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I'm not clear what the problem is. Do you feel that it's just viscerally unfair that some people need to work and some people don't? That people who have wealth should have it confiscated until they're in a position of needing to work again? I promise, I'm not being deliberately obtuse here. Designing policies with the goal of enabling anyone willing to work to have a reasonably decent life seems like a good starting point to me, but that doesn't suggest that there wouldn't be or shouldn't be capital-holders that have arrived at a position where personal labor is no longer necessary for them to draw their living. If the problem is the unsustainability of the rate of return on capital, tweaking some of the more audacious tax policies seems like a plausible approach, but I would need to know what exactly we're trying to fix and what the goal is before really undertaking a discussion of where to go.
In the most pithy form - is retirement just plain immoral?
How could you deny that this is viscerally unfair? Seems the most blatant example ever. Not that we know how to fix the problem, but damn it's unfair as hell.
So what about it is unfair?
Come to think of it what is your understanding of fairness here?
Fairness is an individual having to put into society before taking out and enjoying themselves. At least until we have a state of affairs where that can be an individual choice.
It's unfair that a rich scion can simply coast off the work of others and never have to struggle or put in, while the vast majority strain and buckle under their responsibilities.
So fairness in this sense is only submission and dependence to a given social group?
What of the Randian argument? What of the unfairness of society leeching on the gifted?
What of, in this conception, the unfairness of inequality between states? It is unfair in this sense that Western countries get to have the infrastructure built by their older generations whilst the third world does not?
Not to fall into clichés but can you explain how this is not literally "from each according to their ability, to each according to his needs" state socialism?
The socialists have a strong point. I doubt they’d be so popular otherwise.
The Randian argument is hogwash to me. Objectivism and objectivity as a whole are flawed viewpoints. Religious systems are the only way we can make sense of the complexity of society. I’m simply arguing that the modern world has drastically decoupled wealth, power and status from actual virtue.
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It's unfair that a person can work all their life, save their assets, then get run over by a bus (or die of a heart attack) too. Doesn't mean there has to be some government solution to that.
We have driving laws and healthcare precisely as the government solution to those problems.
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The government should and does work to prevent people getting run over by buses. We fight against the arbitrariness of disease and ill health in pretty much every facet, as @self_made_human can attest.
Pretty much all of society in some sense is working towards making things more 'fair,' otherwise we are just in a state of nature with the mighty taking what they will from the rest.
I think you're assuming a lot here, many proponents of civilization and the escape from the state of nature believe in procedural fairness, and explicitly decry this sort of equalizing.
It's the whole giant gap between the French and English traditions of Liberalism. And a convincing argument can be made that they are inherently at odds because enacting cosmic justice is almost always procedurally unfair.
It depends on whether you value inherent human dignity more versus human work and discipline.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. Both value discipline highly, and dignity is an essentially empty word that just maps onto whatever moral framework we're using.
The dignity of Englishmen prohibits redistribution by the State. And French popular democracy's founding myth is one of pure discipline in the Bataillons.
I wager the difference is actually whether you believe in natural law (in the classic Aristotelian sense) or not. Thomas Sowell, who despite being partial had the benefit of having been on both sides, correctly identifies this in The Quest for Cosmic Justice.
Are we fit to reorder the universe or is that God's job?
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If pressed on it, I'll agree that it's unfair, but it's not a sentiment that I have a strong gut feeling on. My reason for asking isn't strong disagreement on the point, it's that I'm trying to get at where the sentiment that Something Must Be Done is coming from and whether it stems primarily from thinking about outcomes or mostly from a strong gut feeling that it sucks that Blake Vanderworth IV has a trust fund.
It's partially the gut feeling of rich scions getting to coast on unearned wealth. Underlying that is the fact, to my mind, that most of the rich do not actually benefit society. Our market is far from perfect in that way. Many make their fortunes off the backs of others, or by dumping horrid amounts of negative externality into the rest of society, simply because the externalities cannot easily be quantified.
Many see rich people and ascribe their wealth not to their intelligence or hard work or even luck but to the imposition of negative externalities on others... simply because the externalities cannot easily be quantified.
Again, there is nuance to be had here. Many rich people bust their ass and absolutely deserve the wealth that they have generated, from a cosmic sense. Then again, I tend to think that the way our society is set up is so rotten to its core that even the most 'beneficial' wealth generation will have tons of negative aspects. The most common of which is to destroy human connection, religion, generally the things which make life worth living.
It really depends on how you view the overarching modern capitalist societal structure. I'm not a Marxist by any means, and I think market economies are an incredible tool. But at this point they have ceased being a tool and become our master, for all intents and purposes.
