My problem with his solution is that it lacks two key components of an implementable design, better incentives and a competitive advantage. As a result, you'd seemingly need an authoritarian government to force these types of changes, which has the potential to cause greater harm than the problem it's fixing.
Incentives - While such a system seems better for workers, it doesn't show any benefit for entrepreneurs or investors. Why would anyone start such a business if they lose control almost immediately? What is the incentive for investment if it doesn't come with the potential for a return?
Competitive Advantage - The reason you'd need an authoritarian government is because anyone using a traditional ownership model would have an advantage against these types of companies. As we've seen in cooperatives, one-person-one-vote creates freerider and horizon problems, and the pressure to form smaller firms would eliminate the economies of scale that many firms today enjoy.
This feels more like a political solution, and seems liable to succumb to predictable economic behaviors.
Indeed there s no self-reflection on the viability of the supposed "plan". Yet again, this is the same guy who was supposedly planning to counter the ECB's demands by setting up a guerilla currency through blockchains and I-owe-Us.
> Indeed there s no self-reflection on the viability of the supposed "plan".
Perhaps the viability is examined in the book, which is mentioned within the article title?
> Yet again, this is the same guy who was supposedly planning to counter the ECB's demands by setting up a guerilla currency through blockchains and I-owe-Us.
"Supposedly" as in conspiracy theories backed by thin air?
I think some form of democratic socialism is clearly the way forward. We can see what has happened in the unregulated capitalist countries like USA and UK. Poverty levels are way higher than they should be, very poor response to Covid, just insane levels of wealth inequality.
I find Varoufakis to be dead-on in his critique, but would often like more focus on many possible post-capitalisms.
The failures of ΣΥΡΙΖΑ were many, and it is easy to simply call them hopelessly naive (from one side) or abject sellouts (from the other) - and there is no doubt Greece was in a hole partially (only partially) of its own making with no good way forward. And yes, he has a bit of "I'm the most important rockstar in the room energy" but so do a bunch of VCs and founders.
The idea of moving towards market socialism with universal income and using central banking as a mechanism to reduce inequality is new-ish. There are many threads in his writings that are not about anti-capitalism, nor a return to previous types of socialisms, but of how to harness market forces to continue to generate progress while reducing their massively negative externalities.
In any case, his ideas are worth more discussion than his personality.
Yeah it s kind of weird, but even your own comment focuses on his personality. In reality, the article is empty of something to discuss about. It's longish, yet, where's the argument? please enlighten. The structure is, a litany of random facts interspersed with generous self-promotion. But you may be right, the fact that i couldn't pay my servers when he shut down the banks might have something to do with it.
To put things in perspective, imagine if Elizabeth Holmes was writing in the Guardian about the tyrrany of Big Pharma.
> It's longish, yet, where's the argument? please enlighten.
I'm sorry but this really comes off as trolling. It's right there in the article. Everything after Suppose we had seized the 2008 moment... describes an alternative system that doesn't sound bad at all.
The answer to that takes longer than a short newspaper article, which is probably why he wrote a whole book about it. I assume the answers you seek are in there.
Totally meta and OT but at the moment almost half the comments of this page are greyed out. It shows how lively the debate is (or maybe it'll settle one way or another, idk).
I think the opposite is true. A lot of people expressing disagreement by trying to hide things they disagree with instead of rebutting them. I think the down arrow should be reserved for cases where you think they break "The Rules" (not the site rules, but your own judgment of good taste). But then again, maybe I am too lax in my judgment.
Often when one disagrees with positions one also thinks they're lazy and a waste of time to discuss. If somebody in the thread "X is a problem" posts "Why don't we just do Y?" but when you google "X" every article starts with "We can't just do Y, because...," just downvote.
This doesn't mean that doing "Y" isn't the answer, it means that if you're going to bring "Y" up, bring up all of the best arguments against "Y" that you already know first. Otherwise, you're just throwing out a low-effort troll tempting some good neighbor to spend a half-hour crafting an elaborate response for you; one ultimately unnecessary for anyone who has interest enough in the subject to google "X" and read the first hit.
Your particular comment has probably been posted thousands of times, but HN isn't organized in a way that makes them easy to find.
Deservedly so. Most (if not all) of those comments are ad hominems and doesn't address the proposed system in the article at all. In fact, there is no evidence those commentors have even read the article. One of them actually complains about how photogenic he is!
Not really. Up until this morning, my comment had a positive number of votes; it is now very gray. It was not an ad hominem attack. It was a critique of the author's value more than his proposed policies, but I certainly read the article.
I wasn't really talking about your comment, which is probably the only non-ad hominem gray comment so far. As for why you might be getting downvotes, I'd guess that "any system that limits how rich I can be is bad" is very disagreeable for most people and the voting reflects that.
Well, I didn't say that explicitly, but I'd definitely agree with that. I'm definitely okay if removing corruption inherently limits the amount of wealth one can acquire, but a system that explicitly does that is antithetical to the value of non-aggression and is a tremendous violation of property rights.
Nevertheless, my objection was to the use of "voting as disagreement". That's what comments are for.
