
An Optimist's Reply to Ezra Klein - urs2102
http://paulgraham.com/klein.html
======
api
I somewhat agree with Graham: economic inequality is not intrinsically the
problem and startups are not the problem.

The problem IMHO is rent and profiteering off taxpayer subsidies, both of
which more or less force me to pay tribute to the rich.

I don't care one bit if someone else is _infinitely_ richer than me as long as
I don't have to pay tribute to them or otherwise be lorded over by them. I
would not care if (hypothetically) there were people alive today who were
biologically immortal cognitively enhanced cyberpunk demigods with control of
wealth flows in excess of present-day US GDP. In an abstract philosophical
sense it seems likely that such sentient entities do in fact exist _somewhere_
in our vast universe and I don't see how this likelihood impacts me at all.
There are also (statistically speaking) probably a minimum of several hundred
million to a billion people smarter, healthier, and better looking than me.

What I do care about is being forced or at least heavily pressured/coerced
into paying _tribute_ to those who are above me economically.

A prime example: housing costs are insane and this is partly a result of rich
people from around the world parking their wealth in real estate and
extracting rent in exchange for little to no investment in anything
productive. In general, idle rent extraction is a social ill and should be
taxed to hell and back. I would support cuts to capital gains, employment, and
income taxes and large increases in taxes on property speculation (non-primary
residences) and other non-productive rentier activity. (We might distinguish
between productive capitalism and rentier capitalism, though it's hard to draw
an absolute black-and-white distinction.)

Other examples of tribute include the many cases where public insurance is
used to back-stop private losses while private gains remain private, such as
the 2008 bank bailouts or the government paying in part for the cleanup of
BP's gulf oil spill, and cases where taxpayer subsidized research and
development is privatized for exclusively private gain (and patented!). How
many huge companies have been built on the back of government-funded research?
(The fact that so much wealth is built on the back of public research and
public infrastructure is a common argument for progressive taxation.)

A huge reason I've lost my faith in libertarian politics is that the 2008
bailouts convinced me it's a scam. The rich advocate laissez faire until their
wealth is on the line, at which point they become socialists. It's clear to me
that for the poor and middle class to forego the use of government coercion is
for them to engage in unilateral disarmament. I've heard today's economy
described as a casino in which public funds are used to backstop the losses of
the highest rollers, and that seems fairly accurate to me.

It's not transformed me into a conventional liberal though. Personally I don't
think anyone on the present-day right or left has a clear path out of this.
Both sides advocate things that would make the problem worse.

~~~
replicatorblog
This is where things get complex. High rent isn't a natural state of
nature—it's the result of building policies that prohibit housing. Austin
Texas has roughly as many people as SF/Oak, but housing is plentiful and
cheap, even close to the down town. Why? When the population increases, they
build more housing.

~~~
api
Those policies are an example of the wealthy using the government as a tool to
extract rent, hence my comment about unilateral disarmament.

While couched in liberal or eco-whatever rhetoric, make no mistake about it:
SF's NIMBY policies are there so that urban property owners can extract rent
and homeowners can profit off appreciation. NIMBYism of this sort is an
example of regulatory capture.

------
ergothus
I feel like PG is missing part of the point.

The problem isn't "wealth inequality". The problem is EXTREME wealth
inequality. I'm not super rich (or even non-super rich), but I do well enough
that I don't really suffer.

My mother, though, she's got a ton of debt, working a 35k/yr job without
benefits, and no real retirement plan. Thanks to Obamacare she can buy
insurance, but it has such a high deductible that it doesn't really do
anything. She has no home, and can't even rent because most places refuse her
if she has more then 5k in debt REGARDLESS of cosigner. And we know that she's
so much better off than some others: She has food, isn't crippled by medical
issues (yet), no one else to care for, and I'm providing a roof.

When you go from an extreme different between the top 1% and the bottom 10%,
then have a few decades where that 1% has vast, rapid growth and the bottom
10% has things stay steady or get worse, THAT's your problem.

To say that wiping out inequality will stifle innovation...well, that's not
really the discussion at hand. Wiping out EXTREME inequality shouldn't have
that effect, because it didn't have that effect historically. The difference
between the top and the bottom can still be quite pronounced. If/When we
achieve that we will still have some people complaining that they can't get
their kids the latest $1k/ea toy fad, but that's an entirely different problem
I'm willing to tolerate.

