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Comment by mherkender | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for everyone, but for me it was more about the growing divide between the rich and poor. I don't think a healthy/happy society with room for upward mobility can exist if things keep moving in this direction. This is literally how wars start.

I really can't understand how you think this is about some person's individual success. People don't hate that, they want it for themselves too. The problem is that statistically it's becoming less likely for poorer economic groups, regardless of their honesty.

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I agree with you that a healthy society is the one where the gap between the poor and the rich is small. However, I believe this must not be achieved by any kind of coercion coming from government. It may work sometimes (as in Scandinavian countries, but those are exceptions and I'm not gonna go into the details of why I think this cannot be duplicated), but ultimately, I think the gap can only be made smaller by free market and free trade, without government violence and coercion.

If you look at the wealthiest people in the world, those are the people who are either in power or close to power. Nobody will be able to make money by favoritism or coercion or corruption if there is no entity (e.g. government) that facilitates those things. Look at the world map. Which countries (again, with the exception of Scandinavian countries) are the richest and in which countries the lot of ordinary men is better? The ones where there's more free market, not less. The US, of course, is absolutely not in the top list of those countries, being highly regulated and taxed.

> Which countries (again, with the exception of Scandinavian countries) are the richest and in which countries the lot of ordinary men is better? The ones where there's more free market, not less

Which countries, specifically, do you have in mind?

It's very simple. If you looked at Hong Kong vs China, or South Korea vs North Korea, or Western Germany vs Eastern Germany, you only needed to follow the people's footsteps. Have people been lining up to go from the former to the latter ones or vice versa?

Well sure, if you compare free markets with dysfunctional dictatorships, they come out pretty well. But when you start looking at the nuances of regulation within relatively free markets, the answers aren't so clear cut.

Even if you omit the best examples of European social democracy, a lot of people would argue that quality of life for the average person in France, Germany or the UK is much better than in the US, due to such government meddling as social healthcare, labour laws and consumer protections.

> Nobody will be able to make money by favoritism or coercion or corruption if there is no entity (e.g. government) that facilitates those things.

Sure, government corruption is one way rich people make themselves richer, but money by itself is powerful too. Imagine we lived in anarchy, the strongest few would amass all the wealth, they would run their own private armies, and no one who wasn't rich and strong would have any leverage to get anything.

The point of a progressive taxation scheme is that wealth itself confers an advantage that needs to be offset by some collective power of the populace. Claiming that free markets will make the wealth gap shrink is just magical thinking. Money is power, regardless of the form of government.

If you re-read your comment you will see that there's no logical proof in what you're saying, nor is there any evidence. Saying things like "your point is just magical thinking" will not prove me wrong.

Furthermore, please notice that when you say "The point of a progressive taxation scheme..." means that this is an intention of the policy. The actual effect might be quite different, as is very often the case with government policies. I would argue that rich people will always be more powerful, you simply cannot avoid that. And there will always be inequality. Question is, under which system will the rich be less powerful and my answer is that without government they won't be able to coerce others and force others to do things, they will only be able to spend THEIR own money and act on the market as market players, with no special privileges.

The problem is that while your intentions are noble, intentions alone cannot solve the problem. You always have to look at results. Tell me, where in the world has progressive taxation produced innovation and wealth? Perhaps, Scandinavian countries are innovative and are responsible for a great deal of awesome new things in the world? No they're not. Or perhaps China or Russia before they started liberalizing their markets had produced a lot of innovation and increased the standards of living for their citizens? No. Only in countries with less government intervention have we seen the lot of ordinary men greatly improved.

>I believe this must not be achieved by any kind of coercion coming from government.

The thing is, as soon as you talk about a system of property, you're talking about violent coercion. Even before you consider corruption, the government is disproportionately helping rich people by enforcing that they have exclusive access to a larger share of the world's resources. That's fundamentally what it means to be "rich".

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not going to suggest completely abolishing property rights. I just get sick of people using "it's coercion" as an argument against any government intervention, while quietly ignoring the absolutely huge amount of coercion involved in enforcing a "free market".

>Nobody will be able to make money by favoritism or coercion or corruption if there is no entity (e.g. government) that facilitates those things.

People are perfectly capable of favouring, coercing and corrupting others without any help. Centralised power can make it worse in some cases, but it's not like all that power disappears when you take away the government.

It makes it almost impossible to set tax rates that are fair. People always have someone richer than themselves who they think should pay more. People always have someone poorer who is "scrounging". You end up with massive income redistribution with the government having all the spending power. It is bad from almost any political perspective.

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