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by nickpp 499 days ago
Fascinating mindset!

So if a pupil in class decides to do more homework than the teacher required, they are being unfair towards the students that decided to do the bare minimum?

Very interesting way of thinking. I lived under communism and not even The Party was so radical: they encouraged performance, but then you still got paid the same as the lazy bums. :)
1 comments
immibis 499 days ago
It's unfair if the teacher gives lower grades to other students because of that student.
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nickpp 499 days ago
Oh, wow.

How about if we have two farmers with similar patches of land, one works it exactly to his needs, consuming everything he produces. The other one works as hard as he can, weekends included, with the surplus irrigating and buying tools and more land that make him extra productive, such as 10 years down the road he has amassed significant wealth while his neighbor is still living from harvest to harvest.

Still unfair?

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immibis 498 days ago
I repeat: it's unfair if the teacher gives LOWER grades to one student because a DIFFERENT student did better.

Sally gets 90% and gets an A. You get 80% and get a B.

Next year Sally gets 100% and gets an A. You get 80% and it's a D because you didn't keep up with Sally.

Pretty unfair right? Well, that's how capitalism works. So you go and write a regulation that says 80% is a B.

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nickpp 498 days ago
Nope, it's not unfair at all, it's great!

Because Capitalism is not a school, it's real life. In real life the more, harder and smarter you work - the more you get (generally). And the more you have - the more you can leverage that to make even more. And in the process the society and everybody else gains even more since you only capture a small slice of the value you produce.

It's the beautiful process that got us out of abject poverty (literal mud) to the amazing luxury we are enjoying today.

What's unfair is to rule that "this is all I am willing to work and nobody else is allowed to work more". And countries dumb enough to self-own themselves like that will quickly be leapfrogged by smarter countries willing to work harder, longer and smarter.

Because the real world doesn't care about your ideology, it only cares about results. And communism has always failed miserably, everywhere it was tried.

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