PG goes on to say that financiers aren't the problem he's talking about...but
that is the problem that many others are talking about. PG's original essay
seemed quite defensive, and this one does too. He's trying to convince others
that he's right, but not noticing that he seems to be talking about the impact
of an entirely different discussion.

~~~
apsec112
The problem you're describing is poverty, not inequality. How much money Larry
Page or Bill Gates has doesn't make your mother's life any better or worse.
Graham addresses this in the last paragraph:

"Decreasing poverty is not identical with decreasing economic inequality. Some
measures for decreasing poverty could well increase economic inequality. For
example, if you gave every child in America the same quality of education Bill
Gates had, that would surely decrease poverty. [5] But you would then create a
lot of new Bill Gateses as well. These kids wouldn't all stop short at middle
class. The more ambitious ones would shoot right out the other side."

~~~
the_gastropod
This is an argument PG uses, and one I keep seeing crop up in discussions
about his post. It's malarkey! Wealth didn't just appear in Bill Gates bank
account—it came from people less wealthy than him buying his company's
products. It's indirect, but wealth accumulation at the top necessarily comes
from those below them.

~~~
tomhoward
_wealth accumulation at the top necessarily comes from those below them_

That's the fixed pie fallacy [1], which is the biggest source of
misapprehension in this whole debate.

In a healthy economy, entrepreneurs get rich when their customers get rich, in
the form of an improved standard of living.

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Ford, Samsung, Southwest Airlines are all examples
of companies that have become successful because they made the lives of
ordinary (and in some cases, low-income) people vastly better through,
respectively, affordable computers, software, knowledge, cars,
phones/televisions and air travel.

In some cases, they enabled many more people to become financially richer too
(eg, the many people who now make a very good living writing software).

And that's not to mention the flow on effects like medical discoveries made
possible by the use of computers, and lower cost manufacturing parts and
processes thanks to the automotive industry that benefit more niche
industries.

In all these cases, the income captured by the entrepreneurs is a small
fraction of the benefit they deliver to society.

This is not to say that there are no negative effects from the activities of
these companies or the related income disparities (job losses, housing
affordability, environmental harms, etc).

But this is the key point: attack the negative effects, not the generators of
the innovations from which we all benefit.

[1] [https://mises.org/library/why-larry-summers-
doesn%E2%80%99t-...](https://mises.org/library/why-larry-summers-
doesn%E2%80%99t-understand-economic-inequality)

------
jonstokes
Note to PG: when you're in a hole, stop digging.

I think the most disappointing thing for me about the first essay was the list
of people who he thanked for pre-reading it -- were none of those people
conversant enough with the discourse around income inequality that they
couldn't spot the straw men, or were they just not willing to tell him to
scrap it?

I mean, sometimes smart pundits go outside their wheelhouse and say clueless
things. It happens to everyone eventually. (Heck, Tom Friedman has made a
career out of it.) So the fact that he published this clued-out essay on
income inequality didn't really perturb or disappoint me -- I was just like,
"yeah he did that smart guy thing where he's stumbled into a conversation that
he's not nearly as up on as he thinks he is and is going to tell us all How It
Is."

But the fact that all of his pre-readers are equally clued-out is I think
indicative of something larger and more disturbing about Silicon Valley
groupthink.

~~~
apsec112
Could you name specific things in Graham's essays that you think are straw
men?

~~~
jonstokes
I guess I could, but it's been beat to death all over the Internet.

------
GCA10
I'm a little sad to see Paul's footnote 2, where he declares that "the numbers
in the Forbes 400 are nonsense. But it will do ..."

Has Paul ever interacted with the Forbes Wealth team? My book research has
overlapped their interests going back to the 1990s, and every time I've spoken
with them, I've been impressed with how much work they put into trying to come
up with the best possible approximations. Most of their numbers are pretty
good -- and in some cases, their research trumps the public boasts that
various rich people offer up on their own behalf.

If Paul had said Forbes's numbers were "imprecise," he could have made his
point. But "nonsense" is a loaded word, and Paul has been around long enough
to know that. If he wants to be taken seriously in this conversation, a better
discernment/name-calling ratio would be nice.

