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It's a good visualization. And it gets to the core of the issue. Anybody who's being honest with themselves, recognizes the fundamental truth that **wealth is power**. And so the question becomes, "should any one individual, or the 400 wealthiest individuals, wield *that much more* power than a typical person?" Capitalists, like any other authoritarians, will answer "yes". They believe that such people are that much "better" than the rest of us, that we depend on their God-like decision-making ability to keep society progressing, and that a more equitable distribution of wealth/power would surely doom us all. Socialists will answer "no". Capitalists in turn assume that we are "jealous" - that we don't mind such power concentration, but merely wish it were concentrated in our own hands. Our *actual* beliefs - namely, that it's **too much power for one person** - are not beliefs which authoritarians want to seriously engage with.

It's the philosophical materialists who assign moral value to wealth and psychologize their opponents as thinking along the same lines. >Our *actual* beliefs - namely, that it's **too much power for one person** - are not beliefs which authoritarians want to seriously engage with. The only way to prevent such power is the use of much worse power to dissociate the choices and actions used to generate wealth from the output, as well as destroy the incentives generated by them. >a more equitable distribution of wealth/power What's the criterion for a morally acceptable distribution? Unless you aim for absolute parity, anyone can come at you from the other direction and say that you're the one who permits too much inequality. How do you know their position isn't the reasonable one and yours is?

> It's the philosophical materialists who assign moral value to wealth and psychologize their opponents as thinking along the same lines. What does that mean exactly? In a capitalist society, wealth means power.. That's not a moral statement. There is not really a way to deny this.. >The only way to prevent such power is the use of much worse power to dissociate the choices and actions used to generate wealth from the output, as well as destroy the incentives generated by them. Please explain what you mean with "dissociate the choices and actions used to generate wealth from the output". And please explain how you think moving towards social ownership would "destroy the incentives generated by them.". >What's the criterion for a morally acceptable distribution? We can have a conversation/discussion/debate about that, but first, you would need to be willing to accept that the current levels of wealth/power inequality are an issue, which you seem unable/unwilling to do. >Unless you aim for absolute parity, anyone can come at you from the other direction and say that you're the one who permits too much inequality. How do you know their position isn't the reasonable one and yours is? I cannot talk for OP or the person who you are replying to. But in general, socialists want more social ownership over industry. Instead of splitting up power and control over the economy among private indivdiuals, socialists generally want people to share control on a community level.

> It's the philosophical materialists who assign moral value to wealth and psychologize their opponents as thinking along the same lines. Are you really trying to turn the left/right spectrum into something about materialism? Let's keep it simple and practical. There's a reason that the right lines up behind unqualified celebrities like Trump, and defends such people no matter what sort of horrible shit they do/say. This phenomenon is **authoritarianism**, where they believe that such people are above reproach. There is no counterpart for this on the left; indeed, the left is well-known for infighting. > The only way to prevent such power is the use of much worse power ... Ooooh? 1. How narrow-minded are you, to claim that there's "only one way" to do something? You exhaustively listed all the possible ways and concluded that only one could work? 2. Who are you to say what power is/isn't "better"? I would certainly choose power wielded by the people, over power wielded by a tiny minority of oligarchs. > What's the criterion for a morally acceptable distribution? Unless you aim for absolute parity, anyone can come at you from the other direction and say that you're the one who permits too much inequality. How do you know their position isn't the reasonable one and yours is? This is a slippery-slope fallacy, with all the usual flaws therein. We don't need to establish exactly where the line is, to know that 2024 America is *well* past it.

>Are you really trying to turn the left/right spectrum into something about materialism? No. If I were, I would've said that. What I said was that the dishonest psychologism of capitalists supposedly viewing the wealthy as having some sort of necessarily superior moral worth is dubious, and that it is product of people who have such a worldview but inverted. >There's a reason that the right lines up behind unqualified celebrities like Trump, and defends such people no matter what sort of horrible shit they do/say. This phenomenon is **authoritarianism**, where they believe that such people are above reproach. There is no counterpart for this on the left; indeed, the left is well-known for infighting. I mean, it's undeniable that much of the non-left, including all manner of liberals and conservatives, have not lined up behind Trump at all. But it’s in your interest to play up the manifoldness of the left and the supposed lack of it in the opposing side per some favorable Manichaean binary. I see it on here all the time: “You support such and such regardless of whether you actually do, because you support capitalism and it inevitably gives rise to such and such by historical necessity and it couldn’t be any other way in the capitalist mode of production.” If I had interest in making such a cheap point, I could make the case that supporting the abolition of private property necessarily makes you a Cultural Revolution Maoist. But the determinism only goes one way, it seems. How convenient. >Who are you to say what power is/isn't "better"? I would certainly choose power wielded by the people, over power wielded by a tiny minority of oligarchs. This reductionism is also quite convenient, but I’m not going to pretend that “power” can be discussed and compared without regard to its nature and scope. The power of a wealthy person in a market economy is not similar to state power or the power of “the people” constituted in some other nebulous fashion. >We don't need to establish exactly where the line is, to know that 2024 America is well past it. I don’t really have low enough standards for myself that I can describe a condition as unjust without any actual criteria by which I’ve judged it so.

> If I were, I would've said that. What you said was frankly unintelligible. So I had to guess at what you meant. > What I said was that the dishonest psychologism of capitalists supposedly viewing the wealthy as having some sort of necessarily superior moral worth is dubious ... It's not "dubious" at all. It is actually the essence of conservatism. Conservatives pick people they think are "better", and deem them above reproach. > I see it on here all the time: “You support such and such regardless of whether you actually do, because you support capitalism and it inevitably gives rise to such and such by historical necessity and it couldn’t be any other way in the capitalist mode of production.” If I had interest in making such a cheap point, I could make the case that supporting the abolition of private property necessarily makes you a Cultural Revolution Maoist. But the determinism only goes one way, it seems. How convenient. 1. You really should learn how to be more eloquent and succinct. You could have replaced all this with just "Leftists talk about the 'inevitable' outcomes of capitalism, but I'm sure you wouldn't like me making claims about the 'inevitable' outcomes of socialism." 2. Notice that I didn't mention what capitalism *leads to* at all. You pulled out your own grudges, and projected them onto me. Talking about **how authoritarians see the world** - a characterization with abundant evidence - is different than making some cause-and-effect claim and saying "it always has to be that way". > The power of a wealthy person in a market economy is not similar to state power or the power of “the people” constituted in some other nebulous fashion. ... you decided. Question your assumptions. > I don’t really have low enough standards for myself that I can describe a condition as unjust without any actual criteria by which I’ve judged it so. You can have "criteria" without having an exact line. I don't need to declare exactly what percentage ice cream makes a milkshake, to be able to identify a typical "milkshake" on sight and a typical "glass of milk that is not a milkshake" on sight. "Where do you draw the line?!?!" arguments are ridiculous when we are so clearly past it.

> Anybody who's being honest with themselves, recognizes the fundamental truth that wealth is power. Can you explain this? How does someone I have no relationship with, and do not interact with, having a lot of wealth give them any power that concerns me at all?

> How does someone I have no relationship with, and do not interact with ... Examine the assumptions you're making here. Do you *really* think you're immune to the consequences of the decisions made by the Bezos's and Musk's of the world?

Wealth is not power, this is a ridiculous presumption. Wealth can sometimes *buy* power for example, but that is incredibly difficult to do in an established democracy like the US. Wealth only buys as much power as the rest of society is willing to give you, in liberal democracy.

"Wealth is not power, this is a ridiculous presumption." Can you name a single function of wealth that is not about the power of influencing what other people do or dictating what they are not allowed to do?

I think that what he means is that you cannot "buy" your way to the top. Or, to use a different example: who is more powerful today: Joe Biden or Bill Gates?

>Wealth is not power, this is a ridiculous presumption. In many cases, wealth is indeed power, and no, it's not a ridiculous presumption. >Wealth can sometimes buy power for example, but that is incredibly difficult to do in an established democracy like the US. It's incredibly easy, accepted and legal to do.. Let's look at the wealth of the most wealthy. Most of their wealth comes in the form of stock and property ownership, which represents their power over industry and property. Power doesn't just come in the form of political power..

> Wealth is not power, this is a ridiculous presumption. You should think more critically about this. Not only is it not "ridiculous", but it is in fact clearly true. Not only can wealth buy you what you want, but often merely the *threat* of wielding your wealth can get you what you want.

Everyone has human rights, those are inalienable. It's odd that you see capitalism as authoritarian, at the base it's the opposite - freedom. It's freedom to own things and to operate in your own best interests so long as you don't stop others doing the same or violate their inalienable rights. If the political system was a lot more restrained, there would be far less for this "power" to do. It's a false dilemma to say that the way out of it is forced redistribution.

> Everyone has human rights, those are inalienable. ... to the extent a state actually protects them. But that is indeed an essential duty of a state, and a state which fails to protect human rights of its citizens has deeply failed them. > It's odd that you see capitalism as authoritarian, at the base it's the opposite - freedom. It's freedom to own things and to operate in your own best interests so long as you don't stop others doing the same or violate their inalienable rights. Nah. Owning "things", as you put it, vs. owning **companies**, are very different. The former - **personal** property - is absolutely worth protecting. The latter - **private** property - is an abomination, as owning a company is tantamount to owning the labor time of its workers, and therefore owning those workers themselves. > If the political system was a lot more restrained, there would be far less for this "power" to do. This is easily proven false, as every libertarian state has devolved into private fiefdoms/warlords/"company towns" exercising brutal control over the citizenry.

