[beeflet]

As a libertarian I also dislike the "crabs in a bucket" mentality people have towards inequality because it is clearly motivated by jealousy, but the massive amount of inequality we see today seems to undermine some of the assumptions behind democracy.

I think the reason why the social contract of democracy evolves from natural law is that the basic assumption is that we all have about the same fighting power, and voting is representative of this. This assumption does not hold when some minorities have 1000x the economic power but 1x times the voting power: the majority of people will vote to redistribute wealth, while the rich will be motivated to destabilize the peace and take advantage of their disproportionate fighting power directly (killbots? [1]).

Additionally, special interest groups will lobby to protect their cash cows. An increasing amount of the economy flows through government expenditure (including tax incentives, nationalization, etc.), for example palantir, flock, openAI and others. We live in an increasingly planned economy. In the USA, we import pretty much everything and we only build for the military and real estate.

The state of inequality is also concerning considering the recent technological improvements that threaten to totally devalue all labor. There's this notion that the lives of the 1% don't matter as long as we raise the standard of living for the lower class as you suggest, but what is happening now is more like a doomsday situation where we are pulling the ladder up and consigning the working class to the chasm of liquid hot magma below [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVo1S52xdpI [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

[anal_reactor]

Hot take but the more time I spend with poor people the less respect I have for them. I grew up in Eastern Europe where the economies were actively suppressed during communism, so the story "poor people just need more chances" hit home because that's exactly what I saw around me. But then I moved into a poor neighborhood of a rich country and... no matter how you organize the society, a certain percentage will always either be incapable of participating in it, or flat-out refuse to do so. You can give them all the chances they need, they will stubbornly keep making wrong decisions.

[Schmerika]

Base classism isn't really a hot take on this forum.

> I moved into a poor neighborhood of a rich country and...

And what?

> no matter how you organize the society, a certain percentage will always either be incapable of participating in it, or flat-out refuse to do so.

And what percentage of "the poor" that you're maligning are you claiming this to be?

[lII1lIlI11ll]

> Hot take but the more time I spend with poor people the less respect I have for them. I grew up in Eastern Europe where the economies were actively suppressed during communism, so the story "poor people just need more chances" hit home because that's exactly what I saw around me.

Well, what I saw around me in post-Soviet times was that as soon as people got any kind of wealth they would just spend it all on luxury cars, fur coats for their wife, expensive vacations and building a mansion-like dacha. Only the last asset on this list has any potential to appreciate.

> But then I moved into a poor neighborhood of a rich country and... no matter how you organize the society, a certain percentage will always either be incapable of participating in it, or flat-out refuse to do so. You can give them all the chances they need, they will stubbornly keep making wrong decisions.

Western left agrees with you, they just won't spell it out like you did. But their current policies are basically:

1. Just give money for free to the poor, both explicitly and implicitly (social housing, rent control, etc.).

2. All kinds of equality of outcomes policies, diversity quotas, etc.

Equality of opportunity got out of vogue because it didn't produce results the left was hoping for.

[ndsipa_pomu]

> Well, what I saw around me in post-Soviet times was that as soon as people got any kind of wealth they would just spend it all on luxury cars, fur coats for their wife, expensive vacations and building a mansion-like dacha. Only the last asset on this list has any potential to appreciate.

It seems likely that you're just seeing the highly visible purchases and assuming that that's all that they're buying. What's not so visible is the difference between always eating cheap, poor quality food and then being able to afford fresh vegetables etc.

> Equality of opportunity got out of vogue because it didn't produce results the left was hoping for.

That doesn't seem accurate outside of the U.S. - there's plenty of countries that are still attempting to redress the balance after rich white men skewed the odds so that only them and their families could get access to quality education/healthcare/financial services etc.

It always bugs me when people point out diversity quotas whilst ignoring the centuries of white-only quotas.

[anal_reactor]

> It always bugs me when people point out diversity quotas whilst ignoring the centuries of white-only quotas.

The diversity discussion is always funny to me in the context of a country built by 99.9% white people. It's like... imagine arguing about the role of black americans in the history of Japan and why they deserve a piece of the pie.

[ndsipa_pomu]

That doesn't seem like a reasonable comparison and I'd dispute the "country built by 99.9% white people". Yes, lots of white people claimed to be "building" things and yet relied a lot on non-white slavery to achieve it. So, not only were the slaves' lives treated as mere possessions, but they also don't get any credit for the hard work they were forced to do.

It seems to me like a country built on theft of labour (as is the UK where I am).

[anal_reactor]

I'm from Poland. Throughout most of its history, my country was being invaded - by the Germans, by the Austrians, by the Russians, by the Swedish. We had literally nothing to do with colonialism. When Napoleon sent Polish people to Haiti to fight off slave rebellion, Polish people joined the Haitian side.

My country lost its independence in 1795. It regained independence after WW1, but then Germans and Russians attacked us, starting WW2. After WW2 we became a puppet country of USSR, which lasted until 36 years ago.

The only nation that felt invaded by us were Lithuanians, long long time ago. We had nothing to do with colonialism, we did not import slaves from Africa. We never murdered local population. The past 300 years of my country's history was being invaded and then miraculously coming back to existence. Our capital city was completely destroyed by Hitler just to set an example.

> But you have the same amount of melatonin in your skin as the British, therefore you're guilty of everything that the British did

This, sir, is pure fucking racism