~~~
jonstokes
My guess is that he probably knows actual, bona fide net worth numbers for
some of the people on that list, and the Forbes numbers for those people that
he knows about are way off.

~~~
GCA10
That's totally possible for the founders of not-yet-public companies such as
Dropbox and Airbnb, where the Y Combinator connection is highly relevant.
You're right to add that to the conversation. At the same time, lots of other
numbers for companies with public share prices and proxy-disclosed ownership
data should be exquisitely accurate.

My issue was mostly with PG's presentation style, where he offers up data,
dismisses it in a footnote, and then says it will do anyway. It's a weird way
to make an argument. On an intricate issue like this, I appreciate exposition
that is steadily nuanced, rather than battling self-made contradictions.

~~~
jonstokes
Even in the best-case scenarios, you have no way of knowing what those people
have borrowed against those shares and/or what they've done with that leverage
(maybe bought some illiquid assets that it's difficult to mark to market even
if you knew what they were), so it's still impossible to compute a net worth.
I'm sorry, but for all the efforts of the Forbes guys, I'm inclined to agree
with PG -- the numbers are probably hot garbage.

------
janzer

      "But though the graph has the word "startups" on it, it is not a graph of the number of startups, but of all new businesses."
    

From what I have seen most of the world* that is not Silicon Valley, does
define a startup as simply a new business. Yet whenever an SV person runs into
someone understanding the term in the broad sense they don't go, "Sorry, I'm
using the word in a more specialized way", they go "Sorry, you're using that
word wrong". It seems to occur often enough that I feel like there must be a
reason they feel the need to insist on it. Very similar to the word hacker in
many ways.

* [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/start%E2%80%93up](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/start%E2%80%93up) [http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/start-up?q=startup)

~~~
Fomite
This read to me as very disingenuous as well. Being able to dismiss a long-
term decrease in new businesses by dismissing them as barbershops and whatnot
(as if those kinds of small businesses don't matter) and then defining
startups as "Whatever I need them to be today to make my point."

~~~
edanm
But that's not at all what he's doing. He's been consistently using that
definition of startups for years, he's not just using it to make his point in
this one article.

------
bambax
> _If we had a society with no poverty and perfect social mobility, and
> economic inequality didn 't translate into social or political inequality,
> would it be that bad if there was also great variation in wealth?_

That's saying that if money weren't, well, money, it wouldn't matter much if
some people had a lot of it and others didn't have any.

But money is money; _that 's why they call it money_ [1]. Wealth inequality
directly translates into social immobility, because the first thing rich
people do is try to make sure their children stay that way, and there's only
so much room at the top. Wealth inequality directly translates into political
inequality, because why not? If you get to meet the President what are you
going to talk about, but the political issues that directly concern you or
your business?

Strict equality is impossible, of course. Some degree of inequality may in
fact be desirable. But immense inequality tears society apart.

[1] Paraphrased from Heist, 2001.
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0252503/quotes](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0252503/quotes)

------
wildengineer
PG could have saved us all some time if he led with #9 in his original post.
Most of my family and friends are struggling to keep up with cost of living
increases and these aren't considered poor people by government standards. If
this trend of stagnant middle class wages continues long enough things will
get ugly.

I am a supporter of redistributing wealth at the top for expanded education
opportunities, which is why I do believe making the connection between income
inequality and poverty is important. I don't understand why as a people we've
accepted paying out of pocket for an education. We used to expect that public
education provided everything you required to achieve a middle class
lifestyle.

------
xrange
I've always wanted to hear a Swedish perspective on the Wallenberg family. Who
apparently "In the 1990s indirectly controlled a third of Swedish GNP."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallenberg_family](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallenberg_family)

------
replicatorblog
I'm a big fan of PG's essays, his most recent ones in particular, my only
quibble is the treatment of education as a silver bullet.

Offer Bill Gates style education to a cross-section of the poorest kids in the
country and I don't think you'll get much in the way of improvement.

Inequality is as much a result of fragmenting families and the dissolution of
social capital as it is new startups. When 80% of kids don't have a dad in the
home, live in chaotic places, and face other setbacks, it'll take more than a
high-end pedagogy to set things right. Raise taxes and spend more on education
if you'd like, but first lets take a minute to see where that actually works.