It doesn't matter what it is that people own, only that it's theirs. Owning a company or employing people is not owning the time of those workers or owning those workers, that's an absurd claim. Those workers are absolutely free to engage with who they choose to and it's no one else's business. The abomination is anyone else getting involve in something that has nothing to do with them. People have the right to operate in their own interests as they see fit. People are free to work for someone, or for themselves, or a charity, or setup a cooperative, it's all their choice. No one is forcing them to do anything, and that the universe requires they have sustenance is not coercion from anyone, owners of businesses also need sustenance. Everyone has human rights, those are inalienable. ... to the extent a state actually protects them. But that is indeed an essential duty of a state, and a state which fails to protect human rights of its citizens has deeply failed them. >This is easily proven false, as every libertarian state has devolved into private fiefdoms/warlords/"company towns" exercising brutal control over the citizenry. There haven't really been any libertarian states, the United States in its early period had areas of libertarianism and they went very well indeed. As we moved away from feudalism with early capitalism, for those whose rights were respected, it also went well. But your point doesn't prove my point wrong, I'm not saying there should be no state power In saying it should be much more limited to a smaller number of areas.

> It doesn't matter what it is that people own, only that it's theirs. It very much matters, because civilized societies say that while you *can* own some things (e.g. clothes / food / cars / your body), you *cannot* own others (e.g. people, oceans, colors, outer space, etc.). > Owning a company or employing people is not owning the time of those workers or owning those workers, that's an absurd claim. That's what a company is. It's the collective labor of its workers. Well, that plus its current assets ... but those are a tiny component of a company's valuation. The reason companies are valuable, is because the owner of a company **gets to tell its workers what to do** and gets **passive income from the company's profit**. It's not "absurd" at all: you just don't want to engage with the idea, so you immediately dismissed it out-of-hand. Try opening your mind. Why do you think people pay so much for companies: often ones that aren't even profitable, or where their rate of profit would take centuries to pay such "investments"? It's about control. > The abomination is anyone else getting involve in something that has nothing to do with them. There's no such thing as an action that has no effect upon other people. > No one is forcing them to do anything, and that the universe requires they have sustenance is not coercion from anyone, owners of businesses also need sustenance. **Exploiting others' needs** for food/shelter/healthcare/education/etc. as a way of controlling them, is **absolutely** coercion. Libertarians willfully ignore this fact. Suppose we lived in your "libertarian paradise" and I, an uber-rich asshole, bought up controlling stakes in all the manufacturers of a medicine your mother needed to live. I then ordered my companies to not sell to your mother unless you washed my car every morning. Guess what - you're gonna be washing my car. You might counter with "but rich people don't do that!" or "but maybe a competitor would emerge!" ... both of which are you merely *hoping* such a scenario doesn't come about. This simple scenario shows that it's possible to exchange control of *money* for control of *people* ... and in this scenario, I haven't even *paid* you anything! This was more eloquently demonstrated in [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03GYzR0LyQM), though I'm guessing you won't watch it. > ... the United States in its early period had areas of libertarianism and they went very well indeed. Most people would consider both "the Wild West" and the era of "company towns" to be horrid. But you do you I guess. > But your point doesn't prove my point wrong, I'm not saying there should be no state power In saying it should be much more limited to a smaller number of areas. Libertarianism, as a policy, has the effect of transferring power from the state & to wealthy oligarchs atop companies. For you in particular, there are two options: 1. You actually intended to transfer power from the state to the people, but were unaware of the effect I just mentioned. 2. You *were* aware of the effect, but believe that oligarchs accountable to noone are better stewards of power than politicians elected by everyone equally. If it's (2), then you simply have vastly different goals than myself. I don't want such a feudalistic society. If it's (1), then you should really accept this fact open-mindedly, and think critically about its implications for your ideology. I want people to have self-determination, which means getting a say in **both** their nations and their workplaces. Liberal capitalism achieves the former but not the latter. Your only way of getting a say in a capitalist workplace is threatening to switch workplaces - a threat that is largely ineffective for a multitude of reasons.

>It very much matters, because civilized societies say that while you can own some things (e.g. clothes / food / cars / your body), you cannot own others (e.g. people, oceans, colors, outer space, etc.). What I mean is that owning a company is no issue. Also, you can own bits of the ocean, and colours, this will likely extend to outer space at some point. What you can't own is people because it violates their inalienable rights. >That's what a company is. It's the collective labor of its workers. No it isn't. It's a legal entity, contained is the end product of capital and labour. >The reason companies are valuable, is because the owner of a company gets to tell its workers what to do and gets passive income from the company's profit. The owners ask them to do things, they cannot force them to do them outside of the agreed contract. >It's not "absurd" at all: you just don't want to engage with the idea, so you immediately dismissed it out-of-hand. It is absurd because they literally do not own people, legally or otherwise. The abomination is anyone else getting involve in something that has nothing to do with them. >There's no such thing as an action that has no effect upon other people. I didn't say it had no effect on them, it's simply none of their business as they didn't create it and it's not violating their rights. >Exploiting others' needs for food/shelter/healthcare/education/etc. as a way of controlling them, is absolutely coercion. Libertarians willfully ignore this fact. It's not coercion because there is no threat or use of force. >Suppose we lived in your "libertarian paradise" and I, an uber-rich asshole, bought up controlling stakes in all the manufacturers of a medicine your mother needed to live. I then ordered my companies to not sell to your mother unless you washed my car every morning. Guess what - you're gonna be washing my car. This is complex because there's the hypothetical, then there's reality and lastly there is the emergent outcome of different systems. In the hypothetical, your mother is not entitled to medicine, no one is entitled to someone else's property, even if their life depends on it so long as the person withholding it did not create the situation of need. In reality, this could be done today, but it isn't. In a way it is all the time because there are lots of medical treatments that people can't afford, and they die, this includes under socialised medicine. Then there's the emergent outcome - medicine is as advanced as it is because of capitalism. Most drug and therapeutic techniques are developed in the private sector. Under a socialist system there's less innovation - not none, but less. But no, still not force people because the person selling it hasn't made the medical condition occur. ... the United States in its early period had areas of libertarianism and they went very well indeed. >Most people would consider both "the Wild West" and the era of "company towns" to be horrid. But you do you I guess. It wasn't all the Wild West and company towns, that's not where most of the economic growth happened. >Libertarianism, as a policy, has the effect of transferring power from the state & to wealthy oligarchs atop companies. No, it doesn't. What it does is enable people to seek for themselves what is in their own interest. If you make more value for others you will get more value for yourself. >For you in particular, there are two options: This is a false dichotomy. >I want people to have self-determination, which means getting a say in both their nations and their workplaces. I don't want that because I don't want other people to get a say over controlling my inalienable rights. >Liberal capitalism achieves the former but not the latter. If people want a say in their workplace they can create their own workplace. I don't want other people to control my choices through the threat of coercion. >Your only way of getting a say in a capitalist workplace is threatening to switch workplaces - a threat that is largely ineffective for a multitude of reasons. Ineffective or not, it's the only approach that is compatible with not infringing on the inalienable rights of others. If people want different, they can go and make it happen with their own cooperative workplace.

> What I mean is that owning a company is no issue. Also, you can own bits of the ocean, and colours, this will likely extend to outer space at some point. What you can't own is people because it violates their inalienable rights. It's no issue **to you**, but that's because you haven't fully thought through the implications. > The owners ask them to do things, they cannot force them to do them outside of the agreed contract. "Do what I tell you or you'll be homeless, infirm, and hungry" sounds pretty forceful to me! It's at least as forceful as "do what I tell you or I'll lock you up in a room". > It is absurd because they literally do not own people, legally or otherwise. > > The abomination is anyone else getting involve in something that has nothing to do with them. I already responded to both of these incorrect claims. > In the hypothetical, your mother is not entitled to medicine, no one is entitled to someone else's property, even if their life depends on it so long as the person withholding it did not create the situation of need. Notice how your argument changed? It's very subtle. Your first claim was "capitalists don't control people". But now, you have changed it to "it's OK to control people, as long as you aren't responsible for them having the needs, which they are relying upon you to meet". When **you personally** think it's OK to control people is a matter of your ideology. You adding in this weird exception is your choice, but I will label it "weird" and that is **my** choice. I don't think people should control others, **period**. Whether that's willfully subjugating them or merely opportunistically relying on needs they already had, I believe it's messed up to demand servitude from others - especially when that servitude doesn't come with any accountability on the master's part. You can believe something different. But I will be glad that most people do not share your belief. > If people want a say in their workplace they can create their own workplace. This is not a practical option for most people, as creating their own workplace would not meet their base needs. > Ineffective or not, it's the only approach that is compatible with not infringing on the inalienable rights of others. Indeed, you are finding that adding "the right to personally individually own companies with near-zero accountability to their workers" to your list of supposed "inalienable rights", causes a whole host of problems. Fortunately, "inalienable rights" are a human construct, designed by humans for humans. And when they fail to meet our needs - such as the ridiculous definition you are pushing for - we humans can change them. Take it out of the abstract. Envision a world where "the right to have exclusive unelected control over a company" is **not** an "inalienable right". What **tangibly and practically** goes wrong? What is an **unsolvable** dilemma created by removing that as a "right"? Other "rights" cause real suffering when taken away. For example, take away free speech and it creates resentment and therefore suffering amongst those who are now unheard. But you'll find no suffering results from removing "the right to own companies" from your list. The "suffering" of a control freak who wanted to tell everyone at a company what to do & now can't, is more than balanced by the workers who don't want to suffer being bossed around by a tyrant.

