
Income inequality is not the problem, it's a symptom - lisper
http://blog.rongarret.info/2016/01/income-inequality-is-not-problem-its.html
======
cpursley
If I could give away all my hn points and apply them as up-votes to this, I
would.

The op explains very succinctly the problem in this quote:

> what is happening is that the ultra-wealthy are using their disposable
> income to buy political influence, then using that influence to get laws
> passed that allow them to collect rents.

My primary beef with American politics is the "solutions" are always in the
form of bandaids - they focus on the effect, not the root cause. The recent
healthcare laws are a prime example. How to handle the rise of ISIS is
another. Both were caused, or at least compounded by misinformed short-sighted
policy. The answer is rarely "more laws". Especially when more laws was what
lead to most of these problems in the first place. It's like writing more code
around terrible code when what is really needed is a total refactor and proper
test coverage.

Ending cronyism is fairly straight-forward. But stacking on more law is only
going to exacerbate the issue, because like the op explained - the well-
connected are just going to buy more political influence and have the laws
crafted to benefit them. Taxation is more complex. Increasing taxes is often a
solution proposed. Fine, but first - the government needs to prove that they
are good stewards of our money before reaching into my back pocket for more.
Otherwise, that increase is going to end up as farm subsidies and in the
pockets of "defense" contractors.

~~~
vonklaus
Interesting perspective. I wonder how much "cronyism" costs. It is a problem,
but how big?

Sort of the issue is that their is a systemic change taking place globally and
it moves at a compounding rate.

Most governments on a micro scale, are inefficient snd comprised of largely
unaccountable people. They make (benevolent/naive view) decisions but are ill
equipped with the skills to make the proper ones or (cynical) intentionally
extract bwnefit. On a macro stage, we are still dumping money into
infrastructure in competition with eachother. If we had all the best engineers
working on space for example and collaborating, this would be good, or working
to solve things collaboratively.

Luckily as PG notes there is a massive defragmentation. I would argue this is
great. Agency is redestributed to people in this way and the effects of this
will be evident in ~5 years when the laggard affects of technology overtake
many legacy industries.

Cable is being challenged.

The monetary system is being challenged.

This election cycle will highlight apathy. It will be realized soon enough
that the government will have much less power and is thus, less neccessary.

Etc.

Also, I just saw The Big Short. The L3 money supply (which is super
complicated and I don't pretend to fully grasp) is basically mbs in ~2005.

~~~
thatcat
>Cable is being challenged.

cable tv is being replaced by internet service through the same provider, with
the fiber optic deployments being limited by legislation lobbied for by the
original cable tv providers.

>The monetary system is being challenged.

Total BTC is about 4 billion usd, much smaller than most nations currency
circulation.

~~~
vonklaus
i would have to disagree. SpaceX and OneWeb are making strides to do LEO
satellite internet[0] and the successful recapture of the F9 rocket means that
launch costs are going down. Couple that with the commoditization of cellphone
hardware and there will be many distributed systems in space by 2020.

Google has bid on spectrum bandwith, don't have time to cite but Chris Sacca
mentions it in basically every interview, just to keep Telecom players in
check. They are an ISP now and have other holdings in the space.

Facebook is trying to bring internet to india.

People are building their own networks.

NYC announced it would put wifi in where phonebooths once stood.

> BTC marketcap is 4B

It has a cap of ~6.5[1] according to coinmarket. Obviously not a lot however
the upside potential is large and there are many uses for the technology.
Ethereum and Stellar are pretty awesome and Patrick Collison helming stripe
might be keen to expand their BTC. So if stripe increases the infrastructure
and people become more receptive it will become larger. I am not saying that
it will replace u.s currency next year but obviously paper money isn't the
currency of the future and clearly there needs to be oversite on how money is
created. So something like BTC will obv win long term.

[0][http://www.wired.com/2015/06/elon-musk-space-x-satellite-
int...](http://www.wired.com/2015/06/elon-musk-space-x-satellite-internet/)

[http://coinmarketcap.com](http://coinmarketcap.com)

------
rayiner
Mr. Garret quotes Sanders:

> The reality is that for the past 40 years, Wall Street and the billionaire
> class has rigged the rules to redistribute wealth and income to the
> wealthiest and most powerful people of this country.

I am rather puzzled that this idea gets so much traction. Does anyone really
believe that if only the rules weren't "rigged" local shops and businesses
would be able to compete against Wal-Mart and Amazon? Do people really believe
that it's only because of "rigged" rules that big employers are downsizing and
shipping production overseas?

It's wishful thinking. The rules don't drive rewards to the top. It's
intrinsic to the free market.