------
TTPrograms
This conversation baffles me to some extent - it seems plain that discussing
economic inequality is an extremely roundabout and convoluted way to discuss
the economic status of the current decade. That particular phrase simply
happened to resonate since occupy wall street and similar.

The issue of modern interest is rather one of economic mobility - how feasible
is it for someone of lower income to increase their income. When we consider
rent extraction by wealthy individuals or disparate allocation of resources by
the government we're observing mechanisms that decrease the resources
available to lower income individuals, thus inhibiting them from increasing
their economic status.

No one would care about economic inequality in an economy with sufficient
economic mobility to reach the upper echelons with plausible (though
significant) effort - in fact, economic inequality of the degree that we
observe would likely not be possible in such a society. Furthermore, I think
philosophically if there's anything to be said for any of the American values
most people would agree with the sentiment of the "American dream" \- that if
you work hard you can better your own condition and that of your families.

Additionally, through this perspective Silicon Valley has a clear advantage
over Wall Street - skills versus pedigree, bootstrapping versus degrees. I
won't belabor that point, as I don't think it's particularly important.

Basically for reasons both of interpretability and of causality I think it's
more appropriate to consider our economic state through the lens of economic
mobility rather than economic inequality.

------
gizmo
Paul Graham's argument is entirely tautological.

1\. Startups are companies that try to grow quickly into billion dollar
businesses.

2\. Founders have substantial equity in their startups.

3\. Therefore founders get really rich when their startup succeeds.

4\. More successful startups means more really rich people.

5\. More really rich people means more inequality.

6\. Therefore more startups means more inequality.

PG defines startups as companies that become large and make their founders
rich. So yes, you then trivially get "more startups == more inequality".
However, this loses sight of the fact that when the goal is to create a
billion dollar company in a few years there is a huge incentive to game the
system, and to produce all sorts of externalities.

Take AirBnB. They are effectively an unregulated hotel business. How can a bed
and breakfast compete with an airbnb, when they have to face regulations and
taxes? How do the neighbors like it when new people move in every couple of
days and party all night long? Sacrifices have to made in the name of growth.

Another example is Uber or other sharing economy startups. Employees become
independent contractors, who are always on the edge of being fired. Who have
to pay for their own uniforms, cars and other equipment in order to do their
jobs. It's pretty ruthless exploitation, but Uber is valued at $70 billion and
it's super convenient for the customer, so we look the other way.

When it comes to software if you want to serve the most people you work with
open protocols, you open source your software (so it can be inspected for
quality and security), you make importing and exporting to competing products
easy and fast and so on. If you want to make a billion dollar business you
keep everything proprietary and you create a walled garden with tremendous
lock in.

Just look at all the open source products that our startups are built on top
of. Billions of dollars worth of free software. What do the contributors get?
Nothing. (Not strictly true; they get angry bug reports, but you get my
point). This is not the natural order of things, so we should question whether
this is just.

There's a big difference between companies that provide a huge amount of
value, and companies that can CAPTURE a huge amount of value. Startups have to
be in the second category, and that has huge social implications worth
thinking about. The founders necessarily play only a small role in the success
of their business -- we all stand on the shoulders of giants after all -- so
why should the founders be the ones who capture all the rewards?

~~~
apsec112
"It's pretty ruthless exploitation"

If Uber drivers are being "exploited", why don't they quit? Because no one
else would give them a better job, presumably. But that seems perverse to
blame on Uber. All they're doing is giving drivers a better deal than they
would otherwise get.

Suppose your father got cancer, and you decided to sell your grand piano to
get some money for treatment. All the other buyers offer $1,000 for the piano,
and then I come and offer $1,500. $1,500 isn't enough to pay for cancer
treatment, of course, but it'd be crazy to say I was "exploiting" you - I'm
giving you a better deal than anyone else would. The problem is the cancer,
not the piano buyers, and certainly not me.

~~~
gizmo
A typical reason they don't just quit is that they need a new car to work for
Uber in the first place, which they can get using their xchange program[1]
that gives them a large monthly obligation[2]. They can get this even when
they don't qualify for a regular car lease because they have bad credit/no
income.

