To me, earning something means deserving something.
I don't think that the current system rewards those deserving the largest cuts of the pie.
If you want to argue how to get a billion dollars, sure. But to me that is different than earning it.
To me, earning something means deserving something.
I don't think that the current system rewards those deserving the largest cuts of the pie.
If you want to argue how to get a billion dollars, sure. But to me that is different than earning it.
Yes I'm sure that's what AOC meant too but it's not much of an explanation. Who are you to decide what people deserve or earn? And if you're going to decide that perhaps you'd like to provide a better justification, one that doesn't just boil down to "a billion is really really a lot of money".
> one that doesn't just boil down to "a billion is really really a lot of money".
Why? That's the point. It's too much damn money for one person to realistically earn. We all know how long a day is and how fast a human being can think, move, how much suffering they can tolerate, etc. It is an intuitive truth.
There is no conceivable formulation of physical and mental actions a human could perform, regardless of outcome, that could possibly justify that level of wealth relative to the average levels of compensation for other workers in society.
Okay then what's the maximum, and how did you arrive at that number? Feel free to provide a range
you're right to point out AOC is not the arbiter of truth and justice, and has no right to point out that stealing is bad
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I’m no fan of AOC but yes I think this is what she means. PG should be more generous and steel man the argument.
Why would you say that people don't deserve money that others willing gave to them in return for something they wanted and found to be worth it?
First, I'm assuming that you are not a free market maximalist, and that you believe that a market without any regulation will result in mega monopolies where it no longer matters if you find the price of the product to be fair.
The distribution of the wealth created by the massive increase in productivity has been trending towards the organisational top for many decades now.
I don't think that the management has gotten exponentially more efficient and better at their job to justify their increasingly bigger share of the profits.
Wealth isn't distributed in a free market, it is created.
That's not your determination to make. Other people, obviously, disagree. I think capital has been the primary driver of the increase in productivity. So it's sensible that a larger share of the gains go to that.
Nitpick: There's no such thing as a "market with any regulation," because regulation is what creates markets in the first place, by making most unsavory forms of profit illegal, in order to incentivize people to innovate and create.
If you only look at nominal dollars, you could say the wealth has trended toward the top. But the average person is materially richer today than at pretty much any point in the past, in terms of real income + real consumption + net worth + access to goods and services adjusted by quality + safety. There's a lot to be happy about, and I know few if any people who'd rather go back in time and live a worse life just so they're part of a time period where inequality is less.
Also, inequality has always been high throughout human history. The brief period of time in the mid 20th century where things seemed a bit closer, was the exception, not the rule, as far as I understand.
And again, if you only look at nominal dollars, maybe inequality seems extreme. But thanks to technology, the actual lived experience and quality difference between middle and upper classes is lower than it's ever been. What exactly is Bill Gates doing in his day-to-day life that's so much higher quality than what the average American is doing? He's eating the same burgers, wearing the same clothes, driving on the same roads, consuming the same entertainment, and getting more-or-less the same healthcare. His improvements on these things are incremental at best.
Compare to the gap between the rich and poor at any other time in history, and it's miniscule today. Housing and education and healthcare, imo, are the real areas to focus on the most. And I'm a big believer in raising the floor. But lowering the ceiling just so you can say things are more equal in nominal dollars isn't going to help anyone.
Good question. When the robber pointed his gun at my head, I thought: since I am willingly giving this man my wallet in return for my life, he must have earned it.
All of your analogies fail because you ignore the fact that (a) most people are happy shoppers who genuinely enjoy buying much of what they buy, and who anticipate newer and better releases of games, movies, restaurants, and other products; and (b) most people could simply opt out, own nothing, and go live in the woods if they wanted to, but would strongly prefer not to.
You yourself are using an expensive phone or computer to type Hacker News comments, presumably not at gunpoint because you choose to do so. Which means you think it's better than the alternative that you're apparently glorifying.
> (b) most people could simply opt out, own nothing, and go live in the woods if they wanted to, but would strongly prefer not to.