~~~
MrTonyD
It took me years to realize that economics isn't physics - and it isn't ruled
by physics-like laws. Instead, economics is governed by laws created by our
society. And what we think of as "free market" is really just norms of trade
which are created by our society. There is no reason why the bulk of the
billions taken-in by WalMart should go to the Walton family while their
employees live on food-stamps - that is just a legal arrangement. And there is
no reason why the Walton family should continue to be allowed to use offshore
corporations to loan themselves money to run all their WalMart stores - that
is just a legal arrangement which allows them to avoid taxes and hide their
billions offshore. Really, when you start to closely examine "free market",
you come to realize that is it a chimera made real by those with power and
money.

~~~
UK-AL
Do you believe in property rights?

Having a legal/police system to catch people who forcebly take property?

Using trade to exchange property?

This is the core of our system. And that system will always generate
inequality.

Not necessarily a bad thing.

You can have laws to take the edge off inequality generated, but at the core
of the system you can't really avoid it.

~~~
paganel
> Do you believe in property rights?

Not the OP, but I think a lot more people nowadays should read (or re-read)
Locke's "Two Treatises of Government". That book is famous mostly for the
second part, where Locke actually intellectually imposes private property as a
thing in the Western world, but I found the first part equally interesting,
where Locke fights against a guy called Filmer, who was of the opinion
(prevalent until then) that all property was rightfully owned by the King,
transferred to him from generations past since Adam.

The thing I'm trying to say is that yes, private property is just a social
construct, there's no divine nor moral thing about it, the concept came alive
(so to speak) only because some guys in England didn't like that their
possessions were in danger of being confiscated by the King's men.

In the end private property is indeed theft, more exactly the imposition of
someone's moral values over the other's by intrinsic force (if you "steal" you
might go to prison or worst). The sooner we realize this the better, there's
no second-guessing about it.

~~~
puredemo
>In the end private property is indeed theft,

Private property can't be "theft" if there is no private property.

If you don't believe in private property, you're sort of poisoning the well of
any economic conversation, since it's the foundation of basically all of
peaceful civilization.

Without private property there is only tribalism and, "might makes right."

~~~
Frondo
One counterpoint:

