
Ask HN: Redistributing wealth upwards, and “class warfare”  - ssivark
The title might sound click-baity, but bear with me for a minute; this is a short post.<p>John Oliver has a few episodes on the phenomenon of how public institutions are increasingly making money off the poorest sections of society.<p><pre><code>    - [Episode on Municipal Violations](https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0UjpmT5noto).

    - [Episode on Civil Forfeiture](https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks)
</code></pre>
He also had an [episode on the Wealth Gap](https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LfgSEwjAeno) where he mentions, among other things, that any attempt to address income inequality is often toxically termed &quot;class warfare&quot;, and affects how the discussion is framed.<p>I couldn&#x27;t help thinking that the other episodes point out an insidious form of _inverse_ class warfare, where the system is redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich. This is not necessarily deliberate, but it seems to be happening on a significant scale nonetheless.<p>Think about the operating of public institutions. As part of the system, one stops funding them through taxes and chooses to fund them through fines and payments instead. Given that most of these fines are issued on poorer and less well-to-do people, and those fines a compounded by them not being able to pay the money promptly, I&#x27;m guessing that a large chunk of the money required to run _public institutions_ is coming from money extracted from among the poorest section of society. On top of this, it is quite plausible that the poorest section of people do not have the wherewithal to even use these services effectively, though they&#x27;re the ones that need these the most.<p>In this case, we seem to be taking money from one section of people to keep running public institutions that are supposed to serve everyone equally. Is this not what one calls &quot;redistribution&quot; and the an inverse form of what is pejoratively called &quot;class warfare&quot;?
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"Inverse"? If Team Red shoots at Team Green, it's "warfare", and if Team Green
shoots at Team Red it's _still_ warfare.

Don't let these people frame "class warfare" as "poor taking from the rich";
you've seen for yourself how it's quite often working the other way around.