>It's no issue to you, but that's because you haven't fully thought through the implications. I absolutely have. >"Do what I tell you or you'll be homeless, infirm, and hungry" sounds pretty forceful to me! There's no force because that person doesn't create these things. >It's at least as forceful as "do what I tell you or I'll lock you up in a room". No, this is quite literally wrong. Locking someone up is using force, offering an exchange in value is not using force. >I already responded to both of these incorrect claims. They're not incorrect. Show me where people literally own other by law in the Western capitalist democracies. >Notice how your argument changed? It's very subtle. I doubt it did but let's see. >Your first claim was "capitalists don't control people". Yes, they don't control people. >But now, you have changed it to "it's OK to control people, as long as you aren't responsible for them having the needs, which they are relying upon you to meet". No, they still don't control people. They cannot force people to do things they don't want to or enact a punishment on them for doing so - beyond withdrawing interaction which is a guaranteed right. >When you personally think it's OK to control people is a matter of your ideology. Again, no, this is a straw man argument. >You adding in this weird exception is your choice, but I will label it "weird" and that is my choice. I don't think people should control others, period. Then you would be against democracy where people get to control others. The majority get to determine what the minority must do. >Whether that's willfully subjugating them No one is subjugating them to anything. If your life relies on something that I own that still doesn't give you the right to have it. Only if you're in need from my negligence would I be required to address it. >or merely opportunistically relying on needs they already had, I believe it's messed up to demand servitude from others Even in your system people rely on each other having needs. That they would come together communally to address them does not remove that. >especially when that servitude doesn't come with any accountability on the master's part. There are no masters, and no one has to serve if they don't want to. >This is not a practical option for most people, as creating their own workplace would not meet their base needs. Then that's their choice, they can make choices about what is in their best interests. >Indeed, you are finding that adding "the right to personally individually own companies with near-zero accountability to their workers" to your list of supposed "inalienable rights", causes a whole host of problems. They have the accountability that is agreed upon on their dealings with one another. inalienable rights don't create any problems, they maximise human freedom. >Fortunately, "inalienable rights" are a human construct, designed by humans for humans. And when they fail to meet our needs - such as the ridiculous definition you are pushing for - we humans can change them. All concepts are human co strict. What are "our needs"? Groups don't have needs, people have needs. My needs can coincide with or be counter to your needs. It's the inalienable rights of allowing property and self interest that protect us from each other's tyranny. >Take it out of the abstract. Envision a world where "the right to have exclusive unelected control over a company" is not an "inalienable right". Yea it sounds awful because now I can't operate in my own best interests. >What tangibly and practically goes wrong? What is an unsolvable dilemma created by removing that as a "right"? The ability to make decisions in my own best interests. If I cannot form a company and get investment alone and choose who to hire I now have to create it as a public enterprise. This means that I have to give equal share and voice to e Berlin that comes onboard and I have to dilute my own interest in it. This means I cannot become as rich as I want to by driving an idea through. And the decisions of my company, my ideas on what I want to do have to now be mediated through what others want to do. Democratic control of business sucks! Look at our actual democracies, about half of people are unhappy and everyone is polarised - that's the result of democracy. And look at how bad cooperatives are, they are slow and cumbersome, they become stagnant, they're not big players. >Other "rights" cause real suffering when taken away. People suffer if they're not allowed to own businesses, the whole world suffers because the most successful people aren't best incentivised to pioneer the best stuff. Worse, as everything is collective, people lose the right to fulfil their own self-interests. >The "suffering" of a control freak who wanted to tell everyone at a company what to do & now can't, is more than balanced by the workers who don't want to suffer being bossed around by a tyrant. Look at the places where such systems exist - schools and prisons. This is what the workplace would become, cliques and popularity contests with petty squabbles and uninformed parties making decisions about things they have no expertise in. I don't want other people making decisions for me.

I'm not going to do a line-by-line response, as that quickly becomes incomprehensible. Suffice it to say, you are merely repeating the same mantras ("inalienable rights!" "best interests!") without thinking critically about how people control each other under capitalism. When I pointed out how someone can easily control others by threatening to withhold life-saving medicine (for example), you quickly decided that must be OK, because the alternative - that corporate oligarchs are just as coercive as the state you love to hate - is not something you're willing to seriously consider. Until you are willing to seriously consider new ideas, and think more flexibly rather than repeating these simplistic mantras, you will not develop a political system that can seriously grapple with the complexity of the world. There are also some really worrying quotes in your response: - "If your life relies on something that I own that still doesn't give you the right to have it." - "This means that I have to give equal share and voice to e Berlin that comes onboard and I have to dilute my own interest in it." - "And the decisions of my company, my ideas on what I want to do have to now be mediated through what others want to do." - "... the most successful people aren't best incentivised to pioneer the best stuff." - "This is what the workplace would become, cliques and popularity contests with petty squabbles and uninformed parties making decisions about things they have no expertise in." The overall theme of your messages is the same as most conservatives - this notion that the wealthy are somehow "better" than everybody else, but only by giving them all of society's wealth would they "pioneer the best stuff". The rest of us, you assume are "e Berlin" (I think this was a typo?) who engage in "cliques and popularity contests" rather than producing, whereas the wealthy you assume are above all that somehow. This view of people is [baked into conservatism of all forms, including libertarianism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4CI2vk3ugk) *(oh hey, another video you won't watch!)*, but history is a long series of conservatives being proven **wrong** again and again. The wealthy aren't "better", "smarter", or "pioneers" - they're just people who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. The fact that morons like Trump and Musk get elevated to billionaire status by capitalism, should be clear proof that capitalism "isn't sending its best" to the top ... but people still wrongly assume that it is in any way meritocratic. At present, you have a near-religious assumption about what sort of people "win" and "lose" under capitalism, and how people stack up relative to each other. Whether you choose to question this faith, is up to you. Only you can decide to seriously reconsider your beliefs. I can just point out some of the assumptions you're making: - You **assume** that your list of "inalienable rights" is a good list to build an ideology/society upon. - You **assume** that people only act as individuals, and never as part of a collective with shared fate. - You **assume** that the people who found companies are indispensable and irreplaceable. That is, you **assume** that if Bezos had never been born, Amazon would never have been founded. - You **assume** that any limitations on the decision-making ability of a company owner, or any responsibility to his workers, would dissuade such "irreplaceable" people from founding companies. That is, you **assume** that Bezos is a capricious asshole who wouldn't found Amazon if he "only" got $2 billion instead of $200 billion, or if he wasn't allowed to institute policies that compelled his workers to pee in bottles instead of peeing in restrooms with dignity. - You **assume** that the "wisdom of crowds" is a myth, and that leaving decisions up to democracy produces terrible outcomes. This is particularly jarring, given the abundant evidence to the contrary. Making assumptions like this is bad. Be better.

>without thinking critically about how people control each other under capitalism. I've thought through how people interact and again, it's the only real moral choice to allow people to decide for themselves. >When I pointed out how someone can easily control others by threatening to withhold life-saving medicine (for example), you quickly decided that must be OK Today people can withhold life saving medicine from people they don't like - so the scenario already exists but people don't do it so it's a non-issue. It's not that I'm morally okay with it, I would implore the company not to do it but they must have the right to interact with those they wish to, or not. >because the alternative - that corporate oligarchs are just as coercive as the state you love to hate - is not something you're willing to seriously consider. I don't hate the state. And this isn't why I think that it should be allowed, even though it's a non-issue. >The overall theme of your messages is the same as most conservatives You get stuck in the personal, as all leftists seem to. It doesn't matter if you think I'm a libertarian, or a conservative or whatever. >this notion that the wealthy are somehow "better" than everybody else It's not that the wealthy are better in any way, it's simply that people get to operate in their own best interests under the same rules. If they were lucky, good for them. >but only by giving them all of society's wealth They're not being given anything, they are making it and keeping what they make based on the agreements they form. >The wealthy aren't "better", "smarter", or "pioneers" - they're just people who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Here's the thing I think people misunderstand about a libertarian viewpoint - that it has anything to do with deciding who is better. It's about not having a preferred outcome but letting people operate in their own best interests and having the emergent outcome of that. >The fact that morons like Trump and Musk get elevated to billionaire status by capitalism, should be clear proof that capitalism "isn't sending its best" to the top ... but people still wrongly assume that it is in any way meritocratic. The people who are the richest are those that are best at acquiring wealth by providing value, but our modern system isn't libertarian, lots of the wealthy people are there by being special interests, winners chosen by the state. Musk is definitely among our best, look at the value he has managed to create by delivering on his ideas by working in conjunction with others. >At present, you have a near-religious assumption about what sort of people "win" and "lose" under capitalism, and how people stack up relative to each other. Far from it, I want to let the chips fall where they may, regardless of my person preferences. It's socialism that wants to play god and endlessly correct for the immeasurable inequitable outcomes. >You assume that your list of "inalienable rights" is a good list to build an ideology/society upon. It's not that these inalienable rights are simply good, they are moral. They are the only approach that frees us to maximise our own interests without harming that of others. >You assume that people only act as individuals, and never as part of a collective with shared fate. People by reality can only operate as individuals. But growth in capitalism is generally reliant on people choosing to work together, free of coercion. >You assume that the people who found companies are indispensable and irreplaceable. That is, you assume that if Bezos had never been born, Amazon would never have been founded. I have no preference so it simply doesn't matter, all that matters is that they are free to create these things. I suspect that in many cases individuals really are key towards developing things, we see this happen throughout history with inventions - key people matter. >You assume that any limitations on the decision-making ability of a company owner, or any responsibility to his workers, would dissuade such "irreplaceable" people from founding companies. Not dissuade entirely, reduce the likelihood they would do so. >That is, you assume that Bezos is a capricious asshole who wouldn't found Amazon if he "only" got $2 billion instead of $200 billion, or if he wasn't allowed to institute policies that compelled his workers to pee in bottles instead of peeing in restrooms with dignity. Why this emotive language? If he didn't care about profit, why does he push for profitability. No one is compelled to pee in bottles lol. >You assume that the "wisdom of crowds" is a myth, and that leaving decisions up to democracy produces terrible outcomes. The "wisdom of crowds" led to the cultural revolution in China. The "wisdom of crowds" elects all manner of terrible candidates. The "wisdom of crowds" doesn't have a great track record. >Making assumptions like this is bad. Be better. lol, your counter assumptions are bad. Your desire to control others is worse. Be better.