[http://io9.gizmodo.com/5872764/the-greatest-mystery-of-
the-i...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/5872764/the-greatest-mystery-of-the-inca-
empire-was-its-strange-economy)

~~~
puredemo
I'm not sure this is much of a counterpoint. The Inca didn't have a
centralized currency, but we really don't know whether they had private
property or not, how disputes were handled, or so on. They also seem to have
had civil wars, child sacrifice, and other violent traditions.

That being said, many things are possible in groups with smaller populations,
I've heard stories of large communes being fairly successful with up to
several thousand people. However, at some point they tend to become too
disorganized and break down, in one way or another.

In contrast, the concepts of private property and trade have enabled our human
family to grow to 7 Billion, and population growth is barely even slowing down
yet. Civilization allows things to work on an entirely different scale by
providing a somewhat standardized framework for our territorial disputes.

This is also the most non-violent time in history by far, according to
researchers, presumably due to the end of tribalism.

So, for me personally, there would have to be extremely compelling arguments
to even begin to argue against the utility of private property as a social and
economic system.

------
lsiq
There is a very common tendency to focus on consumption, in terms of where
rich people's money flows. This argument that the rich spend most of their
money on ostentatious goods (e.g. fancy cars) or, in the case of this posting,
donations to political or even charitable causes. While there is of course
some truth to this, it ignores the elephant in the room which is that the rich
DON'T spend most of their money. The vast majority of wealth (individual,
corporate, and sovereign) is tied up in investments and other liquid or
illiquid assets. One of the biggest symptoms of the current malaise in terms
of inequality are the abnormally high asset prices globally (and thus lower
yields), and most essential, very low inflation. There are huge sums of money
in the economy that have been pumped in since 2008, but inflation has not
shown up in 7 years largely because velocity of money is down. The
concentration of wealth, and possible talk about technological deflation, are
both closely tied up in this. The lower classes which tend to spend all their
money - and sometimes money they don't even have - contribute
disproportionately to velocity, now likely don't collectively have enough
money to really drive economic and monetary trends anymore. Especially, if
they are burdened by debt repayments which many in this day are.

------
jondubois
I think one of the biggest problems that we have today is that intelligent,
hard-working people are the poorest they've ever been.

In the past, if you studied and worked really hard, you would usually achieve
something. Today you can study and work very hard for a very long time and
still end up with nothing.

Being smart or trying hard has very little value, it's all about who you know
and what assets you own. Today, most people are just living off of their
assets. Assets which they received as a result of a lot of luck and perhaps a
bit of hard work.

Instead of the government stepping in to protect the people - The government
is facilitating this inequality by allowing corporations to carry-out
mutually-beneficial deals with one another at the expense of regular people.

People are being enslaved; not just less-educated people, but also highly
educated people (who can actually see/understand what is happening).

I think we have a new economic class in our society, the 'highly educated
lower class'.

~~~
dredmorbius
You've a peculiarly brief view of "ever".

But yes, from a mid-20th century all-time peak, real middle class wealth in
the US is declining.

------
rdtsc
>> The reality is that for the past 40 years, Wall Street and the billionaire
class has rigged the rules to redistribute wealth and income to the wealthiest
and most powerful people of this country.

> This is the problem.

That is a very good way to put it. I agree with that.

> So why doesn't Graham recognize and advocate this?

He doesn't advocate because it won't help his cause. As I posted in the
comment of the original article (which got downvoted, nobody likes pg being
accused of manufacturing pr?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10827175](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10827175),
hey! it's a submarine ;-).

He created a strawman and a narative around how to interpret and think about
income inequality to give his followers and those involved in startups a
framework. He understands he is part of what can create inequality, and that's
bothersome to him and those around the startup culture. Startup environment
needs myths to operate. These are promises to investors, promises to early
employees, these are things founders are supposed to be telling others ("I
want to make the world a better place") and perhaps themselves as well. There
has to be a myth created that addressed income inequality, because it is
talked about in the media.

As a joke, someone wrote (and I forgot who) how the wealthy and powerful in
this country are devout Marxist followers. They internalize the rules and
assumptions of the class struggle. Except they don't identify with the working
class, they identify with the bourgeoisie. They understand there are the two
classes and what class they belong to. They will actively try to control and
supress the lower classes.

------
kelukelugames
>So why doesn't Graham recognize and advocate this? Perhaps it's because two
of his biggest golden geese — Uber and AirBnB — are actually relying on
exactly the kind of political influence I'm calling out here in order to
survive and prosper.