If you look at a rich person and say "Hey, they must have gotten rich by imposing negative externalities on society, let's take their assets", then even if you theoretically admit the existence of rich people who "absolutely deserve the wealth that they have generated", that's not nuance, it's a cynical demand for leveling. If you're wearing a blindfold while searching for your virtuous rich man, you certainly don't want to find him.
I have never once said we should take rich people's assets, I'm not a Marxist or a redistributionist. However I can understand why so many are eager to paint me with that brush.
I'd simply like to raise awareness that wealth and money do not equal virtue, and in many cases are anti-correlated. Instead of redistributing wealth, I think a better path would be having a conversation about negative externalities of the market and trying to figure out how to price those in.
On top of that, I'd like to see a scaling back of certain areas like religion and the sacred from markets entirely, although I'll admit having both at once would be a difficult challenge.
You don't have to connect the dots yourself if you place the points and draw arrows.
I think this is well-understood; the lack of awareness is the other way around. That no, having wealth doesn't mean you committed mortal sins to obtain it. That inequality of wealth is not something that in itself demands solutions.
Externalities are almost by definition hard to measure, and it's very easy to put your finger on the scale by picking which ones to measure and assigning arbitrary values to them. And there's not much point in discussion when you've already decided they net out to "dumping horrid amounts of negative externality into the rest of society".
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I don't see how smart people working hard becoming rich not to have to work is unfair.
I think it's unfair, and that is me.
I didn't do anything to deserve a high enough IQ or a low compulsion to gamble or a lack of desire to alter my state of concious; that shit just happened to fall out that way.
If I sit here and say, "The cosmic hapenstance that alowes my pleasent life is fine and just" why can't someone say "the cosmic hapenstance of me shooting you in the head and taking you shit is also fine and just", bassicaly.
Because you actually do have control over whether you shoot someone in the head. The universe being deterministic doesn't change that.
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If you assume that 'becoming rich' automatically equals benefitting society and that there is no possible way to become rich while being a net negative on our world, then sure it's fair. Unfortunately our world is not set up that way.
No, I'm only assuming that the average rich person becomes rich in a way that is a net benefit to society.
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If you're retiring in your prime, maybe. More Boxer less Napoleon.
The path of least resistance for talented people is DINKing your way to FIRE at 40 and maybe getting a golden retriever or a couple of cats. Playing video games, smoking weed, phoning it in at your job (if you have to work) and taking a couple months of vacation a year.* I know an unfortunately large number of people who fall into this bin.
This is very much not the behavior we want to incentivize. We need people to do the hard work of having children and raising them well - or perhaps more realistically, decreasing the financial and social burden, but that's another story. We'd all be poorer if Elon Musk had spent his 20s/30s blitzed in Ibiza doing lines of coke off hookers, or whatever it is fun people do at raves. The American frontier wasn't tamed by childless, unemployed scions of wealthy families, good times create weak men, insert your preferred aphorism about rich, lazy fucks here.
*I'm not so tedious as to argue that vacation itself is immoral, but c'mon. Everyone should try to accomplish something worthwhile with their lives, everyone should see what their body is physically capable of in their prime and we need to cultivate a sense of ambition and civic responsibility.
I think the popular sentiment is that if Elon hadn't been around to ramp up Tesla, SpaceX, and whatever else he's dipping fingers in, some other capable person could have done the exact same thing. Because apparently profitable business ideas grow on trees, and just need to be plucked and driven to success.
I don't agree with the idea that Elon is that easily replaceable on the individual company level, and I don't think people grasp how insane it is for ONE GUY to be pushing this much wealth around in so many different companies, AND staying at least a step or two in front of his various competitors who ALSO have a lot of wealth to throw around.
It's the famous 'his engineers do all the work' argument, to which I respond 'why not just sack all of NASA's engineers and hire new ones'? If the effectiveness of a company is decided by the skills and efficiency of its rank and file employees, then it follows that NASA struggling to get back to the Moon is due to the incompetence of its workforce, not problems with leadership and management.
The above is silly, good engineers and researchers are necessary but not sufficient for top-tier, cost-efficient space capabilities.
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Absolutely. And as a reminder to those people who keep saying that Elon got his wealth handed to him by his parents and so what he has achieved isn't a big deal, the fact that he chose to do what he did rather than doing coke off hookers is a point in favour of him being someone to respect. You don't show character by working hard if the alternative is that you die to starvation, but you do show character if you work hard when the alternative is endless blackjack and hookers for the rest of your life.
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