That "other people's wealth" you're talking about is everyone's wealth.

Billionaires stole the profits of our work from us, and they didn't do it fairly.

I feel you underestimate how much a billion dollars is.

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

Nobody in history has ever worked hard enough to earn a billion dollars fairly.

It's crazy to me that you'd defend these people who have corrupted and degraded the entire system - the government, the finance sector, the media - to only favor holding everyone else to ransom. Not producing but holding. Societal wealth stolen without paying tax to benefit society. People didn't choose this.

I'm not starving, sure. And I'd be absolutely fine paying significantly more tax than I am now.

But I'm not about to voluntarily donate while I am still forced to work towards retirement, and there are people controlling literally 10,000 times more assets than I am that pay zero tax.

Do you not see the inevitable outcome of that?

You and your children, and their children, will own nothing because the super-rich will outbid you and everyone else for everything.

Food, houses, cars, travel, hotels, healthcare, medicine. EVERYTHING.

You will be poor. The rich is a tiny club and you're not in it.

Everyone, even the wealthy ones here on hn will eventually succumb. You will be outbid for everything.

You will have to sell your house to afford necessities while all your work goes towards luxuries for oligarchs.

There must be some mechanism to limit wealth or that is the inevitable outcome.

Here's a little thought experiment...

It's a hot day and everyone's thirsty. You have $9. There's a bottle of water on the table that you want to buy and the price on it is $10.

I give you $1. You can almost feel your thirst satiated.

Then I give the person next to you $1,000. How do you feel now?

Well our current system is like that, but multiplied by 100.

I do not agree that society should exist solely for the benefit of a handful of super-rich freeloaders.

On the desert island, they would starve and/or be eaten. That's not my definition of a useful member of society.

This seems like a very skewed perspective. You work for a salary, I imagine, and you freely agreed to take that job and in return get a salary, even if the company was losing money or its share price was plummeting. I.e. taking a salary because of the security of payments.

Lots of people who invest in businesses lose all their money. You can't point at the very very peak performers who a) didn't lose their money and b) made a really valuable company instead, and decide that they owe you something other than what you agreed you would work for. That's just not how agreements work, and it's also the apex fallacy[0].

[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Apex_fallacy

But there still needs to be some mechanism to limit wealth inequality or we still get the inevitable conclusion.

The US minimum wage hasn't changed in 16 years!

Which means many of these peak performers are built on the back of poverty, people who don't have the luxury of "freely agreeing" to take their labor elsewhere.

It's just not fair at all. Governments are funneling money to the rich hand over fist. It's obvious who they represent and who they don't.

You have to agree that trickle down is not trickling down.

I don't mind this, because minimum wage is a national minimum. States (and even more fine-grained than that) need to have contextualised minimum wage, or it's just silly. That's why it hasn't changed. Minimum wage increases wages at the expense of reducing employment, for any job that isn't worth that wage. You can't increase the national US minimum wage to what would get you an apartment in California and expect jobs to exist in Appalachia.

Honestly, the national minimum wage seems almost pointless. States should handle it, as they can contextualise at least a bit better.

And it not changing isn't evidence of anything when state-level minimum wages exist.

> Which means many of these peak performers are built on the back of poverty, people who don't have the luxury of "freely agreeing" to take their labor elsewhere.

Thus I don't think it means that. And also - your false dichotomy of you're either a wealthy business owner or you're on national minimum wage is not helpful either. People are paid what they can negotiate. Companies pay what they can negotiate. Companies exist if they charge a low enough price for their level of service or product. It's a tri-party system. The existence of other companies in in-demand businesses is what drives up wages, as if you don't like your job you can move, and people do. That's why I would say where possible, things that stop new companies springing up should be removed. Thinking it's all about national minimum wage is honestly the wrong approach, in my opinion.

> You have to agree that trickle down is not trickling down.

I don't know what this means. I didn't mention anything trickling down.

I was not implying that "you're either a wealthy business owner or you're on national minimum wage". You can safely substitute a "middle class" person, or even a "rich, but not super-rich" person, for "on national minimum wage", because in a few years I believe the middle class will completely cease to exist.

This is already happening and is actually the inevitable conclusion of all the funneling of money towards the super-rich and the subsequent increase in wealth inequality.

I wasn't even actually talking about business owners, but the super-rich that those business owners borrow money and pay interest to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

That's the trickling down I'm talking about, which you didn't mention because it appears you don't think that som trickling down is even necessary.

Some trickle down or other mechanism to limit the rich from owning everything is necessary if that inevitable outcome of a tiny group of people owning absolutely everything is to be avoided.

Do you disagree with that?