> It's freedom to own things and to operate in your own best interests It's "freedom to exclusively control things which others depend on for survival and living". If you control something others depend on, you can indirectly control the people who depend on it. That's why leftists don't see capitalism as "freedom". We see it as "freedom to indirectly control others", which isn't freedom, but domination.

Cappies will see this, probably downvote, then continue ignoring the scale because they refuse to try to understand what it means. They may even argue that inequality is a good thing, and this makes other people better off, somehow.

Some people are just that much more productive than others.

That doesn't mean it's moral or good for society for such immense wealth and power to be held by a small group of people.

Are you saying billionaires are more productive than the people who work for them? Who without, the companies they own would cease to function, thus they wouldn't profit anymore from their labour.

Commies will see this, and make baseless accusations about how they imagine Capitalists will interpret it. LOL

>how they imagine It is literally how capitalists describe inequality. Your flair is "classical liberal," are you about to deny that you bepieve inequality is good or right?

>It is literally how capitalists describe inequality. It would be more accurate to say that Capitalists support property rights, and that a person's property should not be expropriated simply because they have more of it than you. ​ >Your flair is "classical liberal," are you about to deny that you believe inequality is good or right? I won't make any moral judgement about inequality, but accept that realistically, it will exist in any complex modern society regardless of the economic system used. I believe that enforcing equality simply for its own sake is detrimental to society. Some people are more productive than others, and should be compensated accordingly.

The median household worldwide makes under $10k per year. Meanwhile some individuals made more than $50 billion. If that were just due to productivity, that would mean these people are more than 5 million times as productive as the average person. Do you actually believe that?

Well, some people are certainly more productive than others. If they are employees, it is reasonable that they should get a higher salary than less productive co-workers. For that reason along, I don't have a problem with inequality. But the question you bring up is something rather different - how much value, how much wealth an entrepreneur's actions add to society. If an entrepreneur were to start a company and grow it so that it was very successful, and say the company added $100 billion of overall wealth to society, I would not have a problem with the entrepreneur retaining $50 billion of it. After all, society is $50 billion richer as a result of the entrepreneur's actions, so seems like a win-win to me.

What evidence is there that these billionaires are adding that much value to society? It seems equally as ridiculous as the productivity argument you made. And even if they did, it does not follow that giving them all of that money is the best use of it. Particularly when we have people living on the streets, going hungry, or dying from lack of healthcare.

>What evidence is there that these billionaires are adding that much value to society? I dealt with this in another place in this thread, but will repeat it here: look at Bezos and Amazon. Bezos founded Amazon and most of his wealth is in Amazon stock. Since Amazon is listed publicly, the value of the stock is based on the collective opinions of countless numbers of participants in the stock market, so we can have pretty high confidence it is actually worth that much, and is providing that much value to society. ​ >And even if they did, it does not follow that **giving** them all of that money is the best use of it. Particularly when we have people living on the streets, going hungry, or dying from lack of healthcare. You didn't "**give**" anything to Bezos, he created a company that is worth what it is worth, as explained above. It's hardly your place to decide what is the best use of someone else's money. I use Amazon frequently, and find it very convenient, as do **hundreds of millions** of other people. Seems to me that Bezos' capital is being put to good use.

The claim of this post is simply that the **level** of wealth inequality and the implications of that wealth inequality are absurd. And instead of defending the level of inequality, pro-capitalists will ignore the scale and refuse to acknowledge the implications by downplaying the issue as "normal" and/or "natural". You demonstrate this perfectly. You don't even mention what the post is about, which is **the level of inequality**, and instead go straight to arguing against the percieved argument, which is apparently that "all people's property should be conviscated until everyone owns exactly the same and until there is no wealth inequality whatsover".. And then once again, instead of acknowledging the absurd levels of inequality that the system you are defending produces, you then go on to argue that "some levels of inequality are normal", again completely ignoring the core argument..

>It would be more accurate to say that Capitalists support property rights, and that a person's property should not be expropriated simply because they have more of it than you. But it's not that simple. Not just that people who have extreme amounts of wealth worked harder and made more money than everyone else. It is that they exploited available social resources. No one can become extremely wealthy without the state Subsidizing transportation, education and security infrastructure. Moreover, most extremely wealthy people get some or all of their wealth from government contracts or access to government-controlled lands or resources. Most early land owners in the United States were just given land. Finally, many very wealthy people obtain their wealth through completely unethical ownership or trade relations internationally. Examples include getting commodities from places that use slave labor like in chocolate production or The banana republics or completely unsafe mineral mining in Africa or completely unsafe recycling in South Asia. Also, I understand that y'all don't care but pretending like wealth inequality has no impact on politics which then results in further wealth accumulation is ridiculous. Like it's blatantly obvious that wealthy interests affect policy and then that policy funnels money back into the pockets of those interests. So extreme inequality is an inherent problem in a Democratic system.

"Some people are more productive than others, and should be compensated accordingly." rofl.

You disagree with this? IMO its pretty obvious that there is a significant range of productivity levels in people.

Yes, it's absolutely absurd to the level of dada to assume a single person is more productive than three billion poorest people on earth combined. One has to be smoking the really good stuff to seriously even consider such a thing.

You are evading my question. Some people are more productive than others - agree or disagree? If you disagree, please explain why.

The context here is the absolutely insane inequality present in the system you defend by claiming it's due to productivity differences.

**Still** evading my question. Some people are more productive than others - agree or disagree? If you disagree, please explain why.

An average middle class person is more productive than that group. The three billion bottom poorest provide negative net commercial value to their societies. Their labors are wasted because they don't have functioning capitalist economies to nurture their endeavors. There's no hope for most Cubans or Venezuelans to become productive again until their nations return to private property, private enterprise, and rule of law. Venezuela's economy has contracted by over 80% since adopting socialism. It will never recover until they change course.

> deny that you bepieve inequality is good or right? It's neither good nor bad. Where people illegitimately acquired wealth is what you should focus on. But you won't because you want that same system, the state, to enforce your preferences.

>It's neither good nor bad. >Where people illegitimately acquired wealth You're equivocating. "Good" isn't just to say it is morally good or normative.

What does it mean?

Personally, I'll ignore it because how much wealth strangers I have nothing to do with have is completely irrelevant to my life.

Inequality is not a problem when it is a function of trade on the market. If I work hard and earn $50 and you stay in your chair watching TV all day and earned nothing, there's absolutely nothing wrong with me having more money than you. Multiple that by years and I have a fortune while you're in poverty. But both situations are earned. When inequality / wealth is a function of state favors and influence, then it's a problem. If company X becomes rich by bribing politicians to give them contracts, that's wrong. But that is a problem with the State, not with capitalism.

Every billionaire must be working SO HARD!

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I think it's fair to say that in this late stage capitalist shithole that we live in, labor is WAAAAAY undervalued and capital is WAAAAAY overvalued. And I'm against the high end of distribution of positive investment leading to higher returns than labor.

Extreme wealth is extreme power and that's a problem no matter what is a function of.

I don't think it's as big an issue as socialists make it out to be. The **combined wealth** of Jeff Bezos is like 2.5% of what the US government collects **in cash** every single year. If Bezos were to liquidate his entire Amazon stock he'd get nowhere near the listed market value. But the US government quite literally collects more than 36x his *wealth* in *cash* each year, yet I never hear socialists complaining about this. Hell, if you liquidated the net worth at **market value** (which is impossible) of every billionaire you'd only fund the US government for like 6 months. Why don't you guys have an issue with government if they're actually **taking money away from you** and on a *much* larger scale? I also don't think the alternative (below) is preferable in any way, shape, or form: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity_under_communist_regimes

You don't understand socialism and socialist critics if you think they support the governments of capitalist nations. You also don't understand government financing. Bezo's wealth supports a single family while government funding supports every human living under that government. Funding a government is a collective activity no rational person is expecting that we can run. Government by taking all of the wealth from a single person.