So they have to work many hours just to get to the 0 point after which they
start to earn money for themselves. If they quit they're stuck with the lease,
which they cannot afford to pay and makes no sense for them to have with any
other low paying job. So the lease serves as lock in -- bondage -- of the
worker to Uber, even though they're technically not employees. I think being
indebted to your employer in this way is barbaric.

Disclaimer: I heard this, haven't verified it myself.

[1] [https://get.uber.com/cl/xchange/](https://get.uber.com/cl/xchange/)

[2] Lease cost. Taxes. Fuel. Insurance.

~~~
apsec112
The page you linked says drivers aren't locked into the lease, which would
indeed be bad.

"Flexible leases from Xchange Leasing, LLC are 36 months with the flexibility
to return the vehicle after 30 days with a two week notice and a $250
disposition fee."

------
arvinjoar
It's interesting that the comparison of the Gini coefficient between Sweden
and the United States wasn't mentioned as one of Ezra's errors. Since, as far
as I can tell, PG is talking about wealth disparity, generally, in his
original article, and only mentions income inequality when talking about the
"pie fallacy".

Most of the money the founders and early employees of a startup end up making
would never be considered income (right?) and therefor not skew the Gini
coefficient?

Anyway, seems like an error to me, if I am wrong, please help me understand
what error _I_ am making.

------
skybrian
re: "He says I think modest changes to the tax code will derail technical
progress. But I don't think that. Larry Page's Google stock is worth billions
of dollars. It would take way more than modest changes in the tax code to
change that fact."

Oddly, this might be construed as an argument in favor of (or at least not
against) more progressive tax rates: in the end, it's not going to stop people
from getting rich.

~~~
shockzzz
agreed - i'd doubt that PG is vehemently against progressive tax rates.

------
obrero
> the public conversation about economic inequality is way too sloppy, and
> that we should focus not on crude statistical measures like economic
> inequality but on the specific underlying components

This is a ridiculous thing to day. For one thing there is no public
conversation about income inequality. The press is owned by corporations,
whose majority ownership is billionaires. Even this forum is owned by Y
Combinator, a corporation which owns shares of companies who have collectively
raised billions of dollars.

I mean, elected political parties like Hezbollah in Lebanon have television
channels like Al-Manar. When someone like Javed Iqbal in the US sets up
receiver satellite cards so Americans can watch this channel - he was sent to
prison for over six years. That's the "public conversation" in the USA.

There have been somewhat open channels of public discussion on the Internet
like Usenet. Which is why the US government and last-mile monopolies got
together to work to crush Usenet a few years ago, which for the most part
worked in severely harming it.

Then it's also in the interest of the idle class heirs who expropriate surplus
labor time from those of us who work to try to muddle the conversation. The
idle class is who has been working to take the "focus" _off_ "specific
underlying components". It's farcical that the people working to confuse the
issue then go on to complain how it seems so unfocused.

It's pretty simple - any created wealth is created through work. Heirs who do
not work can then only live by expropriating surplus labor time from those of
us who do work. It's as simple as that. It's been happening for 10,000 years,
whether it's called slavery, or serfdom, or modern wage slavery. It's all the
same thing. Among we who do all the work and create all the wealth has been
awareness of the 1% parasites who feed off of our labor.

