Is income inequality unjust, and if so, where is the injustice?

PatrThom

PatrThom

mikerc said:
Are you a FTSE 100 CEO? Do you work 09:00 - 17:00 Monday to Friday? Did you go back to work after the New Year on Thursday 2nd Jan? If you answered "yes" to all of the above then congratulations your pay so far this year is greater than the average full time employee will be paid over the entirety of 2020.
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The following tweet's been going around since Fall of last year, and if it doesn't demonstrate the idea of "imbalance," I don't know what else would:


And then there's also this rather interesting thread on reddit:
Why should any American company ever act responsibly again?
Whats the point of good corporate governance and fiscal responsibility? The companies that leveraged themselves to the moon, did stock buybacks to hyper-inflate their stock price, live on constant debt instead of good balance sheets are now being bailed out by unlimited QE. Free money to cover your mistakes. Why would anyone run a good business ever again? Just cheat and scheme and get bailed out later.
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The comments are pretty rant-y (and Boeing shows up a lot), but there are other comments which are actually insightful.

--Patrick
 
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PatrThom

PatrThom

To continue pointing people to reddit threads:

Fed should pay every American more, let hedge funds and billionaires ‘get wiped out,’ says Social Capital CEO
Palihapitiya argued that rather [than] giving workers relatively small $1,200 checks, the U.S. would be better off giving everyone larger payments directly, and skip businesses entirely. “What we’ve done is disproportionately prop up poor-performing CEOs and boards, and you have to wash these people out,” he said.
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And in case you were wondering about the math, $2 trillion / US population = just over $6000/person.
Some good stuff in this thread as well, such as a link to the Velocity of money.

--Patrick
 
AshburnerX

AshburnerX

@Li3n said:
C'mon guys, it's just feudalism's turn again...
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I've already been reading stuff from Pro-Feudalism Right Libertarians. They're concerned the "Event" came sooner than they predicted and that they don't have the means to control their workers (mind control devices, electroshock collars, robot workforce, etc...) that they predicted would exist by now and might be held accountable for their actions by the mob if they try anything. It's some weird, chilling shit... there are a lot of very rich people with some very fucked up world views.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Ravenpoe said:
The what now?
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By the sound of it, people who believe some lives are worth significantly more than others, and that the rest are just downright expendable, possibly even considered as nothing more than livestock.

—Patrick
 
AshburnerX

AshburnerX

PatrThom said:
By the sound of it, people who believe some lives are worth significantly more than others, and that the rest are just downright expendable, possibly even considered as nothing more than livestock.

—Patrick
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Kinda? It's mostly hedge-fund managers believing some "Event" will destroy civilization as we know it and are making plans to basically escape it and lock the door behind them. It's basically a doomsday cult, but the religion is worship of the almighty dollar.

Here's an article that talks briefly about it, but I'll just quote the relevant bit.

After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.
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To paraphrase the article: these are people who see Humanity's free will as a bug and not a feature. They want to live like kings and are making plans not only to do it, but to force us to comply.
 
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PatrThom

PatrThom

AshburnerX said:
It's basically a doomsday cult, but the religion is worship of the almighty dollar.
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Money/Get back/I'm all right Jack/Keep your hands off of my stack
Money/It's a hit/Don't give me that do goody-good bullshit

--Patrick
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

AshburnerX said:
Kinda? It's mostly hedge-fund managers believing some "Event" will destroy civilization as we know it and are making plans to basically escape it and lock the door behind them. It's basically a doomsday cult, but the religion is worship of the almighty dollar.

Here's an article that talks briefly about it, but I'll just quote the relevant bit.



To paraphrase the article: these are people who see Humanity's free will as a bug and not a feature. They want to live like kings and are making plans not only to do it, but to force us to comply.
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Historically these are the people who eventually get their head cut off by an angry mob
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Dubyamn said:
Apparently the richest people have been making out like bandits while 60,000 of their fellow Americans die. And while in Bezos' case he fails to provide a safe working environment for his employees.
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Speaking of Bezos, there is an effective visualization of Bezos' wealth on GitHub called "1-pixel-wealth" that's been making the rounds recently. It does a good job of illustrating the inequity visually rather than via incomprehensible numbers. Towards the end it veers off into territory that even _I_ think smells a bit like L'Eau d'Wealth Envy, but I gotta say I agree completely with the overall message.

--Patrick
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

Nobody will ever accuse me of being a communist (I'm considered right wing scum by Belgian standards), but yes, this complete imbalance, which has grown enormously over the last 20-30 years, simply isn't reasonable or healthy anymore.
One main issue, of course, is defining wealth - and worthy causes. Let's consider a world where president Bernie does this...what stops a next generation Trump from doing the same simply to line his own pockets? What stops a next generation president Lenin from confiscating 80% of everything over $1 million?
It's definitely unequal and unjust - but that doesn't mean a solution is simple.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Bubble181 said:
what stops a next generation [this]? What stops a next generation [that]?
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What's supposed to stop them (besides having a dang conscience, that is!) is the constant specter hanging over them of being ousted when they screw up. By the People, by the Senate, by whatever. But unfortunately the ability of the People has been eroded via things like Gerrymandering, the Senate has chosen to sit on their hands while turning a blind eye (a convoluted posture if ever there was one), and the end result is what we've been seeing--lack of transparency, outright grift, rampant cronyism, the trampling of personal rights and segregation of "undesirables," and all that.

--Patrick
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Did we ever get resolution on my simple capitalism-except idea, where basically every year the person with the largest net worth is killed? The idea was a race to put as much into charitable giving as possible...
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

We did not, and it will never be implemented.
Because everyone voting on such a plan is going to vote "No," because they all think they are "temporarily inconvenienced" and will someday rise to be that person on top.

--Patrick
 
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