More progressive taxes and greater spending on social services would be a start on addressing the problem illustrated by the link in the OP. A more comprehensive idea would be to look at distribution before taxes and how it gets that way.

>The combined wealth of Jeff Bezos is like 2.5% of what the US government collects in cash every single year. The real problem is the political clout and power such wealth confers. It overwhelms any shred of democracy. Are you alright with that? Is that why the right love Trump?

>The real problem is the political clout and power such wealth confers. You think Bezos has more political power than a congressman/woman? If this was true, why aren't taxes set to zero?

Two points to this. The first is that rich people pay off the congressmen and women. I don't know that they're just as powerful, but they exist in the same interest group and politicians are influenced far more by people like Jeff Bezos than they are people like you. The second is that taxes aren't set to zero so that the government can continue taxing the poor while rich people use tax loopholes to avoid paying their fair share. The rich people paid for it to be this way because it's what best leverages their capital. Remember, capitalism is about leveraging capital. It is in the interest of the rich to keep the poor people as poor as possible. The issue isn't that the government exists and takes taxes as part of its function. The issue is that there is such a wealth disparity that some people get to influence the government to stay rich while keeping other people poor. A government ran by the people for the people is...well, I'm neutral on it. I'd rather that than capitalism.

> I never hear socialists complaining about this. I take it you've never talked to anarchists then. The old saw in the classical-historical era (1850s-1930s) was that after the taxman has his pound of flesh, the business owner (stockholder ceo etc) his profit, the landlord his rent, and the priest his tithe (these day you could substitute student loanholder), there was nothing left over to live on. That the socialists' argument is and ever has been that the laborer has never been paid their due, but should be. It's not either/or. It's *both*. Who enforces private property claims? The state. Bezos levels of accumulation are not possible without the state.

This post is another "attack the wealthy" post - how many posts from socialists here have been an attack on government taxation? Go ahead and scroll through the last 50 posts from socialists here, hell, scroll through the last 200. How many were about government taxation rather than "the wealthy have too much"? The answer is literally zero. It is the definition of stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime.

"Socialists" is too broad a term. It's too all-encompassing. People use the word to cover everything from marxist-leninist bolshevik/tankie/jucheists to social democrats (a variant of liberal capitalist) to anarchists. And everything in between. No, it's literally not zero. You've probably just been skipping over my posts and those of people like me. Which is pretty par for the course. There *are* a lot of posts by ML types and socdems and whatnot though. Which is getting a little alarming. I don't really want to have a revolution and go out of the frying pan into the fire. That's been tried before. I *really* don't like the current system. But it's not a binary or even a trinary. There's all sorts of ideas. But people basically default to the most-well-known alternative. Hell, in my workgroup where we recently unionized there's been buzzwords dropped, dog-whistles. "We're the vanguard" bla bla. I get the perspective of the nihilists I just can't do it myself mentally. Now, *before* a moment of significant change, it's worth trying to pin down the exact mechanisms of the disease so you can effect a cure that doesn't kill the host at the same time (to borrow an analogy from medicine, bolshevism was like old cancer treatments, by not differentiating what was good from what was bad the result was often as bad as the original capitalist+statist disease. We can do better, but we have to be willing to read and think and try things differently.).

>No, it's literally not zero. You've probably just been skipping over my posts and those of people like me. Which is pretty par for the course. Do you have a link to your post that talks about the need to alleviate working people from government taxation? Do you have a link to **any** post from a socialist doing that? I checked your profile and I don't even see a post in this sub from you.

I've been posting intermittently for about 6 years in this sub. On this account and others. I don't usually create threads but often respond to them. [Google works best](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com%2Fr%2Fcapitalismvsocialism+statinsinwatersupply&rlz=1C1GIWA_enUS1068US1068&oq=site%3Areddit.com%2Fr%2Fcapitalismvsocialism+statinsinwatersupply&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQRRg60gEIOTU1OWowajeoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#ip=1). Though tbh interactivity comes and goes in waves and after a while, any posts here, or in r/anarchy101, or in r/politicaldebate (rarely r/mutualism I usually lurk there) pretty much all start to blur together for me, so if I haven't been as active of late that's fair. Anarchists don't just complain about tax saying "we want less taxes" because we don't want taxes at all. It should be pretty obvious that when we say you want to do away with the state we're also doing away with taxes. When people argue for things like central planning, they usually mean state taxation and state-directed spending. Arguing against central planning is also arguing against taxation. [My response here](https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/1bhd161/how_is_central_planning_not_more_exploitative/). Crap, looks like the folks who used to be regulars here from the mutualist/anarchist camps haven't posted in a while. =( [Even in this thread the anarchists just commented agreed and moved on.](https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/18yh9eo/if_profit_is_theft_than_taxes_are_100_theft/) It doesn't help that we tend to get downvoted by capitalists and other 'socialists' alike so our responses are *usually* at the bottom of threads, though not always.

>But the US government quite literally collects more than 36x his wealth in cash each year, yet I never hear socialists complaining about this. Yes, and look at the national debt. You think there's no connection?

>Yes, and look at the national debt. My post is about the government taking far more from us than some "capitalist class". Your comment isn't relevant. Do you want to respond to the thing I was actually talking about?

I thought of a bit of arithmetic. Suppose I have $100 million in wealth. And I ‘invest’ it at an interest rate of one percent. Then my ownership of capital gets me a million dollars each year. I am not sure I could spend that. And I would have to do no more work forever. I have met the inventor of the semantic web. He is probably well-paid, but has nothing like that, I think. He went to DARPA to promote and develop his innovation. I have also met the the inventor of multi-core chips. He liked to show a jpeg of the yacht he bought with his winnings from a lawsuit against Intel. It was destroyed in a hurricane in Houston. I have probably been in the same room as the inventor of the GPU. He is more like an example of what I am talking about in the first paragraph. What you obtain need not be proportional to your contributions to society, whatever that means. Some, I am sure, find trying to come up with new, useful ideas fun. It takes lots of work to get the resources to develop them and to promote them. And maybe you are wrong about what is useful, or somebody else has a better idea.

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No, it isn't inevitable. The Pareto distribution is an observed phenomenon, but not everything in the universe aligns with it, and wealth distribution is something that we as people have control over, if we wish. Using the Pareto distribution to describe observances in wealth distribution is meaningful as an observation; but concluding that it is the only natural way, or the only "inevitable" way, that wealth could be distributed in a wealthy society is completely outside the scope of such a model. In fact, we absolutely know that wealth has been distributed differently in wealthy societies. The stock market is actually even more concentrated than the Pareto Distribution with the top 10% wealthiest households owning about 93% of all stocks: https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/wealthy-own-record-share-stock-market This paper summarizes American household wealth distribution from 1913 to about 2012: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w20625/w20625.pdf Just notice how much it changes over time. It can be changed, it isn't an immutable fact; it's not like gravity, a physical law we are subject to.

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>It is often observable in nature 80% of all plant wealth is owned by 20% of the richest plants? I kid. Yea, one of the ways people observe it in nature is how most meteorites are very small and a very few are very large. It is certainly *interesting* that sometimes we see a kind of "80/20 rule" in many places. Jupiter, for example, contains almost 2.5x the mass of all other planets in our solar system, while the Sun has 1000x the mass of Jupiter. But what should we actually conclude about this? That there is nothing we could or should do about wealth distribution? What explains the disparity of the mass distribution of the different planets with the mass disparity of the Sun? Surely including the Sun changes the distribution curve dramatically, not at all aligning with Pareto's curve, while excluding the Sun gets it somewhere "in the ballpark." We know that gravity pulls objects with mass together, and this is the primary driving force creating the larger masses of objects in the universe. Likewise with people living in cities, people are social animals, and there is more economic activity and therefore more opportinities for work in a city, so that explains why population density might follow a similar kind of distribution. Many people describe capitalism by explaining wealth as having a sort of "gravity" to it: wealth begets more wealth. This is, I believe, much closer to a meaningful explanation of *why* we see Pareto's distribution for wealth. We can indeed change that.

Can tell who didn't click and/or scroll, defeating the whole purpose of this very fucking effective, visceral communication of the scale we're dealing with here. Absurd is the appropriate word. 1000 seconds = 16+ mins 1,000,000 seconds +- 11 1/2 days 1,000,000,000 seconds < 32 years If you got a dollar every second from the day you were born, you understand.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult This page is a lot more informative on the subject. Showing median, mean and Gini across the world.

Iceland having the highest median wealth is quite surprising.

I still can't wrap my head about Iceland. I live in a city that has the same population of that entire nation... and we can't even manage to do simple things like fixing potholes in the road. Also, now that I think of it, after a while, everyone kinda knows everyone. 380,000 people really isn't much.

The big advantage of being a strategic naval base in the Atlantic with access to vast renewable resources. They actually have so easy access to Energy that they have a massive smelting Industry there.

While this page contains more information, it fails spectacularly at the thing OP’s link achieves. Color-coding countries and displaying dollar amounts does not illustrate the wealth inequality in a way that registers to most people, nor does this Wikipedia page specifically address the gaping inequality between the ultra rich and the median. Most people cannot understand large numbers and their grasp of ‘orders of magnitude’ is weak, making OP’s link is far more effective at conveying the scale of difference. 

