What’s wrong with extreme wealth concentration? It’s not like hoarding cash. The wealth is the stake in companies they built or own.
We need more wealth concentration, simply because opposite of this is the prevailing normie zeitgeist. You can just write it off based on how popular it is to hate wealth.
Wealth is power. Power decides what we use our collective time and resources on. The more concentrated power is, the less we use that time and resources on things that improves the life of the average person, and more on things that matter to the few with wealth.
I’m going to assume that this is just some edgy post, but you should read up on the relationship between wealth inequality and corruption, social mobility, and similar factors.
Not trolling. It has served me better than most heuristics.
If there is something subjective and if you cannot find a critique of it, it’s usually a super power to assume the opposite is true barring obvious exceptions.
I would say if there is a decline in society, the normies are wrong. And if there's steady improvement in quality of life, then the normie zeitgeist is correct. But there's always a delay in these things, at least a generation.
I don't think that applies when the normies lack power; which is precisely the problem with wealth concentration. That would be like blaming the serfs for the failures of feudalist governments.
There's a reason we don't have feudalist governments. It's a "solved" problem.
The normies may have much less power, but it's never zero. Wealth isn't the only form of power. There's law/politics and there's military power. Whenever a group oversteps, you get the Magna Carta, you get secularism, you get civil wars and your Second Amendment. This is why the French Revolution and The Civil War(s) are in the textbooks.
When Venezuela's economy collapsed, a South American friend said that they deserved it. Every other South American country fought corruption and died for independence.
We never want violence, but it is there as an option. Laws and economic policies are there to make sure the violence is never the best option. Non-democratic capitalism doesn't work because it puts the law and the wealth in the hands of a few and leaves force as the only option. The world didn't suddenly convert into communism because Marx and Lenin were handsome demon lords; they converted because capitalism pushed them into a corner.
When you have this decline, it's because a society had weak and corrupt lawyers, statesmen, and economists. These may not be your normies, but they're pretty close to the middle class.
But you don't get to praise capitalism for the cheap air conditioning and then criticize it when low costs push production overseas. You can't negotiate for the high salaries then blame greedy CEOs when you get replaced by someone cheaper. You don't get to charge "as high as possible" and then wonder why your doctor is charging your life savings to save your life. The normies built a culture around winning and lopsided power, then are shocked when power is used against them.
> simply because opposite of this is the prevailing normie zeitgeist
We'd love to be able to have reasoned discussions about economics and the pros and cons of wealth concentration vs redistribution here. But this is not the way to do it, and the comment led to an entirely predictable flamewar. Please don't do this on HN, and please make an effort to observe the guidelines, as you've been asked to do before.
Man it's hard to read stuff like this on the internet. When has wealth concentration ever been a good thing? Wealth is power and power leads to abuse almost universally.
You underestimate the resources the subset of society who it actually benefits can, will, and do use to distort views on how wide that benefit actually is.
Like all of the startup founders and all of the folks here working at tech companies and investing in their 401ks, happily cashing out RSUs, and such right?
I don't know about the IT worker part but I dare you to talk about capitalism to the nurses, school teachers and police officers who cannot have lucrative business models like us HN folks.
Are these the same nurses who are anti-vax and the police officers I'm supposed to want to de-fund, or just the ones you're thinking of?
Are you going to be the one to tell the teacher's or police officer's union they have to divest their pension and buy fiat currency? No more stocks allowed!
Why people here brandish Communism when someone critics Capitalism? It’s like we’re still in the coldwar. Those two views have many sub-categories and there’s others in-between and on the sides. Just a few in the last decades:
- socio-democratic countries are the norm in Europe, namely Norway, Denmark and Sweden.
- Ordoliberalism: Germany, Switzerland
- cooperative economics: Japan, Spain
- market socialism: China, hungaria
- Parecon: brasil, Argentina
- Ubuntu: South Africa
- Anarcho-syndicalism, The third way, Islamic economic…
What a weird comment, so disconnected from reality. Norway is fully capitalist with income inequality similar to the USA. China, despite being nominally run by communists, is actually a fascist dictatorship. And "Ubuntu" isn't a real thing: South Africa is a failed state run by kleptocrats who can't even keep the lights on.
The income inequality in Norway is roughly half that of the US, and the quality of life of the bottom income bracket is much higher there, due to social policies. Why lie about things that can easily be looked up?
The Gini coefficient is similar so I have no idea where you're getting the idea that income equality in Norway is "half" that of the US. And the US has consistently had a positive net migration rate with Norway so regardless of your nonsense claims about quality of life people seem to be voting with their feet.
Because they have been conditioned to do so. The ultra-wealthy have been fighting the war against socialism for over a century, and part of that strategy is to polarize the topic. If you’re not explicitly pro unfettered capitalism, you must be a communist.
Ideologies have associated talking points. If you start spouting 'blood and soil' rhetoric don't be surprised or offended when people start to call you a Nazi.
In this case communism's obsession with talking about Capitalism as a proper noun as distributed process as if it was a monolithic discrete object with clear intentions and something which can be 'abolished' with no idea as to what the particulars would entail.
We need more wealth concentration, simply because opposite of this is the prevailing normie zeitgeist. You can just write it off based on how popular it is to hate wealth.