Almost every single person I know would rather do this, including myself, and can't. The woods are all private property, and unless we managed to hide somewhere, we would be removed by force.
Historically, (at least in my country, Scotland), people have been forced via economic and military coercion to migrate to the cities and adopt a lifestyle of employment and consumption, there's very little free choice going on.
Can you not join an intentional woodland community? What about moving to another country and living in the woods? If almost everybody you know would rather do this, it sounds like you've got quite the group. Why not pull together and make it happen?
I would be interested to hear of any in my nation that would have me, seems like quite an ask to allow a stranger to join your community when they bring little of value. That's not to mention whether it's legal or not, which I suspect it is not, planning laws are rather strict.
I do not believe I could move to another nation without employment or family relations legally.
We cannot pull together because even pooling all our resources, we could not afford to purchase the land nor the means of survival for ourselves and our families.
People share a terrifyingly large amount of DNA with mice and apes and other creatures that can become hopelessly addicted to self-destructive behaviors. What is also interesting is the susceptibility of many people to believe really insane things. People join cults. People start cults. People do the cinnamon and tide pod challenges. People jump of bridges. People commit copycat suicide. People do lots immoral and stupid things when that's society's standards.
And no, I don't think that most people are "happy shoppers" but seem deeply disaffected about their lives, and shopping might be a compulsive behavior that helps them soothe underlying fears of dread.
The most insane belief that people currently possess is that we should all be miserable, despite living in what is undoubtedly the best, most prosperous, safest, healthiest, and most abundant age of all of human history. It's a cult, and its members don't even realize they're a part of it.
Oh, I agree. I don't think we should be miserable. We'd be a lot less miserable with less stuff and more friends. Less internet (probably), more music and hobbies. Yet here we are :)
Many of us aren't miserable, love our stuff, and love our music, friends, and hobbies! And I suspect many more would be in the same camp if they weren't being told so often that "everybody's miserable."
When people hear "the world sucks" enough times, they start think, "the world does suck", and easily enough that leads to "my life sucks". Hearing that the world is great can help have the opposite effect. But it's often derided as foolish or even insensitive not to dwell on the negative.
Was the world less prosperous, safe, healthy, and abundant in 2005? If you don't measure it in clock cycles per second?
Significantly so.
Name one person who enjoys renting shelter.
I loved renting for many years and highly preferred it to buying. As do many of my friends. Frequent topic of conversation.
Name one person who enjoys paying for a new roof and mowing the lawn.
Exactly. I'd like to live in a concrete box - *my* concrete box - but it's not allowed!
I think there's a bit of nuance here. AOC is directionally correct, but of course there's exceptions.
I do think Taylor Swift and JK Rowling "earned" a billion dollars.
I don't think Elon Musk or Donald Trump "earned" their wealth.
Elon, for example, did earn a lot of it. People gave him money for Teslas.
But he disproportionally makes profit off regulatory credits, selling his own companies to each other, and burdening his companies with debt. He's forced people to work through pandemics, undermined the SEC, stolen data from the government, bought elections, and (if you want to believe recent stories) may have even helped cheat in the most recent presidential election. He directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths due to DOGE budget cuts, all while getting billions of dollars worth of contracts via SpaceX and xAI.
Or Bezos. Amazon uses our roads and infrastructure. A majority of Amazon warehouse workers rely on public assistance. I believe Bezos is a phenomenal founder, but his returns have subsidized by us.
There's a reason Taylor Swift doesn't get brought up when people talk about the rich. You _can_ earn a billion dollars, but more often than not you have to screw over a lot of people to get there.
I don't understand this dichotomy between the people you've mentioned—nobody makes hundreds of millions of dollars in a vacuum by themselves. Swift had her parents, staff, record companies that helped push and advertise her and rowling has a similar story.
That and Taylor does get brought up the whole time for being rich and wasteful, I can't count how many times I've heard about her incredibly short private jet trips in the past few years.
