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by fastandfurryous 3953 days ago
Why is redistribution unfair? There have been hundreds of years of theft, violence and political misgivings against labor to get to the point where, as a class, labor is neutered against having a chance to have a piece of the pie they built for industrialists and owners.

So why is it suddenly unfair to suggest redistribution?

Why are the deaths of billions of people somehow more just than a redistribution of wealth accumulated through centuries of ruthlessness?

> The vast majority of humans, if not literally every last one, will be much wealthier.

What makes you think that there would be any wealth made available for those who are not owners of wealth producing businesses? This is a serious question, because it is the same problem your solution is trying to fix.

> We need to accept that and adjust to it, not fight it with gimmickry and theft

Or we can recognize that the current state of affairs was brought upon by years of gimmickry and theft by a slim margin of people against the whole. If you rely on trading your time for money, you are not part of that slim margin.

Honest question: where do you think you'd be in this situation? On the side of vast wealth holders who will welcome you with open arms into their enclaves where a multibillion dollar net worth is required? Or rotting with the rest of us who rely on programming a computer to pay the bills?

This reads like an earnest Modest Proposal and efficiency porn mashup.

1 comments

How do you redistribute?
We could let workers unionize and work out an agreeable private contract between their union and employer when it comes to compensation for jobs eliminated by machines. That option has left the table because of the violence, deaths and laws passed against workers and unions in the past.

Or we could do what's worked reasonably well at keeping people from dying in the streets and enact social programs through taxes.

Wealth accumulation to the extreme that it is today wouldn't be possible if not for the centuries of intentional enclosure of land, subsequent displacement of people, violence against workers looking for just compensation/treatment and political/legal/economic disenfranchisement of organized labor. This still happens today in the form of Right To Work legislation and in less luxurious industries and places.

Yet anything that can be couched as "redistribution" is deemed wrong and unfair.