Whether this is true or not, we need to realize PG has motives. He doesn't
write essays just for his health.

~~~
nostrademons
Having read PG's essays since 2002, I suspect his motive is that he wants to
have good ideas. The kind that will be remembered after his death. He even
said as much in one of his essays [1]. He's writing for legacy, not for
profit.

YC itself was one of those ideas - it started out as an experiment [2],
derived from a talk at Harvard Computer Society [3]. The easiest way to test
if an idea is a good one is to go do it, so he did, and it turned out it was,
and that led to profit.

I don't think it's fair to attribute Machiavellian scheming to PG. There are
some other people in Silicon Valley that will take a position and then
influence public opinion to make that position come true, but it's pretty
rare, and I don't think it's the case here. Rather, it's the same reason all
VCs talk their book: they start with a hypothesis about how the world is, then
invest their book according to the hypothesis, and then tell everyone what the
hypothesis is. The worldview comes first, the investments come second.

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/speak.html](http://paulgraham.com/speak.html)

[2]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html)

[3]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html)

~~~
paganel
From half a world away I wouldn't say his motives are "Machiavellian", but his
style and the subjects he wrote about definitely changed just after reddit and
especially YC became important, mostly for the worst/not-interesting.

I think I started reading his essays in 2004 or so, and he was a cool guy, not
as cool as jwz, for example, but pretty interesting nevertheless because of
his story of actually making some good money out of having used LISP (which
back then was like a Nirvana-reaching thing, I mean, making big money out of
LISP) and for being a programmer who was actually showing interest for other
things outside programming, like Renaissance painting (Christopher Alexander
and his Turkish rugs' patterns was also a thing back then among programmers).

But then reddit launched, YC was founded, somehow they started making money,
and things like Arc and trying to make LISP a world-dominating language became
things of the past. That's when his writings became a lot less interesting for
guys like me, i.e. for average programmers who just wanted to read what other
guys smarter than them had to say.

~~~
S4M
Coming also from half a world away from Silicon Valley (Europe), I also think
there is a large discrepancy in PG's essays before and after YC became
successful. Before YC was successful, I felt that his essays were written by a
very smart guy who thought a lot about various topics, and his advice made
lots of sense (don't go for prestigious fields for prestige's sake, find what
you really love, etc.), while now it feels that he's thinking that everything
converge to make startup the only path to success (I'm exaggerating a bit, but
not that much). I don't think he does that to bring more and more people to
apply to YC, but I can feel the influence on spending lots of time with VCs
and startups.

------
UK-AL
Uber hired lobbyists because they had no choice. Traditional companies have
captured the regulatory system so bad you have idoitic laws designed to
protect them.

In London one law was proposed for a minmium wait time of 5 minutes. It was
directly aimed at uber.

------
cjy
>The Baumol Effect, in case you didn't know, is the tendency of wage increases
that come from increases in productivity to "spill over" into jobs where there
have been no productivity increases. In other words, it's trickle-down
economics under a fancier name.

Mr. Garret gets the definition of the Baumol Effect more or less right, but
then mislabels it as trickle down economics and proceeds to attack that. Here
is an example of the Baumol Effect:

As improving technology makes computer scientists more productive they will
receive higher salaries in the business world. Meanwhile, computer scientist
teachers in academia may not see similar productive gains (they still can only
teach X number of students a semester). Nonetheless, universities must
increase computer scientist teacher pay to prevent them from leaving academia
for the business world.

In the context of PG's essay, he is saying that high pay for entrepreneurs
forces companies to pay competitive salaries:

>anyone who could get rich by creating wealth on their own account will have
to be paid enough to prevent them from doing it.

If Mr. Garret, or others, disagree with this assertion they should attack it
directly. Personally, the logic and direct incentives at work seem self
evident to me.

------
natrius
> It is possible to address this problem without killing the golden goose.
> How? By rolling back some of the legislation that was put in place by undue
> political influence.

Using the political system to reduce the influence of money in politics is
prohibitively difficult because the system is already captured by money. We
should try, but we need other options when that fails.

When government stops responding to the wishes of the people, revolution is
the typical answer. Luckily, we don't have to do that. We can end the
influence of wealth on our politics without needing the government to do it
for us.

Instead of trying to get the government to stop excess political spending, we
should eliminate the incentive to accept excess political spending. People
accept money to influence our democracy because they can use that money to get
whatever they want from almost anyone, including you. You can't opt out
because economic power is invisible. But we can make it visible, and give
every individual the freedom to reject economic power that they feel is
misused.

This is merit capitalism.
[http://meritcapitalism.com/](http://meritcapitalism.com/)

------
rubyfan
@pg is basically arguing that fragmentation is leading to the end of oligarchy
and this author is arguing we are headed toward it.

Who's right? The comments I've read today on a few of these posts today are so
divisive that I'm not certain they come from the same universe.

FTA: _On the other hand, I also want an effective, democratic government to
provide infrastructure, protect people from extreme economic contingencies
(like war and hurricanes), prevent people from profiting from economic
externalities (like pollution) and provide oversight for well-regulated, free
and transparent markets. And that 's not the direction we're heading. We're
heading towards political power being concentrated irreversibly in the hands
of a small minority. We're heading towards oligarchy.

And that is a problem._

------
zacharytelschow
> If the differences in income and wealth were entirely reflective of people's
> productivity and contributions to society there would be no problem. But
> they aren't. Instead what is happening is that the ultra-wealthy are using
> their disposable income to buy political influence, then using that
> influence to get laws passed that allow them to collect rents.

If you're arguing the problem is the ability of the political class to pick
winners and losers instead of creating rules that are beneficial to society
generally and applied to all equally - amen.

------
ThomPete
It's a symptom but not as claimed of the ultra-wealthy buying influence. That
matters too but it's not the number one reason. If that was the case, other
countries with much less ability to affect the political process (like the
scandinavian countries) wouldn't be experiencing the same problems (although
at a different scale)

No. Wealth is a symptom of a system where the winner takes all and the winner
is increasingly technologically based companies.

Wealth allow you to increasingly affect the political process but only as a
function of you being rich to begin with. No one starts with the political
system to gain wealth at least they wont' be wealthy for very long if thats
how they came to their wealth.

Income inequality is increasingly a symptom of systems with little friction to
become the first or second in a field but a lot of friction to challenge them.

------
nostrademons
I don't think Uber is a YC investment. It's certainly not listed as such under
CrunchBase, nor have I seen any public article mentioning them as an
investment.

