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Are you willing to vote against your own interests in the short-term (ex. your wait times for your non-emergency doctor visits due to Medicare for All may increase, but in exchange everyone has healthcare) to help those that are less fortunate than you in the long-term? I don't blame anyone for playing the hand they're dealt, minimizing their taxes, not donating money to charity. Those are the laws and norms we've agreed on - maximize your quality of life from there. Related note I've been thinking about it a lot recently:
Will & Ariel Durant wrote an 11 volume history of the rise and fall of Western Civilizations (after touching on China and the Middle East) called The Story of Civilization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization It was written in the 1930s-70s so it has some fascist, racist and pro-eugenics overtones. Different time, pretty expected - you'd have to be pretty high on Western Civilization to spend your entire life, all the way to your deathbed, writing about it. Conveniently, he wrote a summary of what his takeaways were after all of his research The Lessons of History https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008GUIEYU/ref=dbs_a_def_r... After studying the rise and fall of hundreds of states and civilizations, he credited excessive wealth inequality as one of the most consistent causes of a failed state - Romans, Greeks, Chinese, etc. Once you hit a certain level of inequality - norms fail, and it gets redistributed anyways. Since capitalism inherently concentrates wealth upward (returns on capital are higher than returns on labor), controlled income redistribution (e.g. The New Deal) is necessary to maintain stability. Blog post with a few examples from the book https://fs.blog/2016/03/history-concentration-of-wealth/ It feels like a lesson that humans have repeated thousands of times, and we've managed to forget again. |