It's easier to take away than to give and help. So I don't blame them for that mentality, but it would definitely be great if society worked to lift the poor up more.
It is absolutely not easier to take away than to help. When trying to take away you must fight the will of those you plan to deprive. Whereas while helping you can often expect cooperation.
It’s great to lift up the poor, but up to what extent? Poor will still be poor, so what’s an acceptable amount of poor we should allow where they just have to deal with it?
>Lift up as many people as possible. It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people.
To illustrate this point, in our current era of the mega rich, we also have record low levels of poverty.
Wealth isn't a zero sum game. It's possible (but not always the case) for a billionaire to create more than a billion dollars of wealth for other people.
Wealth is not a zero sum game. But it is not possible for one person to create a billion dollars of wealth for other people. What creates wealth is actual productive labor, not some kind of vision.
If one person creates a new process to make $3 widgets cost $2 and sells a billion of them, while paying his manufacturers $1 per widget, he made $1 billion dollars and each of their 1 billion customers are $1 wealthier.
What happens in practice is that one guy in a lab invents a new process in exchange for his paycheck, and then some very different guy in a suit gets to collect the money off that invention.
Probably not technically due to poor being a relative term but we have a lot of discussion these days about housing for the poor which is obviously important but there's a lot less talk about the poor starving (and really, there's more talk about the poor having an unhealthy amount of calories). I think it's important to keep perspective that we are actually making great progress on providing a higher quality of life for the worst off.
It's true that there will always be a lowest class as long as there's income. Currently, in the US there's a percentage that skip meals, heat/A/C etc or work multiple jobs. OP might be referring to minimizing or eliminating the necessities those people go without.
Yes. Standards change over time. The acceptable level of poverty is not something morally objective, but rather dependent on the available technology/energy/capital.
But then you're back to the original question: is eradicating all poverty even possible?
A tech like AC is not available to everyone all at once. It starts out very expensive and gets cheaper over time. It may end up cheap enough that it can be ubiquitous, but before that point there must be a time that only most people can afford it.
If you then include it in the must-have category before the point of ubiquitousness, you will never get rid of poverty. Whereas if you include it after the point it's a pointless exercise, because everyone that wants one already has it.
Yes, to some degree we'll always be lifting the bottom line up as the top line rises. That said, we're not doing that now; right now we're still trying to get people fed and supply shelters.
If the "standard" for poor is changing over time, then the goal of eradicating poverty can never be achieved. For me, it has to be static: Basic shelter, food, health, and safety. It's a set of criteria that I believe most reasonable and non-idealistic people can agree on to be a universal starting point.
The fact that we're not providing the above basics universally to all citizens right now, as a matter of priority above all else, is a damning critique of government and one of the main reasons that set me down the path of anarcho-capitalist thought.
There are a few points that could be made. The primary point is that even though they might score low on some metric, the people of Bhutan are pretty much all well-off and happy. The king decreed democracy not long ago. It's a kind of "existence proof" that people can pretty much be alright.
Consider a couple of other stats from that site:
> the proportion of population with access to electricity in 2020 was 100%.
Sure, but that’s the answer to “can poor people more or less be alright “. Which while interesting is orthogonal to the question of “can a society exist with no poor people”.
Fair enough, but I feel that, at that point, we're getting into semantic weeds over the definition of "poor", eh?
For concreteness, I'll say that I would define "poor" as not having the capability to satisfy the lower tiers of Maslow's hierarchy. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs ) By that standard Bhutan isn't poor despite being technically a Third World nation.
I think it’s axiomatically true that if you change definitions at will then anything can mean anything. I don’t think that’s useful for enhancing understanding.
Depends on your definition of poor. If bottom 20% is poor as per some definitions, then you’ll always have poor.
If it’s enough calories and roof other your head… Then we have very few true poor. Especially if we don’t include those who are there due to choice and/or mental illness.
> If it’s enough calories and roof other your head… Then we have very few true poor. Especially if we don’t include those who are there due to choice and/or mental illness.
I mean if we are only using the most convenient definition it's easy to say we have few poor people. If you are eating only rice everyday in your rusting trailer somewhere in the Midwest, you're poor.
