith".

They weren't stupid. They knew the party line was an obvious load of crap, a fig leaf over a ruthless power grab. They went through the motions only out of fear of the secret police (in itself an acknowledgment the rulers didn't expect any loyalty). In particular, Russian cynicism about propaganda became legendary.

You don't judge actual democracy by looking at totalitarian hellholes and their blatant lies about how "democratic" they are, do you?

How come every Communist regime comes so quickly and easily to the 'secret police' rule-by-fear?

Was every Communist movement that took power -- Lenin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh -- dominated by ruthless power-grabbers with no allegiance to Communist ideas except as a cynical route to power from the beginning?

(If in fact these ideas are so useful to ruthless power-grabbers, and so hard to implement 'in good faith', might that alone not discredit them? Attractive, in theory; but when you try to build a popular movement around them, nastier people than ever wind up on top.)

Why, when cracks in the secret police's power finally emerge, do the people embrace property, markets, and profits rather than a chance to finally implement 'Communism in good faith'?

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

-- Tom Paine, Common Sense

Gov't is at best a necessary evil - communism is unmitigated evil.

Quoting a guy that lived over 200 years ago doesn't prove a point, though I like Paine quite a lot. Remember that he lived in a simpler, quieter society.

Government is necessary to avoid a lot of sorrow. It gives us regulated foods and highways and it stops a lot of greedy people from doing bad things, while in theory allowing the people who're rich based on merit and talent to thrive without punishment.

I think that government should be a choice on parts of the people - I'd like a few more anarchic societies in the world for people who don't want to deal with regulations and are fine with risking themselves for freedom - but civilization thrives under a good government.

Good gov't huh? That's the one where 2 wolves and a lamb vote for what's for dinner? Democracy is the ultimate expression of might makes right, the only justification of voting is that since the majority can beat up the minority the minority better go along from the start. Can anyone here point me to ANY rational reason anyone should go along with a gov't other than to avoid being assaulted or worse?

I kind of like the idea that my food's been inspected for poisons, my highways won't collapse on me, I won't be raped and killed when I go for a walk outside, and that companies don't have permission to turn into dictatorships. I like the last point a lot because I wasn't a fan of Internet Explorer and I'd have hated to have to use it. Petty reason to like antimonopoly practices, but hey, I'm free to be petty.

Even the stuff the government fucks up on are fundamentally good ideas that I hope one day get revised. I like the philosophy that I get a say in who gets elected, though I wish we had instant runoff voting and caps on campaign expenditures. I like the idea of having free education, though the school system is awful. I also like that I have a right to avoid the government in favor of private practices in most cases.

The government doesn't inspect whether food is kosher but if a package of food has a kosher symbol on it I am fairly certain it is. Private organizations certify for kosherness and that seems to work pretty well. Why can't it work for food safety?

EDIT: I would trust a private organization much more than the govt. in determining food safety because there can be competition amongst food safety certifiers and financial responsibility(I could sue them if food they said was safe, wasn't).

If food being kosher was a matter of sickness and health, I'd want to make sure there was a nationwide focus on it. Kosher is a small industry, and it's a religious industry, meaning that it's all relative anyway. If a Jewish man accidentally eats an unKosher meal, there's no harm to anything but his psyche, and chances are if he ate it by accident he wouldn't tell.

The police have absolutely no responsibility to protect you. Look it up. The chief of police of your town could know that a murdering rapist is coming over to your house this evening to murder rape you and the chief would not be responsible in a court. The private individual is alone responsible for protection of his or her life and property.

The problem is that gov't FORCES everything on everybody; markets allow each to choose what is important to them. A really good example of the conflict is the current health care debates - if you want to see both sides in close argument, look at the comments on Megan McArdle's blog at The Atlantic. Megan claims to be a libertarian, but she's not much of one, I follow her blog mainly because of the interesting conflict in the comments.

Also, I am serious about does anyone have any rational justification for gov't other than its ability to threaten.

I just gave you rational justification. I'd have thought clean water was justification enough for anybody.

Maybe he was arguing against democracy, not government?

His point-- and it's one I think I agree with-- is that majority decision making really only differs from tyranny only numerically.

The alternative, I suppose, would be voluntary governments, and decion making by consensus.

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