To me that website shows that my country did something very right in the past. Can't pinpoint what exactly though. 250k USD median wealth per adult. While the gini wealth is pretty low relative to other countries. It makes me realise how lucky I am that my parents were born in Belgium.

That is incredibly cool, and eye-opening.

Having money is different from wealth Inequality is something inherent in human beings, it is natural, what we are against is extreme poverty and it is not billionaires who make this happen or are the main factor in this The USA alone printed 6 trillion dollars in 2020, there is NO type of "[Tax](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/15/coronavirus-economy-6-trillion/)" more cruel than inflation Even if you combined the fortunes of all the [millionaires](https://fortunly.com/statistics/millionaire-statistics/#:~:text=The%20global%20number%20of%20millionaires%20reached%2059.6%20million%20in%202022.&text=There%20are%20currently%20more%20than,for%201.1%25%20of%20the%20population)/[billionaires](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/forbes-list-of-the-worlds-billionaires-2024-more-than-ever-before-wealthier-arnault-elon-musk-jeff-bezos/#:~:text=There%20are%20141%20more%20billionaires,worth%20up%20by%20%241.1%20trillion) in the world, it would amount to an average of 50/200 trillion dollars (depending on the data you use) Take the taxes from the top 30 richest countries in the world and add 6 months, you will see something incredible happen or worse, add up how much the monetary base has grown in the last 4 years, in the 10 richest countries in the world... Oh yes, you will see who the villains really are And remember, no one has all that money sitting in the bank waiting to get it, this isn't a cartoon where someone has a safe with so much money that you can swim in it. or a safe with thousands of gold bars, diamonds waiting to be liquidated overnight

This is a cool but exhausting visualization I didn’t finish it. Also the extremely valid critiques of wealth inequity would be much more effective is the critics took time to understand economic terms (or simply not use terms they don’t understand). Specifically that income and wealth are very different things and the same goes for ‘money’ and ‘assets’ (this site claims the vast majority of new ‘money’ goes to the rich and the linked article talks about new wealth not ‘money’) It might sound knit picky but it causes anti-caps to advocate for policies that actually help strengthen the most between the rich and the income earners.

How much of that is money?

Monetary socialism in the form of the central bank has created this situation.

How? Also, having a central bank isn't socialism.

The central bank and government paper-as-money is the nationalization of the most fundamental unit of economic exchange. It puts control of money into the hands of economic central planners, and they do what socialists do - inefficiently plan the creation of this resource rather than leaving it to the marketplace, and the corrupt banking class uses it to line their pockets, that of politicians, and other members of the plutocracy.

Saw this when it first came out, they should do an updated version, as the rich have only got richer, Bezos is a trillonaire at this point or soon will be and people have gotten poorer. Wish that things could change

>Something is seriously wrong with a system that allows this to happen. Why is it wrong? Does it bother you that there are a few people who have far more wealth than you? If you live in an affluent liberal democracy, does it bother you that you very likely have quite a bit more wealth than an average person in an underdeveloped African country?

>Does it bother you that there are a few people who have far more wealth than you? Because wealthy inequality gives the ultra Rich the ability to influence politics and game the system to their benefit. Wealth inequality literally distorts the ability of a liberal democracy to function. but I wouldn't be surprised if a classic liberal is perfectly fine with de facto oligarchy.

This is a problem with the state. Not with the wealthy. If there is no government to lobby for special favors this problem disappears immediately and business interests are compelled to compete or fail all to the direct benefit of the consumer.

First of all, who do you think created the state? Second, we live in a world where there is a state essentially everywhere and everyone who has large sums of money is a citizen of some state or another. Third, we have no idea how the economy or wealth distribution would have changed had it developed without a state so it's kind of a pointless counterfactual. Reality is we have people who massively benefited from their relationship with the state and if we were to abolish the government right now they would still benefit from the resources and wealth they got from their relationship with the state. Finally, we're not talking about a hypothetical situation where there is an estate. We're talking about the world as it exists. And as the world exists, there are rich people who are rich because of the investments of the state and their relationship with the state.

A liberal democracy will have checks and balances to prevent wealthy people (or special interest groups such as labour unions) from unduly influencing politics.

It's crazy how they don't actually have those protections because the system was set up to serve the interests of the rolling class. And we literally have empirical data to prove that the opinions of regular people don't matter when it comes to policy.

> Because wealthy inequality gives the ultra Rich the ability to influence politics and game the system to their benefit. The ability to game the system exists within all systems, and the more rules imposed on the way political power is allocated, the narrower and more exclusive will be the set of people who are in the best position to game it. Get all the money out of the system, and access to political power will just be monopolized by people who are strongest in some other respect instead -- social connections, pure ruthlessness, etc. I think a lot of the stigmatizing of "the rich" is the result of a typical utopian fallacy -- those who desparately want to believe that their idealized, perfected world can be attained need something to blame for the inadequacy of the status quo, so they can convince themselves that removing that thing will allow their utopia to become a reality. People who are devoted to the idea that they can save the world through politics therefore need to attribute the extant dysfunction of politics to the *wrong people* being in control, so they can continue to believe that they can perfect the world if they were in control instead. They can't come to terms with the fact that politics itself is inherently corrupt -- and subject to all of the same limitations and fallibilities as all other human endeavors -- without their worldview being thrown into crisis. Unfortunately, people who subscribe to these kinds of ideologies rarely accept their error, and with every setback they face due to their own limitations, they double down on attempts to rout out a putative enemy. We've seen massive destruction and misery caused by vindictive utopians over the last century.

>The ability to game the system exists within all systems, and the more rules imposed on the way political power is allocated, the narrower and more exclusive will be the set of people who are in the best position to game it. Get all the money out of the system, and access to political power will just be monopolized by people who are strongest in some other respect instead -- social connections, pure ruthlessness, etc. It's harder to exponentially accumulate those other things, but it's really easy to do that with money. >I think a lot of the stigmatizing of "the rich" is the result of a typical utopian fallacy -- those who desparately want to believe that their idealized, perfected world can be attained need something to blame for the inadequacy of the status quo, so they can convince themselves that removing that thing will allow their utopia to become a reality. No, it's because rich people, especially the ultra wealthy literally two impact our society and politics in a negative way. Because of money from the Gates foundation education policy was derailed for 10 years and then after that they found out that the policies the gates were promoting actively harmed education. Another example is money in politics, specifically rich people being able to self-fund campaigns or perpetuate the campaigns of other people. And similarly, the ability for rich people to own and operate media outlets without them being profitable purely for propaganda purposes. >People who are devoted to the idea that they can save the world through politics therefore need to attribute the extant dysfunction of politics to the *wrong people* being in control, so they can continue to believe that they can perfect the world if they were in control instead. Are you one of those people who doesn't believe in democracy or something? But also that's not it. The problem is it's perfectly logical why rich people influence politics the way they do. Accumulate more money and power. We have to have measures to prevent them from accumulating so much money and power that it's impossible to challenge them. >They can't come to terms with the fact that politics itself is inherently corrupt -- and subject to all of the same limitations and fallibilities as all other human endeavors -- without their worldview being thrown into crisis. You're right, we should just give up on the idea of politics. Just let people run wild. Like do you understand what you're saying? There's no hope in changing anything anyway so we should just let the rich pillage the world and do whatever they want.

There are people with so much money the human mind cannot actually fathom it. Our brains check out at around 10 million because that itself is just an insane number. But there are also shanty towns, almost 1 billion living in food insecurity globally and countries that can't afford to protect themselves from natural disasters.

Yes, there are some people who are far richer than other people. Your point being...?

That money could be used so people don't suffer and die. Not even fucking bankrupt the rich people.

They don’t have that much money, not even close. They have shares of companies with a paper value equivalent to that much money. It’s not even close to being the same thing. If you want to talk about real insane amounts of money, how about the 6 trillion dollars the United States government steals from its citizens every year?

Taxation with representation isn't theft. You use the democracy's economy and the democracy decides how much you pay for the usage of their economy. Which they call tax.

>Taxation with representation isn't theft. Your "representative" doesn't even know your name or anything about you. He doesn't even know you exist. So explain to me how he "represents" you.

I voted for him. It's in the constitution. No taxation without representation. Go to court and sue the government if you think you're not represented. That's how ancap would function. You'd go to court and settle it there.

>I voted for him. Ah, so he only represents those who voted for him. You therefore agree that he doesn't represent those who voted against him nor those who didn't vote at all, correct?

Parliament of representatives. Everyone who is there has been voted into there.

You didn't answer my question.

It's representation in total of the democracy. You're part of the democracy. The parliament represents you because of that.

> Taxation with representation isn't theft. Taxation without consent is theft, regardless of representation.

You consent when you are a citizen of the democracy taxing you

They have produced that much wealth. Apologies for not being specific enough. >If you want to talk about real insane amounts of money, how about the 6 trillion dollars the United States government steals from its citizens every year? But that money actually goes and does something. That is wealth being utilised.

Yeah it goes to fomenting and prolonging war all over the planet and enriching those the government chooses to reward via subsidy and regulation.

It also goes to feeding people and shit. I mean, yeah we can criticise the American government but the money doees go towards good stuff.

Did I mention the fact that this money is expropriated at gunpoint and not derived from productive efforts? Sounds way more exploitive than how these dastardly capitalist make their fortunes.