And yeah, when that happens, your mental health is not going to be great.
There’s no convenient or not definition. But we have to agree on one before we start discussing if we can fix it. If we define poverty as defining bellow median, we won’t ever get rid of it.
Mental health as in mental health issues making people make decisions where they end up on the streets. Many homeless people were living normal lives when their mental health deteriorated.
People up to middle class generally have money issues. There's probably some level of deeper assessment the court could do to determine impact if people are willing to share financials.
At the end of the day, the goal is to create enough incentive for someone to stay and face justice. Anything that furthers that goal without marginalizing people is a good start.
This chain so far is disdainfully reductive. Resource scarcity creates a zero-sum game, so you can't give without taking. People aren't trying to punish rich people so much as force their hand into helping those that they rest so comfortably upon, given the total lack of meaningful initiative.
The best we get is this "effective altruism" bullshit, which is just regular billionaire puppetry with a shiny new coat.
No, things (e.g. transactions in the economy, contracts that get signed, tax & transfer payments, etc) are almost never zero-sum. They are usually positive-sum, and sometimes very negative-sum. Almost never zero-sum.
They appear to be zero-sum if you only focus on the raw dollars that change hands in a transaction. But they're not zero-sum in the utility that's created, which is what matters for any meaningful analysis.
What resources are the rich hoarding? Does Elon Musk own 500 pairs of pants that could otherwise have clothed other poor men? Is he hoarding 500 tons of grain that should be released to starving country? He burns tons of jet fuel, literally, but so do an equivalent load of 300 vacationers on a jet to a holiday destination (and they do not produce the same GDP increase, to boot). Is Jeff Bezos monopolizing the I-5 freeway, SeaTac airport, or clean air in Seattle? What are these resources that are being 'hoarded' by the rich and denied to poor people exactly? And how is an average American living in a 2000 sq ft house 'hoarding' a resource a homeless person could be living in? Should the average American take in a homeless person so that his 'hoarding' of resources is lessened or alleviated?
They’re hoarding capital instead of distributing it to their workers. Furthermore, they’re utilizing shared resources for their companies profit without paying proportionally.
Wrong on that score too. To 'hoard' capital is to take it and put it in the equivalent of a mattress. I assure you, the family offices of these billionaires are doing anything but hoarding capital: huge chunks of it are invested in various vehicles. And the idea that billionaires should simply give away their wealth to their workers is widespread, but wishful thinking. The average person who wins a lottery (the equivalent of the recipient of a billionaire's largesse that you envision) pisses it all away in a few years, rarely deploying it for his own benefit, let alone that of society.
> The average person who wins a lottery (the equivalent of the recipient of a billionaire's largesse that you envision) pisses it all away in a few years, rarely deploying it for his own benefit, let alone that of society.
I want to point out that first of all, this isnt even a good comparison, because nobody is talking about just giving people a massive lump sum of cash. Its about putting the money back into the workers creating it, as well as public welfare systems to ensure future safety nets.
And second of all, even if we just gave the money away and people "pissed it away", the money is still being circulated and put back into the economy.
That's called taxation, and the billionaires you are referring to pay all the taxes that are due. None are behind on any tax bills AFAIK.
Of course it is easy to say 'put money back into workers creating it'. But the labor market is just that - a market, and no-one is being forced to give away their labor for free or less than it's worth.
If the tax code is riddled with tens of thousands of exceptions that incentivise a gazillion different behaviours, again, that's the will of the people asserting itself via the tax code. It's much harder to unpick those, right? Thus the highly enlightened conversation about making billionaries illegal and such.
> And second of all, even if we just gave the money away and people "pissed it away", the money is still being circulated and put back into the economy.
Yeah, that worked out great and totally did not result in historically high inflation that will now cause a recession with massive job losses (thus hurting the cause of the workers it purports to support). Also, the inflation is totally not a tax that will be paid mostly by poor people or those on fixed incomes.
They're not hoarding grain or iron or silicon or network bandwidth - in fact the only reason they got rich in the first place is because they allocated these physical resources effectively to serve a wide group of people. (See AWS for example. The average computer runs at maybe 10% utilisation for 2 hours a day; whereas theirs are at a high utilisation 24/7.)