~~~
tptacek
Yeah I was wondering the same thing.

------
briantakita
Access to resources & social attention are key concerns.

Some harmful effects of inequality when people do not have access to:

* needs (i.e. Maslow Hierarchy); particularly autonomy * ability to express perspective * ability to have perspective considered, paid heed to, & respected * ability to influence local systems * protection from those who are abstracted away from local systems; those who will not feel immediate consequences of their actions

If we can create systems where these concerns are prioritized, then inequality
of wealth may not matter.

Some people are good at playing the game of gaining wealth. Some are good at
other games. In the end, we all benefit from respecting and having compassing
& empathy for all life & natural systems.

------
pdonis
It looks to me like Garret and Graham are actually in violent agreement. :-)
Garret wants to keep people from getting rich through political influence
rather than creating wealth; Graham wants to make sure people can still get
rich through creating wealth, even if they can't get rich through political
influence.

------
rumcajz
Wealth inequality and income inequality are often touted as the incentive for
people to do actual useful work.

However, if you think about it for a second, it's clear that having more money
in a bank or on a payslip doesn't make you work harder.

What makes you work harder is the possibility of improving your status,
getting richer.

So, one would imagine that a society with drastically reduced inequality (both
wealth and income) but with extra high social mobility could work perfectly
well.

------
hkmurakami
>So once again, let me be clear: I do not want to kill Y Combinator, nor do I
want to kill Uber or AirBnB.

AFAIK Uber is not a YC portfolio company.

~~~
kelukelugames
[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/678653529288916996](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/678653529288916996)

PG on Uber. "No, just a user."

~~~
lisper
Wow, you're right. I've published a correction.

------
stretchwithme
As long as technology enables people to scale their efforts to serve vast
numbers of people, there will be vast differences in what people can earn.

Those that sell to millions will make a lot more than those who only sell to a
few.

Instead of trying to force equal outcomes, we should be teaching people about
how they can benefit from leveraging technology.