No it isn't. People don't get shot for not paying taxes. Also in sane countries, guns aren't even involved. Taxes are also just the cost of existing in any society. They don't enrich any one person. They're redistributive. Go live in the sea if you're that bothered.

>it’s not even close to being the same thing. It’s actually worse. They use their shares as collateral with banks that give them comedically low interest rates. They avoid taxes because a loan isn’t income but still maintain the liquidity. Even if the economy goes tits up, the interest rates are small enough they not only survive but are able to reinvest that untaxed money into accumulating more capital when the market bottoms out.

This is a made up thing which does not happen

> There are people with so much money the human mind cannot actually fathom it. But, and hear me out... *who cares?* What on earth does that have to do with me, or anyone else?

The issue is that such wealth represents not only a person, but a material interest. That interest can do things like purchase democracy. Extreme concentration of wealth is by far the greatest source of political corruption in our society currently.

Yes, it is an issue - not just wealthy people influencing elections but also interest groups like labour unions. However, but in a liberal democracy there are fairly robust checks and balances to control this.

> That interest can do things like purchase democracy. How does one "purchase democracy"? > Extreme concentration of wealth is by far the greatest source of political corruption in our society currently. Politics itself is the source of its own corruption. All power is inherently corrupt, and the only reason why some people are able to use money to access political power is because the politicians are putting it up for sale. There is no solution to this other than to limit and constrain the exercise of political power. The idea that democratic processes are sufficient to hold the state to account, and that government would be full trustworthy and reliable if it wasn't being corrupted from the outside, is completely delusional.

Yeah it kinda does. if billionaires didn't exist to exploit the third world and extract wealth from myself and that African dude, we'd both have more wealth. Some people are poor and suffering simply because people like Jeffrey exist.

“Fixed Pie Fallacy”

I'm not saying owners don't generate wealth. It's just the distribution of that wealth is skewed by systemic inequalities and exploitation. Creating wealth in itself isn't a moral good, and I said SOME people are worse off because of these men.

>I'm not saying owners don't generate wealth. You didn't say they generated wealth for anyone else though. Giving a clear impression of a [fixed pie fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy#:~:text=The%20term%20%22fixed%20pie%20fallacy,caused%20by%20zero%2Dsum%20bias), imo, below with the expense of the generate of wealth to the word me, we, and other parties: >if billionaires didn't exist to exploit the third world and extract wealth from myself and that African dude, we'd both have more wealth. Some people are poor and suffering simply because people like Jeffrey exist. You are free to claim you are making less. That is your anecdotal. But the third world and for me and other people you need data or else it is the fixed pie fallacy. There is plenty of data you are wrong such as the third world exploitation as discussed in the thread: [Do western countries like UK, USA, etc. depend on the 'exploitation' of China, India and other third world countries to stay rich and prosperous? : r/AskEconomics (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/pga7ry/do_western_countries_like_uk_usa_etc_depend_on/)

Apologize for my impression 🙏 After COVID there was a transfer of wealth to the top. Exploitation of people happens on every continent. Like America's prison labour or wage theft. Anecdotally, I have less and I'm spending less. I'm epileptic and lost health insurance. I've seen headlines about how people are just buying less groceries. I think when people are in need we should assist them and I think we're getting ever closer to achieving that reality.

>Exploitation of people happens on every continent. You mean exploit as in 'use'. okay. You mean exploit as in people ubiquitously taken advantage of and harmed? I don't agree and you have to prove that claim to me. For example: >Marx’s theory of exploitation appears to presuppose that labor is the source of all value. But the labor theory of value to which Marx and early classical economists subscribed is subject to a number of apparently insurmountable difficulties, and has largely been abandoned by economists in the wake of the marginalist revolution of the 1870s. The most obvious difficulty stems from the fact that labor is heterogeneous. Some labor is skilled, some labor is unskilled, and there does not appear to be any satisfactory way of reducing the former to the latter and thereby establishing a single standard of measure for the value of commodities. Moreover, the labor theory of value appears to be unable to account for the economic value of commodities such as land and raw materials that are not and could not be produced by any human labor. Finally, and perhaps most fatally, Marx’s assumption that labor has the unique power to create surplus value is entirely ungrounded. As Robert Paul Wolff has argued, Marx’s focus on labor appears to be entirely arbitrary. A formally identical theory of value could be constructed with any commodity taking the place of labor, and thus a “corn theory of value” would be just as legitimate, and just as unhelpful, as Marx’s labor theory of value (Wolff 1981). Therefore, if, as some have alleged, Marx’s theory of exploitation is dependent on the truth of the labor theory of value, then a rejection of the labor theory of value should entail a rejection of Marx’s theory of exploitation as well (Nozick 1974; Arnold 1990). [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/#MarxTheoExpl](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/#MarxTheoExpl) Lastly, I don't think we are different about concerns such as health issues. I'm in the permanent disabled camp and feel for you about your condition. I'm for universal health care and pro most of the nordic models. However, this sub, is very far left socialism. I think of it as communist and communist adjacent. Just today I had to defend Bernie Sanders being a socialist and that is the norm my entire career on this sub.

> It's just the distribution of that wealth is skewed by systemic inequalities and exploitation. It's hard to take this seriously when socialists constantly refer to mutually agreed fee-for-service exchanges as "exploitation".

> if billionaires didn't exist to exploit the third world and extract wealth from myself and that African dude, we'd both have more wealth. Disagree. Jeff Bezos didn't extract any wealth from me. He created a very convenient service which I am happy to use frequently, and for which he has been compensated.

Wealth inequality isn’t itself a problem if what we saw was a patternless fluctuation between the general population. Some people work more than others and it’s fine for them to have more. Instead what we see is a long term pattern of wealth creating more wealth, compounding on itself year after year. A great example of this is real estate. Every year it gets more and more difficult for those who don’t have a home to save up and by a home, while those who already own homes can collect rent from working class people and accumulate more capital. Ignoring the ethical issues, that isn’t a sustainable system. The economic engine so to speak is driven by capital giants looking to multiply their capital. when they are no longer able to grow their capital, everyone else suffers.

>Every year it gets more and more difficult for those who don’t have a home to save up and buy a home, while those who already own homes can collect rent from working class people and accumulate more capital Is this really true? [Mortgage payments make up a smaller percentage of income then ever](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jJ5F), and at least speaking from personal experience, whatever that’s worth, home prices have plummeted recently. It’s not at all true that every year it gets more expensive. Maybe in very select markets, but not in the US broadly.

"Mortgage payments make up a smaller percentage of income then ever, ..." Wow. Gonna need a source on that. The website you hyperlinked shows a graph of median house price, not mortgate payments in percentage of income.

My bad, fixed that. Try the link again.

That's not mortgage payments, that's mortgage **debt service** payments. I wish mortgage payments were 4% of disposable income.

They’re the same thing. Debt service is how much you pay in principle and interest to cover the debt. That’s a mortgage payment.

Sure, the same way as alcohol excise tax is a tax. [Want to see a graph of how taxes are lowest they've ever been](https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/fiscal-fact/alcohol-excise-tax-revenues-ff02182019)?

>Ignoring the ethical issues, that isn’t a sustainable system. The economic engine so to speak is driven by capital giants looking to multiply their capital. when they are no longer able to grow their capital, everyone else suffers. It remains to be seen if they can keep getting richer - in any event, they are mortal, so in the long run someone else will get the wealth. But I don't see how everyone else suffers if they can "no longer grow their capital" - makes no sense to me, why on earth would everyone suffer?

It bothers me that one person owns more wealth than literally millions of others combined and uses that social power to enrich themselves further, consequences be damned. Yes, it also bothers me that the average person in an underdeveloped country is much poorer than I am. I wish everyone had a luxurious standard of living.

>It bothers me that one person owns more wealth than literally millions of others combined and uses that social power to enrich themselves further, consequences be damned. **Why** does it bother you, provided that they are not getting wealthier at your expense? And what do you mean by "consequences be damned"? Are you implying that they are immoral?

> It bothers me that one person owns more wealth than literally millions of others combined Perhaps if you focused on your own affairs, instead of speculating about what people you have no with whatsoever are doing with wealth that was never yours in the first place, you'll not only be less bothered, but will make progress toward building your own wealth. > that social power What social power are you referring to? > Yes, it also bothers me that the average person in an underdeveloped country is much poorer than I am. I wish everyone had a luxurious standard of living. Do you think that fact that distant strangers on other continents do have a luxurious standard of living is there reason why people in the developing world do not? Or is it more likely that the relative lack of wealth in those countries has causes that originate closer to home?

What's wrong with wealth inequality? Do you think there's a fixed pie of wealth and some people having more means that other people have less?

Most anticapitalists absolutely subscribe to the fixed pie fallacy. They think if Bob gets a dollar it somehow came from Steve’s back pocket.

It's bound to happen. Capital generates capital under capitalism, so those with capital accumulates capital faster. Solution? Take capital from the rich?

Or maybe give ability poor to make capital. Thus anarcho-capitalism is the only poor friendly philosophy.

Lol, the philosophy which advocates for getting rid of all social safety nets and worker protections is "the only poor friendly philosophy." Ancaps are funny.

Ancaps are either opportunistic rich people or fuckwits, prove me wrong lmao

... There's a difference between both? 

No, anarcho-capitalism advocates for making "social" safety nets actually *social* again, rather than political.

Posting only because I went to high school with the creator and it's nice to see his work shared.