As you rightly said, the things that Bezos, Musk and Gates are "hoarding" is capital in the literal sense.
Their net worth isn't made of gold coins sitting in a swimming pool doing nothing, but car factories, server farms and massive logistics networks.
The US Budget was $1.65 Trillion. If a couple billion fed every hungry child in the country (and yes, it would), childhood hunger would be a solved problem. And in the US, it mostly is a solved problem because of a combination of state and federal benefits that deploy money towards feeding and heating needs of poor families. There is also a child tax credit that outright put money in the hands of families with children (last year, I think?). All of that is already happening without your proposed (forced) transfer of the 1%'s wealth to their workers.
It's very easy to demand accountability of billionaires and supremely difficult to collectively hold our political leaders responsible. The law doesn't require billionaires to be accountable to the general public beyond obeying laws and paying taxes that are due, but our public representatives have higher standards to live up to, and our focus should be on them, not billionaires. All the wealth of American billionaires would add up to a couple years' federal budgets (or perhaps less than a year of federal and the top 4 populous states' budgets).
EDIT: The City of Los Angeles apparently spends ridiculous amounts of money on a per-person basis to 'solve' the homelessness problem (https://ktla.com/news/los-angeles-is-spending-up-to-837000-t...). This is just one example of ridiculous rent-seeking government bureaucracy and nonprofit hucksters. Money is not the problem, lack of accountability is.
What are you talking about? Are you claiming that redistributing wealth doesn't redistribute resources? If not, what is the actual claim you're making?
- The recipients get a greater share of existing resources.
- The changed demand changes supply accordingly. So there might be fewer private jets produced but more food produced, for instance. Thus future production changes too, and the economy is reshaped.
In GP's example, capitalism has made food production cheaper and less labor intensive so that more people can get it, relatively.
But for me, your example is capitalism in the sense that people do it of their own free will. They give up their time and resources to help others without coercion or compulsion. Capitalism is freedom to me, and a natural state that exists outside of the state where people can interact freely with one another. What they do with it is another question entirely.
Others, however, equate capitalism with greed and evil though.
Human nature to help one another doesn't exist because of capitalism though. In tight-knit Amish communities for example, communities come together and help each other out. Or under feudalism, for example, I'm sure people still helped out other people with no coercion from time to time.
What? You're talking about a dude who's net worth is sufficient to purchase the entire state of Wyoming (land and structures) and you're, with a straight face, going to insinuate no hoarding is taking place? Fascinating.
Ah, the good old fixed pie fallacy. Too bad it's a complete bunk. It'd be so easy if we could just break into Elon Musk's house, take out all the resources he is hoarding and distribute it among the hungry and end the poverty forever. Some people even tried something like that. Many times, in many countries. Nothing but a lot of blood (and I mean A LOT), a lot of poverty and a lot of suffering comes out of it. Some of those countries are still suffering from the consequences of these solutions, and probably will many years ahead.
You're completely wrong. Redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor works wonderfully. It's called the welfare state, and countries that do it best not only have much lower poverty than the US, they invariably have greater GDP per capita per hour worked than the US too.
Redistribution does not rely on fixed pie fallacy. The idea that the root of poverty is "hoarding" does.
Also, somehow you seem to be under an impression that the US does not implement the welfare state paradigm. Did you ever look at the budget and see how much is spent on mandatory and discretionary welfare programs? The fact that it did not fix poverty should give you an idea that maybe it's not Elon Musk being too greedy that is the problem here.
The root of poverty is hoarding. Poverty is a shortage of money - we can fix it redistributing money from rich to poor, but we don’t do this because rich people don’t want that and would rather hoard it.
The US has some good welfare state elements, but overall it’s very bad and far inferior to places that do it well. The consequence is vastly higher poverty rates.
Taking money from people who aren't spending it and giving it all to people who will spend it all immediately doesn't fix poverty. It just causes hyperinflation.
No it doesn’t. The Nordics don’t suffer from hyperinflation, in spite of their much larger welfare states.
Redistribution increases demand in the short term, but in the longer term production shifts accordingly to match. Which really is the whole point: Changing the economy to produce more of what ordinary people need.