------
makeramen
Um, am I the only one here confused at why this guy is arguing with PG? From
what I can tell they are in full agreement.

Ron here is saying we shouldn't kill startups (what PG calls "creating
wealth"), we should instead fight against practices that actually take money
from the poor and give to the rich (what PG calls "zero-sum games"). After
reading PG's article, I got the impression that he wants the exact same thing
as Ron does. What's there to argue?

PG even has a paragraph in his essay that is almost equivalent to the title of
the article:

> There are lots of things wrong with the US that have economic inequality as
> a symptom. We should fix those things. In the process we may decrease
> economic inequality. But we can't start from the symptom and hope to fix the
> underlying causes.

------
rlaferla
This is a great discussion on the single most important issue of our day. I
like Paul Graham's perspective on this but I would like him to elaborate on
how he would curb corruption. In the past, he said that "transparency" was key
but they are doing this in the open and they direct the media to put a spin on
it which the non-critical thinking masses can't detect. Politics/economics is
an imperfect entity. I think the "pragmatic" solution may lie somewhere
between Graham's Libertarian view and Sander's Democratic/Socialist view.

------
tipiirai
Thank you. Glad you wrote this.

------
forrestthewoods
"At the very least, we should strive for a non-regressive tax system, which is
what we have now."

I'm super pro regressive taxes. Regressive taxes are fantastic for the poor.
They get more than they put in AND the elite are less able to avoid paying
them. The socialized promised lands of Scandinavia are highly regressive.

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/why-im-soft-
on-s...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/why-im-soft-on-sales-
taxes/?_r=0)

~~~
monochromatic
> The socialized promised lands of Scandinavia are highly regressive.

No, they aren't. Regressive means that the rich pay less, percentage-wise,
than the poor do.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Did you even read the link I gave?

~~~
zurn
Your link's graph shows that nordic countries have highest social transfers
and highest consumption taxes. This means that they are countering the
regressive effects of consumption taxes with other income transfers. What the
graph doesn't show is that income tax (and many other fees/taxes) are also
quite progressive in these countries. So the graph supports Krugman's claim of
high consumption taxes in these countries, but not your claim of on "highly
regressive" taxation.

Krugman's other reference has a broken link but his text does not sound like
your claim either.

But in the big picture, income transfers do seem to be more favoured in strong
welfare states than progression in the tax system. The US has a mongrel system
with EITC because you get a "negative income tax" by social criteria (basis of
which are quite 1950's...) - it's more like a social transfer in many respects
than a tax progression.

------
dredmorbius
Adam Smith, in the second discussion of his title's topic in _Wealth of
Nations_ : "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power."

Oddly this insight is lacking from much the rest of economic literature.