Your criticism of Bezos are also a bit ridiculous. Nearly every company that isn't B2B SaaS junk uses roads in some degree. I fail to see how the warehouse workers being on public assistance have anything to do with Bezos—if you wanted them to be self sufficient a politician could increase the minimum wage.
Your criticisms of Musk dishonest, but I would also argue that he didn't "earn" a lot of the money for Tesla, as he's just a jackass with a bachelors in econ that did none of the work on it.
AOC/Bernie types have never been directionally correct, as allowing the government to rob you in America will usually not correlate with any increase in QoL for the general populace. Someone on here described taxes in America and Western countries as "tithes" like you would pay to the mafia as "protection" money, where every dollar you give them makes them more capable of extorting the next one out of you.
AOC once summed up her political position as "I believe that in a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live," and I would consider that directionally right.
Then I can presume we can measure AOC's morality by how much she anonymously donates to anti-poverty charities.
This statement is a logical fallacy and one as accomplished as Walter Bright surely knew that while writing it.
I don't think it's a fallacy since AOC so clearly implies, if not outright states, that the reason people are poor in America is because people richer than them have too much money, and should have less. If that applies to them, why doesn't it apply to her? At what level is the cutoff?
No, her argument is not that people have too much money, it's that the system allows for it. She's dedicating her biggest resource, her time, to fixing this.
There's a greater wealth inequality in the US now than there was at any other point in time.
> No, her argument is not that people have too much money, it's that the system allows for it.
What's the difference? Either way, she's trying to change it so people can't have so much money.
And why? To what end? How does trying to tear down people who have money help anyone else? Why doesn't she instead spend that time trying to create more worth and opportunity for people who don't?
Because she believes that the economy is closer to zero sum than you do. One person having a lot means another person has less, not just in terms of material distribution either, but also the distribution of power.
It is rather strange to have a system where the problem is lots of people don't have access to material goods and power, and you see a few people with huge amounts of those things, and not think that maybe those few people should have less so the majority can have more. You may disagree based on economic analysis, but surely that follows intuitively?
I think she's wrong in almost every way. AOC is a demagogue who focuses on getting her constituents to dislike people with money, and in order to do so, she massively oversimplifies things.
First of all, the average person has more power today than at almost any point in the past. If you're obsessively focused on making people hate others with money, then, of course, you're going to spread the message that money is the only thing that contributes to power, but that's far from the case. Any scholar of personal power would tell you that that's incredibly oversimplified to the point of being almost laughable.
Compared to, say, 70 years ago, the average person has a greatly increased ability to: publish and distribute ideas, organize large amounts of people quickly, start a business, influence culture without being gate-kept by institutions, gain and maintain attention without being gate-kept by institutions, etc. Education is better and more broadly available, capital is more accessible, legal and bureaucratic tools are easier to use, geographic constraints matter much less, more paths to elite influence exist. And of course, far more people are included in what "the average person" is, more can vote, more can be part of society. And this is over the exact same time period that income inequality has increasing. Income equality is only part of the picture when it comes to personal power, not everything, as AOC would have you believe. Also, there are more people in the upper and middle classes today than there ever have been in the United States!
Also, she's hugely oversimplifying the economic landscape. There aren't just two parties, rich and poor. There's a huge third party known as the government. And that party's express mandate is to take care of the people. And the people pay into that party's coffers in order to help it do so. And they pay at progressively higher rates based on how rich they are. The top 1% alone pay about 40% of federal income taxes.
So yeah, if you just completely oversimplify things and pretend that this entity doesn't exist, and you came into a situation where the rich had all they money and power, you might propose a system exactly like this. And I would agree. We should tax people, and that tax should be progressive, and that tax should go to a central government, and that central government should have stewards who we elect to help redistribute the money. And that's what we do.
But these stewards are also so busy telling everyone to hate each other -- hate the trans, hate the atheists, hate the rich, hate the men, hate the conservatives, hate the business owners, hate the elites, hate the immigrants, hate the blacks, etc. The average person is extremely susceptible to demagoguery. It's much easier to hate and blame your neighbor than it is to actually look into government budgetary figures.