The origin of the entire opioid epidemic comes from a company looking to enrich itself. You can't raise the bottom when the top is pushing the folks at the bottom, drowning them and taking the life vests from them to sell for pennies.
> It's perfectly possible to think that some ways of generating wealth for yourself are immoral, without thinking that all such ways are immoral.
Ironically, SBF's mom wrote about that and even made a claim that if se has any sense self awareness would make her question her entire career given how her son and his colleagues turned out [0]:
> The reality is that we are all at best compromised agents, whether by biology, social circumstance, or brute luck. The differences among us are differences of degree that do not admit of categorical division into the normal and the abnormal. A morally serious inquiry into the requisite meaning of free will needs to face some basic facts about this society—for starters, that in the United States parental income and education are the most powerful predictors of whether a three-year-old will end up in the boardroom or in prison; that most abusive parents were themselves victims of abuse and neglect; that the norms of one’s peer group when growing up are powerful determinants of behavior; and that traits of emotional reactivity and impulsiveness, which have a large genetic component, are among the more robust predictors of criminal behavior. Such an inquiry would also need to address what evidence would suffice to conclude that Smith could have behaved differently. Is it enough that someone in a similar situation once pulled herself up by her own bootstraps? That the average person does? And how can we be sure that the situations are in fact similar in relevant ways?
> The origin of the entire opioid epidemic comes from a company looking to enrich itself. You can't raise the bottom when the top is pushing the folks at the bottom, drowning them and taking the life vests from them to sell for pennies.
Furthermore, it was the Sacklar family who used it's wealth to protect its self from personal liability, despite it being a family operation, and avoided some much needed Civil lawsuits in order to put harsher Corporate Laws in place and instead let Perdue pharma take the bulk of the fines [0] and they only had to kick some in an offer a contrite apology for all the death and misery they profit(ed) from.
I'm as anti-CCP as they come and I'm very vocal about it, and I see them as an illegitimate group of thugs and cronies who should be overthrown; but to think that US Pharma, with the help of paying politicians for favourable laws isn't to blame for the opioid crisis is outright delusional.
Moreover, its been suggested by those with ties with the major Mexican drug cartels who supply the US--and have added precautions to help ID contamination--that the rise in fentaynol is coming from domestic sources as poverty has risen dramatically since COVID and made things worse for so many, and thus US based drug dealers (be it of American, Chinese or Russian lineage) have been cutting their drugs with them in order to either stretch them as demand has exceeded supply due to the wide reach [1] on social media as a lucrative but short-lived cash grab, or in order to attract more serious addicts who built tolerances is a more likely scenario than the CCP trying it's hand at re-creating the addiction tactics used in the Sino-Anglo war--they're too busy destroying it's economy and rattle-sobering in the Taiwan straight.
This says it all:
> “Drug dealers are using American innovation to sell lethal products,” executive director Paul DelPonte wrote. “Social media platforms bear some responsibility for these deaths.”
Honestly, it's as if the core story of Breaking Bad, which was a dramatized critique of social divides within the US medical system, law enforcement and hyper crony Capitalist system, has been entirely forgotten despite it being a land mark series of the 2010's that exposed some of the obvious hypocrisy of the US Society.
The truth is if the US had any real interest in solving any of this, they'd likely offer free testing of drugs for users without punishment but since it mainly affects poorer people they really have no interest in doing so since the war on drugs, and homelessness is such a cash cow to funnel public funds into NGOs and non-profits; ironically the very website/DNM the FBI took down (Silkroad) had a reputation system to solve this in addition to a licensed Chemist (Dr.X) who DPR paid [2] to keep it's members safe and who is now serving multiple life sentences in a Super Max prison for doing something innovative to reduce unnecessary deaths and violence in drug deals and a pubic health service!
Ross was many things, naive most above everything else, but this goes to show that it isn't a lack of talent in the US to try and address the immense drug issue it has (and continues to get worse) but rather self-interest, regulatory capture and the Industrial Prison Complex an an entrenched legal system to blame.
I think these people would prefer everyone sit on rocks rather than poor people sit in wooden chairs while rich people had leather couches.