I believe you're alluding to some kind of nearly perfect system where large businesses have not created artificial regulatory and other moats to protect their business and hamstring competitors.

eg, imagine a large factory that employs most of the people in an area. Potential workers for that factory do not have the ability to negotiate a fair wage, and also don't have the mobility to uproot their entire life to move somewhere else. Also another company cannot reasonably expect to move in and out-compete for the workers in that area. Thus the fictional factory is in a massively favorable position to "negotiate" wages for its workers.

I think we have largely differing views on the fundamental fairness of a system where low-paid workers are expected to negotiate with multinational corporations that already have all the advantages in any negotiation.

Those corporations are also able to monetize the profits from those workers productivity to actively lobby governments for even more favorable conditions in those "negotiations".

I believe it is a very unfair system.

I doubt we will end up finding a middle ground here if you do not think a system where the super-rich are not limited in some way from accumulating wealth is unfair.

From this article in 2024: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffe...

There is additional context there explaining why Berkshire holding cash reserves is unique to their needs, and historically has only represented 17.5% of their total assets.

Billionaires and large firms are not sitting on piles of cash Scrooge McDuck style, because holding cash is costly.

Edit: Meaning that the Jiffy Lube guy has to pay income tax on what he earns at his job, but you don't have to pay tax on the labor expense to you.

I expect very few people to report this to the authorities, unless, of course, you are going to do something which is significant enough to require you to apply for a building permit.

My laptop has an IPv6 address, as does the router that routes its traffic. There’s no NAT, that’s true, but there’s still a firewall — only inbound packets from a destination host and port that have been sent to are allowed in. And in enterprise environments, from what I’ve seen, there’s a symmetric NAT on IPv6 anyway — packet comes from a different IPv6 address and randomized port than the one client sent it from, making peer connectivity impossible, as the source port varies by destination host and port.

I suppose if you could make agents all sound the same they would be interchangeable, and companies always love that. It’s Anjali or Ligaya or Dolores but now they all sound like “Becky”?

I personally also know a few people from university where if I superficially look at their situation now, I'd think "that could have been me". And I'm a guy so in my case it wouldn't highlight a man/woman difference. But then, looking at the details, some of them made sacrifices that I would be unwilling to make. Or their starting position wasn't that similar, after all, e.g. I just didn't know 10 years ago that they were trust fund babies.

My wife and I have taken about equal share in raising our kids and honestly I am prouder to have managed to spend time with my children growing up and to be married to a woman who doesn't have to rely on me to survive than of anything I could have done in a slightly more successful career.

A very good insurance policy? We pay a lot of extra money on our house loan to ensure it's immediately void should something happen to me (or gets cut in half if one of us becomes seriously ill).

I bring up this story because, in the end, they ended up splitting up since he was unwilling to exploit the flexibility of his professional life to allow their relationship to flourish. I bring it up since I was to raise the question, a question that thinkski's comment triggered even though it is by no means directed their way: how often do we consider the aspirations and potential of our wife when deciding who is going to be the "breadwinner" and who is going to be the "care giver"? I am not saying that it is impossible to be both, but the reality is that compromises to a greater or lesser degree often have to be made for the sake of the family.

this, for me is the key to any relationship. generalize it to partner, since it is important for both sides. when i met my wife i carefully considered whether i would be able to support her goals as well as tried to figure out whether she was supportive of mine. fortunately, working in IT meant that i had a lot of flexibility and so in our case the chances of a conflict in our goals was small, but i would not have married her otherwise.

> the bond invested in our children will be there forever.

It is entirely possible to bond with our children and still maintain a career. These are not mutually exclusive the way you've implied.

Parties, skiing, Hawaii, toys, consoles, cars, motorcycles, vacation homes, etc.

Over time, most people I know grow tired of them. They have more friends yes, but even my friends know their “good time friends” wouldn’t stick around through hardship.

Kids aren’t the only way for sure. There are plenty of causes, but they are one thing that lasts longer than a few product cycles.

Then if there is a dispute with the family provider, the person not working will be in a position of fragility: if he/she leaves, she has no career, no way to support herself, she has to abide by what the providing partner asks her to do, even if he is sometimes abusive

That's not guaranteed.

I have an IoT graveyard of devices from companies that did not charge a monthly fee and went under (Edyn garden sensor, Automatic car monitor, etc).

The Soviet block and DPRK was exactly as close to socialism as it was to democracy: 100% in their propaganda, 0% in reality. Or would you say democracy doesn't work because the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a shit show country despite being "democratic"?

The reason there has been no successful implementation of it is that the process of enacting it is inherently fragile. And some bastard is going to exploit that fragility.

Then you're screwed and we end up with the bountiful historical examples that people love to cite & then others refute as "that's not real xyz-ism".