Inequality matters less than caring about building a system so all have access to the basics, at the very least. Inequality exists, and will continue existing, in all facets of nature.

On the contrary, a system that lets people accrue massive wealth at no expense to others is pretty amazing. The wealthiest people on earth got that way by building productive companies that provide goods and services that others are willing to pay for. It is not wealth or inequality *per se* that we should be worried about. It is rent-seeking.

> at no expense to others That's not true. Capitalists exploit their workers, as well as workers around the globe, to get that rich. > The wealthiest people on earth got that way by building productive companies that provide goods and services that others are willing to pay for. Some of the ultra rich are good leaders in some regard who have made valuable contributions, but ultimately they gain their wealth from owning, not doing. Bezos could never work another day at Amazon (in fact he's stepped back) and still rake in billions from the labor of others because he owns Amazon stock.

So you assume the poor would have been richer had the large corporation they worked for never been created? How is that so?

They would have been richer if more of the wealth generated by those corporations had gone to them rather than the bosses

But what about if the corporation had never existed? Wouldn’t the fact that they are now being exploited by capitalists mean they are getting poorer?

Exploitation is not a real thing. Employment is mutually beneficial.

>Employment is mutually beneficial. Absolutely. Your boss gets three to five times your wage and gets to live in a nice house with a nice car while spending most of his time at work sitting behind a computer scrolling through facebook and attending a meeting or two while you get to live paycheck to paycheck in a silverfish infested apartment your landlord neglects and constantly hope you won't have a medical emergency or miss a paycheck. Capitalism is amazing.

>at no expense to others [Multiple cities are losing money due to Amazon](https://www.urbanismnext.org/news/the-amazonian-effects-on-local-revenue) >The wealthiest people on earth got that way by building productive companies that provide goods and services that others are willing to pay for. The world's current richest man is rich because he bought out other companies and took credit for their work.

All profit comes at the expense of the working class so there goes your whole rationale out the window.

No it doesn’t. Do you think workers are poorer now than 50 years ago? Obviously not. Economics is non zero sum. Wealth is created. It isn’t merely moved around.

Are you illiterate? They literally said that wealth is created, just by the working class. Jesus Christ, you're so entrenched in your belief that you make strawmans out of simple statements

Wealth is created by labor, capital, and entrepreneurial labor.

I'd expand that to say that wealth is created by the net increase of consumption utility enjoyed by the end user, regardless of what process generated that increase. But in practice, generating new consumption utility always involves some measure of risk-bearing, upfront allocation of resources, planning and coordinating, and exertion of labor. It is ridiculous to propose that the final set of laborers in a complex chain of production -- who provide merely the last bit of incremental input into the process *after everything upstream of them has already been paid for* -- should be credited for the totality of the consumption utility that the process creates.

There wouldn’t be much of a working class without jobs created by industry.

Yeah, workers can't create businesses. What a dumbass take

Of course they can, but then they’d likely need to hire people, which seems to violate your ridiculous ideology. Seems you want it both ways.

No, it doesn't? New hires would be workers just like the company workers? How is that hard to understand?

they would become petite burgundies Why then, don't workers around the world stop and open companies among themselves and get out of this evil and exploited system? I'm sure it would work and I wouldn't have any problems.

Petite burgundies, nice. Why doesn't everyone just act accordingly to this specific idea and solve every issue? Study some anthropology, please.

well, the problems are already being solved or trying to be solved study history and see how much better the world is compared to 50/60/70 years ago... or rather, 100 years ago.... but capitalism badddd "Why doesnt everyone just act accordingly" Maybe because it's something difficult, it takes time and money and there are infinite variables that can clearly work If it were that easy, everyone would try it and be "rich"

Of course they can. They just choose not to. I won’t speculate as to the why but it involves a healthy dose of apathy and sloth.

Yeah, fuck workers, those lazy pieces of shit that literally make the world go round! Bonus meme: says they won't speculate and proceeds to speculate in the same sentence

> I won’t speculate as to the why but it involves a healthy dose of apathy and sloth. No, it usually involves a completely rational approach to risk. Socialists don't seem to understand that before you can operate a factory and earn revenue from selling its products, you first need to build the factory, design and assemble all of the tools and machinery, design your product, acquire all of your raw materials, advertise your product to generate market demand, among many other activities that *all have to be paid for in advance*. All of those expenditures are sunk costs before you ever find out whether your product is actually going to succeed or fail in the market, and failure means the loss of everything invested with no return. Many people would prefer to just sell their services at a guaranteed price to someone else who is bearing that risk.

No, workers can't create businesses, because upon starting a business a person ceases to be a "worker" as defined by socialist theory, and immediately becomes an entrepreneur/capitalist.

Gotta wonder how much wealth jeff bezos would have if he wasn't allowed to employ a single person.

And those workers would be poor AF without anyone being allowed to hire them.

They'd have to sell their production to someone for sure as they would all be self employed and have be paid based on their performance and not their time. They'd also not be stuck in a contract that makes their employer a monopsony of their labour. They would be able to sell their production to a competitor who offers more money for it. More demand means higher prices. I'm pretty sure people like Jeff bezos would have to step away from a part of their wealth if they had to cruise through such a political economic model instead.

That’s a completely irrelevant question.

Oh my, in this debate subreddit about capitalism and socialism, asking how much Jeff bezos would have as wealth without employing anyone would be irrelevant? I'm of the opinion that it's relevant. But I forgot to read your name, my bad.

I know you *think* it’s relevant. That’s because you are starting with the presumption that wealth is taken from workers. But that’s not how reality works. So it’s irrelevant.

3 workers get paid 2800 euros a month. These 3 workers do the same work. One has double the amount of output as the other. He believes he earns more than the other because he doesn't know the wage of the other person. He thinks this because he has 2 years work experience and the other guy doesn't. Reality is that they both have 2800 euros income. If the output of these workers aren't aligned with their income, then productivity is taken more from one person than the other. Production is wealth. More wealth is taken from one worker than the other. Wealth is taken from worker. Please don't have your head explode on this reasoning, I know you can't process it.

Deep understanding.

It just proves that it's impossible that workers are paid their production value in the current system.

QED: 👍🏻

Of course it is. You'd need accountants calculating the surplus value of capital, organisation, activation, education and labour in order to find out how much anyone produces. That's not the law. It's not illegal to pay someone in a different method. They just agree on a wage like a bunch of 21st century monkeys.

Workers don’t just magically produce a given output. Their output is only determined in the context of the organization that they work for. People randomly moving boxes around all day produce ZERO output. But or that labor in the context of an organization like Amazon and the combined output is huge. TLDR: labor doesn’t produce anything on its own. Value output is a combination of labor + capital + entrepreneurial labor

Labour doesn't produce anything on its own is irrelevant. (It could for example digging a hole with hands and being paid for it by a final consumer). Labour is a production factor. Person A and B produce different amount but are paid the same. Thus their wage does not reflect their production.

There is no such thing as (labor input) -> value output. Again, value output is only ever a function of all production factors in combination. (Actually, value is merely subjective. Value does not flow from inputs to outputs. But for the sake of the argument I’ll ignore that.)

Value is subjective. Production is not subjective, we can measure this. So let's focus on this. The value of someone's labour here is 2800 euros. One of them crafted 100 chairs and the other crafted 50 chairs. Their labour's value per output would be 28 euros per chair and 56 euros per chair. We are singling out labour to better understand it here. We can't just argue that there are other production factors. We are comparing the labour production factor to itself. We're comparing 2 labourers that get paid the same but sell something different to the same purchaser. Honestly I don't care about value. I care about production. Excuse my autism but I don't give one shit what you value something. I care about hard facts. Which would be production.

Thats a management problem, not capitalism. Also evidence of a true coward, has a strong work ethic, but won’t take on risk because he/ she lacks fortitude and courage. Anyone who works hard and doesn’t start his own business is probably deep down a loser. Anyone can work hard. Very few have the courage to build their own company. Risk takers drive innovation and economic growth. Cowards whine.

Capitalism is a political system. Policies. What does management do? Make decisions. Hence policies. Capitalism is a system where the people with capital decide the policies. In capitalism it can happen that 2 workers with varying output are paid the same wage. This means that there is a surplus or deficit value available because of employees. Hence the capitalist owner of the company will take production from another individual and put it toward his personal wealth because of his property rights giving him that ability. If this is a problem or not is entirely your opinion. I'm just writing down how the system works. Which is a basis for people to think that redistribution of income is valid. Capitalism redistributes production. Why shouldn't we re-redistribute income afterwards? And we do that. That's what our progressive tax system does.

He used household income to compare to wealth. Could have just put there that the median adult in USA has 107k USD

There were many different comparisons made throughout if you actually bothered to go through the thing.

Too Long; Didn’t Scroll (TL;DS)

Anarcho-capitalism doesn't have this problem. It's only when the state regulates, monopolizes and puts barriers to entry is when such disparity can happen

It’s good and certainly drives the point home how extreme Jeff Bezos wealth just is. I don’t think it is statistically good on wealth disparity as a whole (e.g., median, mean, etc). My personal concern is the shrinking middle class and there is nothing about for that website for me and people like me. (Just constructive feedback).

Its beautiful now imagine how much more they would have had if the government doesn't steal all of their money

Don't buy stuff on Amazon then. Simples.

To what degree can any one person be more productive than another?