------
graeme
Did YC fund Uber? I had thought they weren't a YC company.

~~~
lisper
You're right, they didn't. I've added a correction.

------
sytelus
Pg's main point is that the major source of wealth inequality comes from
wealth creators as opposed to wealth exploiters. The wealth creators are
typical startups and people creating new industries while wealth exploiters
are the one playing high frequency trading, lobbing congress, buying up real
estate, creating monopolies, investing with insider info and so on. My gut
feeling is that wealth creation part is in reality less than 20%. This
intuition is based on simple fact that wealthy people have managed to far more
disproportionately increase their wealth than what comes from increase in GDP
or other measures of productivity. There is plenty of analysis available in
Capital book that clearly suggests that wealthy people mainly invests in non-
productive investment instruments such as real estate that has nothing to do
with increasing productivity of the society. It just constraints the supply
side, inflating prices and thus increasing value of the investment. These
investment tools enables them to transform themselves to become passive wealth
exploiters with a setup that generates massive multi-generational income and
wealth increase without proportional need for positive contribution to
society. There was a very well written article with data analysis on HN that
proved that most increase in wealth for top 1% came from these non-productive
investment tools such as real estate. This is like wealthy people grouping up
to buy loads of the fresh water and inflating prices so average people now
must pay majority of income in buying water. So wealth transfer from common
people to rich occurs through inflated water prices. Of course, if wealthy
people really did this for water, they will be in trouble and revolutions will
break out. However doing this for real state raises no eye brows even though
real estate is essential need for humans.

A fun fact: Despite of giving billions and without starting any new
blockbuster companies, Bill Gates has managed to increase his wealth by more
than 50% since he officially retired. He has sure helped few startups but it
would be too funny as well as cruel to think that most of his wealth gain
comes via helping startups or causing productivity gains in society. Last I
checked his billions are managed by hedge fund like setup who typically have
goal to maximize returns through non-productive instruments such as real
estate, HFT, commodity market games, derivatives etc and they rarely devote
more than 20% of portfolio to truely productive activities such as startups.

It is also marvelous how some of the wealthiest have outright bought the laws
for themselves, for example, middle class in US universally pays almost twice
the tax rates than top 1%. This would be unthinkable in previous generation.
The entire capital tax gimmic is put in to law with a full knowledge that it
does not benefit majority of citizens who have little or no savings, let alone
investments for short term trading. It is purely designed to benefit top 1%
who derives large chunk of income as capital gains. The most depressing thing
is that the field is becoming less and less level playing, for example wealthy
can buy out admissions in best universities while average citizens are getting
priced out from same institutions. The significant increase in mortgage and
student debt load combined with long term stagnant wages now eliminates
possibility of savings or investments and therefore risk taking. I suppose
this wasn't exactly like this in 70s when many more people had decent savings,
had ability for some risk taking and lot of them even actually were able to
retire. In our generation most people don't even think of retirement anymore
except in tech industry which is probably less than 5% of population. We in
tech field are perhaps not so much impacted and so world looks little
different from our glasses, especially if you had been college dropout or
without family. However for a common citizen with a family, mortgage,
healthcare bills, no savings, retirement funds uncertainty and student loans
it is much more difficult to cross the chasm than it used to be in 70s.

------
dovereconomics
Some decent points, but why can't anyone acknowledge the centralization of
capital?

Sure, Uber lobbies city mayors, but what about the financial system that gives
$6.6B to a single startup? The inception of all problems.

Politicians and lobbyists? I'd worry about the Fed.

------
Turing_Machine
"I think the propaganda of "The Communists" has been drilled into the American
public so solidly"

You mean the part where communists murdered 100 million people in the last
century? That "propaganda"?

~~~
dang
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10829000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10829000)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Your house, your rules. Still won't make the stink of all those bodies go
away.

------
gizi
It can all be reduced to the problem of man-made law. It is wide open to
abuse. So, yes, the ultra-rich abuse man-made law to make more money. But then
again, machine guns easily overrule money. That is why there are now islamic
insurgencies, in 30+ countries, of which the primary purpose is to get rid of
man-made law (and to establish their favoured alternative). The problem goes
way beyond the distribution of income. At some point, everybody who believes
in the legitimacy of man-made law will have to prove that he is willing to
risk his life and die for what he believes in.

~~~
mwcampbell
What alternative to man-made law would you propose?

~~~
gizi
Scriptural law, for example. Each religion enforces its own law. This solution
may not be ideal in every possible respect, but to the extent that it puts a
halt to the invention of new man-made laws, it will certainly mitigate the
problem. Every man-made law represents a reduction in your freedom with the
purpose of serving the interests of someone else. Therefore, I am in favour of
any alternative solution that will put a halt to people inventing new laws.

~~~
chimericray
Does any scripture cover traffic violations?

~~~
gizi
A consistent set of traffic rules is a mathematical problem. Mathematics
emerges from the laws of nature. Traffic rules are a prime example of what
would go totally wrong if you tried to solve it with typical man-made laws.
Instead of giving priority to traffic coming from the right, we would end up
giving priority to traffic of the members of the elite instead. In fact, that
is what happens in many countries. Furthermore, in case of a traffic accident
they always find man-made "legal" reasons why the elite is right and everybody
else is wrong.