You're absolutely correct that they're not "real" xyz-ism. And that should make you very worried about supporting something that has the same or similar end goals as those initiatives once had.

Socialism is nothing more than extending democracy beyond the state to the workplace. It is no more collectivist than democracy is in any other economic system. And like any other form of democracy, it is naturally opposed to authoritarian rule, not conducive to it.

As such, the problem with socialism is not at all that it's easy for it to fall into dictatorship. The problem is that it is hard to convince the rich to allow it to form without aggression, since it necessitates them losing much of their power. The same problem that democracy faced: kings rarely step down, and bloody revolutions are typically worse than the status quo (and you can never be sure what will happen after one).

Social democracy has numerous successful implementations (eg Scandinavia).

But the more “hardcore” collectivist -isms have from what I can recall basically zero successes, despite numerous attempts.

This concept that there is a well defined polar opposite to western “freedom” capitalism is so far from reality in literally any economic history understanding

Not only that but the USSR was in no sense Marxist Communist. It was well known that the Lenin-Trotskyist Bolshevism was the core, specifically the command economy part.

That regime coopted the philosophy of Marxism well after his death.

That’s what happens when both sides are spinning the same propaganda.

BTW I’m equally not a fan of Marxist material dialectic as I am the trotsy-lenin unholiness or the American oligopolies.

We need a true state-free attempt at anarcho socialism but that’s nearly impossible as such a concept fundamentally threatens the basic structure of the modern state.

In no revolution are the poorest and weakest persons ever benefited it’s only typically been to the benefit of some small group they just recycles hands so in fact, the last thing I want is some kind of hard break.

No, I’m an anarcho syndicalist. Which is a gradual reappropriation of the means to worker collectives slowly and peacefully.

“enforce strict protections for worker pay, fairness, and whatever“

This assumes a lot about the foundational structure of the environment these agents are operating within

Unless you address who reaps the benefits of commerce then its just the same situation with slightly different tyrants

What you describe is precisely the structure of what exists now - but you’re not satisfied with the rates

That's something I hadn't thought of before. I suppose the part of the solution that addresses that would go hand-in-hand with TFA?

So for example, if I own a table saw and my neighbor doesn’t and needed one for his labor, anarcho-syndicalism would suggest that if my saw was not planning to be used for a day, and he uses it for a day of creation, then the neighbor owns 100% of the resulting value. Much like if you rented a tool from Home Depot.

That makes sense and there’s no reason to believe that simply because I own a fallow tool, would benefit even equally from the labor.

Now look at how companies are created they are created in such a way that 100% of the value is retained by the organization and labor does not get to set its own rate. It Hass to simply be responsive to the rate offered by the organization decoupled from an alienated from, the labor that I’m inputting into it.

This isn’t accidental it’s a type of accounting that assumes labor inputs are not valued based on the productivity outcome they are simply, and only based on the relative bargaining power of the respective organizations.

This is why you see corporations, so aggressively fight the concept of collective bargaining because it creates the power dynamic that is actually appropriate for equitable relief, but reduces the amount that the more powerful organization can determine the relationship between the less powerful individual.

So anarcho-syndicalism is really about ensuring the individual worker cannot be put into a position of deprivation or suffering such that they have so little relative bargaining power in labor production that they can only choose between oppressive tyrants.

The key fallacy that people love here is that it’s all about relative deprivation so people have exceptionally varied views on what is considered oppressive or what a lifestyle would look like that is, let’s say inequitable.

Often times and you’ll see in many threads is the argument that “Actually we’re objectively more comfortable and well off that really, you shouldn’t be complaining about anything because you’re not starving to death”

The problem here is that it’s a completely separate argument than the argument for long term concentration of power, and who is actually controlling the economy, and has the ability to be flexible and create a life free of intermediaries that are confiscating your labor.

It all comes back to who has the power to set their own destiny in the economy, and the reality is, it’s always been small groups of exploiters who are able to do whatever they want to do because they’re taking advantage of the relative deprivation around them to not make things actively better for everybody. The people in situations like this, take no responsibility for their surroundings, their community their environment, they simply say how do I take advantage of this environment to my own best ends, and if that is the foundational conceit of a society, then you will not have a society that long and history tells us that society is built on this go through this political cycle, which so far has been basically every society in recorded history, unfortunately.

Anyway, there’s a lot of Intersectionality here with, for example, global finance, how this got really amplified after Bretton Woods two and the kind of fiatization, and then financialation of all possible value so there’s a giant kind of systematic thing here that is encoded in a lot of these as foundational assumptions in western capitalist economics.

Unless people there somehow have much lower IQs than their neighbours, who do vastly better, the difference in outcome must lie in the system that co-ordinates their work.