And it's much nicer as a steward of the government budget to get everybody hating their neighbors than to have everybody scrutinizing what you're doing with their money.
Have you actually listened to AOC? Because this entire post feels like one massive strawman. I don't think AOC has argued things were better 70 years ago, and I think you know that. She has correctly suggested the wealthiest country in the world, one that routinely exploits poorer countries, shouldn't have citizens that are afraid to call an ambulance. That's tremendous failure.
Your government budget comment is just fluff. If you actually engaged with her in good faith, you'd realize she is not someone who thinks government spending should go unchecked, and the only issue is how much it's getting. She just disagrees with the right on where it should go. For instance, it shouldn't go towards bombing a country for 3 months just to wind up paying them billions for the same deal we already had. I think we can agree having a world leader that is so easily baited into pointless conflicts is bad for our budget. But I guess we balance it out by slashing social programs.
A lot of people's interest in government budgets coincides with the introduction of DOGE. That is to say, their entire understanding of it ends with what Musk tells them. Most people have no idea how it works, and half the things they suggest are already happening. It shouldn't shock you to know some people think billionaires could pay a little more and we can be smarter about where the money goes.
I didn't say that AOC said that things were better 70 years ago. I said she makes it sound like people have decreasing power due to income inequality, so I'm comparing to times where income was vastly more equal, and I simply don't think her claims hold up. Your-income-relative-the-richest-people's-income is, imo, a very small factor of how much overall power you have in society as an individual, compared to the other factors I listed. Yet it is repeatedly harped on as if it's the only factor that matters.
I don't believe I said that AOC thinks government spending should go unchecked. But the vast majority of comments I've read from AOC seem to blame the plight of the poor on the success of the rich.
People have decreasing power because the very people AOC is targeting are nakedly taking power from us, thumbing in our faces, and then whining when they get called out on it. This goes way beyond hoarding wealth. There's no world in which Palantir exists and you can seriously argue these rich people are not our problem. I think AOC feels a way about the oligopoly that many of us do. The lobbies that flood our elections, the social media companies pumping filth to make the internet a hellscape. We do not have to pretend they need to be coddled anymore. People have had enough. Yes, they are scumbags, and they can pay more, and nobody gives a fuck if they think different. Heaven knows they deserve worse. If they acted like real human beings for even a few seconds, they would be treated like kings. But instead they ratfuck the country
The only real question is how someone can delude themselves into buying the Aw Sucks routine of the most powerful people on the planet.
Explain how it is a logical fallacy.
For one, if she “anonymously” donates to charities, how would anyone ever attribute any donations to her??
For another, as a sibling comment points out, AOC can have a much greater impact by influencing policies that help the people than through charitable donations, which, let’s face it, are just a bandaid on the structural issues that lead to such wealth inequality. Making something one’s professional goal when in a position of influence is much more impactful than optional activities on the side like charitable donations.
> if she “anonymously” donates to charities, how would anyone ever attribute any donations to her?
If she was truly moral, she wouldn't need to be feted for her actions. Virtue comes from doing the right thing even when other people are not looking.
Her using her position of power to extract money from Peter and give it to Paul does not bestow on her any morality or virtue points. One could characterize it as "buying votes with other peoples' money".
Homelessness won't be ended with just money, it'll be solved with (or caused by) politics and policies.
But the reason it's a "fallacy" is AOC could donate 100% of her current salary for 63,000 years and that would equal 1% of Elon's current net worth.
Even if you did get 1% of Elon's money, it wouldn't be enough. Real change comes from structural change, not pure cash.
And as the original person pointed out, you're clearly smart enough to know that.
> But the reason it's a "fallacy" is AOC could donate 100% of her current salary for 63,000 years and that would equal 1% of Elon's current net worth.
I didn't say anything about Elon's money being related to AOC's morals. I said AOC's morals were dependent on her donating her money without bragging about it. The claim of logical fallacy does not follow.