If the focus of the issue is confused, it's because the offending group wants
it to be confused - the people who own the press, who jail the Javed Iqbal's
who allow different views from elected parliamentary parties, who crush public
forums like Usenet etc.

~~~
apsec112
"I mean, elected political parties like Hezbollah in Lebanon have television
channels like Al-Manar. When someone like Javed Iqbal in the US sets up
receiver satellite cards so Americans can watch this channel - he was sent to
prison for over six years. That's the "public conversation" in the USA."

Iqbal was imprisoned because he entered into a business relationship with
Hezbollah, a terrorist organization, not because of the content of the
broadcast. From the New York Times:

"But Judge Richard M. Berman of United States District Court rejected that
view last year, ruling that the prosecution was based not on the content of
speech but on conduct — allegations that the men provided material support to
a foreign terrorist group.

In court on Tuesday, Mr. Iqbal admitted that his company, HDTV Ltd., received
money for providing television services to Al Manar — “the beacon” in Arabic —
which the United States Treasury Department has designated a global terrorist
entity."
[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/nyregion/24plea.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/nyregion/24plea.html)

Terrorist attacks by Hezbollah:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah#Alleged_suicide_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah#Alleged_suicide_and_terror_attacks)

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "Hezbollah, a terrorist organization"

Hezbollah is more than just a terrorist organisation...

[http://www.irinnews.org/report/26242/lebanon-the-many-
hands-...](http://www.irinnews.org/report/26242/lebanon-the-many-hands-and-
faces-of-hezbollah)

"Hezbollah not only has armed and political wings – it also boasts an
extensive social development programme. The group currently operates at least
four hospitals, 12 clinics, 12 schools and two agricultural centres that
provide farmers with technical assistance and training. It also has an
environmental department and an extensive social assistance programme. Medical
care is also cheaper than in most of the country’s private hospitals and free
for Hezbollah members.

Most of these institutions are located in the country’s more marginalised
areas, such as Beirut’s southern suburbs, in South Lebanon and in the Bekaa
Valley. “We have special sections all over the country that provide financial
and food assistance to the poor,” said Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Nabulsi.
“We also run an emergency fund for instant care in case of immediate
hospitalisation.”"

------
jackcosgrove
I'm glad Paul Graham is being honest about startups' role in wealth and income
inequality. Ezra Klein says there are good (Silicon Valley) and bad (Wall
Street) rich people regarding income and wealth inequality. However if you're
using the gross measure of income and wealth inequality, rich people all
contribute the same way, in proportion to their wealth and income. Paul Graham
is correct to focus on finer-grain factors, which are implicit in Ezra Klein's
good-bad dichotomy but which he misses by going after inequality rather than a
concept of justice, whether that justice be just deserts or equity.

~~~
ergothus
Finance provides the value of liquidity - ensuring that those that need money
have the opportunity to connect with those that have money to invest.

Startups provide the value of coming up with new quality of life options for
society.

Given that financiers have stopped adding real value and instead have
introduced new risks, I don't see the two groups as contributing the same way.
Thousands of startups that try and fail are still more valuable to society
than people creating artificial opportunities to make the rich richer and
society to bail out failures.

~~~
jackcosgrove
Then critique finance based upon some theory of justice, rather than using
statistics like wealth and income inequality that obscure how the money was
made. I'm not claiming the two industries are morally equivalent. I am
claiming they are equivalent in their contributions to wealth and income
inequality.

------
Balgair
On points 2 and 6: Ezra is defining a start-up differently here, not wrongly,
but differently. I'm curious to know what exactly constitutes a start-up to
PG. Was the first In-N-Out burger a start-up? If not, why? In-N-Out is a case
example, but just because a business is small and then happens to stay small
or grow big with all the stock still in the family does not mean it is not a
startup to many people, possibly including the bean counters that track these
things. What does PG define as a startup in these essays?

------
comrh
His "Bill Gates education" analogy doesn't really make sense to me. I think he
is saying that it would create a bunch of super rich people but I don't think
you get Bill Gates by education alone (IIRC Outliers supports that). The major
of people would probably join the middle class (and not "stop short", the
middle class is a great place to be compared to poverty) and lessen income
inequality, even if one or two became billionaires.

~~~
shockzzz
he clarifies it in a footnote,
[http://paulgraham.com/klein.html#f5n](http://paulgraham.com/klein.html#f5n)

~~~
comrh
He's saying it would help poverty (I think?). I think it would help income
inequality as well, not hurt it as he suggests.

------
forrestthewoods
I said it another thread so I'll say it here. Inequality isn't not
fundamentally bad. It's a second or third order derivative of something that
is bad.

Bringing in more refugees will increase inequality. Refugees are actually good
for the economy. Therefore inequality is not strictly bad.

As Ezra said, only certain things are bad. He called out finance. We should
focus on the root causes. Inequality is a too far removed at best and a red
herring at worst.

------
givan
Aren't startups creating
wealth?[http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html](http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html)

I can't say the same about the financial system where banks were bailed out
with public money or big companies "legal" tax evasion etc, this is the
inequality people complain and Ezra was pointing out.

------
ciconia
So Klein's argument is the most thoughtful, and it's all wrong! wow...

------
metaphorm
anyone else feeling like PG is constructing increasingly obtuse arguments that
can all be boiled down to "I'm terrified of paying more taxes than I presently
do."

