[TeMPOraL]

It's no contradiction - it comes from understanding the dynamics of the situation. It's a prisoner dilemma-like case. Repairing income equality requires cooperation of a lot of people - who are otherwise competing with each other. At any point during that cooperation, it is in each participant's short-term interest to screw the whole thing and go exploit workers right now.

Every business owner may truly care about thriving, growing economy. Hell, they could all be nice people who are unhappy about exploiting their workforce. But any ability for cooperation drops rapidly as competitive tensions increase. So yes, without external guiding force, them choosing what's best for all longer-term would literally be a miracle.

[badsock]

Exactly, it's a classic tragedy of the commons situation. The most rational move is to maximize your own gain, despite the obvious collective result.

There are conditions that can cause the rational action to switch to self-moderation, but I don't see any of them being likely in this scenario.

[MajorLOL]

>without external guiding force, them choosing what's best for all longer-term would literally be a miracle

Do you agree that have had quite a few miraculous people in our history as a nation? Many founding fathers, presidents, judges, military service members, and the like have chose what is best for the long-term at the expense of themselves.

I am trapped by your logic on this one anyway - the rich can't or only in a "miraculous" case chose a non-self enriching endeavor; so the discussion is futile, in your world, no human can solve this issue. Hopefully Google can get that Skynet system up and running soon, to resolve all these issues! :D

[gnaritas]

> Do you agree that have had quite a few miraculous people in our history as a nation? Many founding fathers, presidents, judges, military service members, and the like have chose what is best for the long-term at the expense of themselves.

No actually, we've had virtually none, and this easy to see if you attempt to count them and state their numbers in terms of percentage of the total population inclusive of their lifetimes. 1000, even 10,000 such are merely statistical noise basically equivalent to 0.

What you're doing is reasoning by anecdote, thinking a few examples mean something by ignoring the hundreds of millions of times the anecdote is wrong. You have to look at all of the people if you're going to make relative claims like "quite a few" because it's not quite a few, it's practically none.

[TeMPOraL]

> Many founding fathers, presidents, judges, military service members, and the like have chose what is best for the long-term at the expense of themselves.

Not saying it doesn't happen; it does rarely, and under special circumstances. Also it's not that people really need to be pushed hard to do good things - it's more that everyone is entangled in various incentive structures preventing them from doing good, and you could argue that rich and powerful are generally subject to much stronger incentives to do bad than ordinary people. It takes strong character and luck to be an exception. Elon Musk can and does think long-term and for the betterment of everyone - for which he is constantly ridiculed by the media (or even here), not to mention loads of people being constantly perplexed by Tesla's and SpaceX's business decisions, because they can't understand that a company can really exists just as a means to realize some non-short-term, non-monetary goal like getting us to Mars or getting transportation off fossil fuels.

Hell, we've generally created a system that attempts to forbid companies from long-term, cooperative thinking. Just almost any kind of strategic cooperation on the market is being called "anti-competitive practice" and discouraged with severe punishments. And for good reason, probably - companies tend to cooperate against society, not for it, and governments tend to not like rich people being powerful enough to work around them completely. As companies get successful they're being asked to go public - and that's usually enough to destroy any possibility of working for long-term good in them - public shareholders tend to not give a damn about the company mission or deeds beyond their means of making immediate profit. It takes special trickery, like Google did, to keep the company in control of individuals capable of thinking longer-term.

For better or worse, we tend to force rich people both culturally and legally into being greedy and short-sighted - so let's not act surprised if that's all most of them do.