> Nevertheless, my objection was to the use of "voting as disagreement".
Oh, well that's a long lost fight. No matter how platform holders define a downvote, it has always meant I don't like this and there is too much inertia to change it.
I think people are too gentle with this guy in this thread. He really does not deserve any of the attention that he gets and he desperately seeks. When he was in power he caused major damage, and as part of the current opposition he is basically a clown, looking for opportunities to get some more attention saying silly things. And since even in Greece he tends to get ignored (even by journalists who used to enjoy making fun of him), he is seeking for attention abroad. Like other commenters say, he raises some interesting issues about the society and then he proposes solutions that are at the same depth of political thought as discussions in a party (of the wild ones, with drugs and alcohol). He became important, when he was appointed as the minister of finance by the populist prime minister of a populist government, which came to power because people were really angry about the economic crisis. The prime minister, simply did not know much, he did not even speak english (he is still learning), or held any job before being a prime minister (yeah, Greek politics broke through the floor), but he finally realized his grave mistake and kicked him out, but not before capital controls were imposed in the country. Those capital controls were largely because of his useless role in the debt relief negotiations where he was basically avoiding to take any action or talking seriously to anyone, hoping that with this vague attitude (by the way, he termed his “creative vagueness” and he is proud of it, I am not making this up) the biggest leaders in europe will just bend the knee in fear of vague threats. He loves attention and he wants to be a sensation, which is not what you want from the guy who can kill the banks overnight (but admittedly less than your pilot or your surgeon). Some people that may not know him, may project on his image their own frustrations about life, politics or the economy. Maybe it is understandable, he is relatively photogenic and expresses himself with complete sentences (with verbs and nouns and propositions and all). But, really, we can all project our frustrations to people of higher quality, pretty please?
I don't think name calling the EU as bullies advances anything. It is unsubstantiated and sounds like political speak and click-bait.
The problem of unsustainable debts of EU countries is complex. Debts cannot be fully forgotten as this sets an unsustainable precedent. Full austerity isn't sustainable either. Any reasonable solution will be nuanced.
By the way the same issue will arise soon enough to another EU country or to some US state. Will the US feds be bullies by telling states their debts cannot be forgotten?
> I don't think name calling the EU as bullies advances anything.
That might be true, but if 50% of what he said about his interactions with EU officials is true 'bullies' is kind way of describing reality. Greece was blackmailed, plain and simple.
Parent is presenting the current common view of him in his country: that he 's a huge fraud
As of your opinion, seriously? you think his childish antics amount to "stnading up to bullies?". He was gambling with millions of fortunes. But that's easy to forget from afar and it looks good on film. In general, it would be nice if international audiences don't enable this guy -- The Left in greece is having another identiy crisis, and i'd hate to see someone like him taking the reins , cause then the future becomes very deterministic.
I have read his book and if even 10% of his interactions with the EU are truthful then bullies is accurate and he was completely in the right not to accept such disgusting terms.
Greece has never recovered from the deal they signed after kicking him out.
Of course it is an opinion, just like any other comment. But the things I write about his background is a pretty common opinion which does have some evidence. He him self released audio of the euromeetings where he acts like an observer, in order to accuse the european leaders of ignoring him. Imagine the attitude of someone who goes to negotiate, while filming in order to show that the negotiations failed and it was not his fault. Which means he was intending for the negotiations to fail. The head of the comisión of the time said that he was basically not participating in the negotiations and he talked he would give long talks about nothing. He was eventually fired by the Greek prime minister, when things got really dangerous. There are articles about what he says and what he writes in Greece, and well, maybe it is my opinion that he talks bulshit, the people in power ignore him and he acts as if he is some kind anti-hero. He was playing games and bluffs, hoping that he does not need to do anything since he believed that the european union would do anything to save Greece in order to save the euro. So he was bluffing, vaguely obviously, that he does not mind to take Greece out of the EU (later it was found that he was preparing a home made currency, like home made beer, at that level). Then it turned out that the Germans were fond of the idea, and they were considering to propose a temporary (aka permanent) grexit for a couple of years. This is public info by the way, even if you believe half of these things, I see very little reason to praise this guy. I mean there are other people who stand against the system and win fights against it, in their minds, in their couches, but we don’t go and praise them, do we? Sorry, I do apologize, speaking about this guy, I just cannot not be sarcastic, he just brings this to people.
His opinions sound pretty sound to me. Problem with the EU was already decided to hit Greece with big austerity which did big damage to the Greek public.
Your rant on the other hand seem not very much more than an argumentum ad hominem.
Agreed. A smart, pragmatic economist pilloried for trying to rescue a country strip mined by vampiric corporatists doesn't make any sense except perhaps when someone had an agenda to shovel and/or is tribally against exploring some ideas because the current order works for them.
Greece was indirectly forced to accept a poor deal by capitalists because of how they would have suffered if Greece refused and the german & french banks collapsed.
The ECB was under pressure from it's largest economies to give Greece a poor deal.
I have read his account (Adults in the room) and if even 10% of the behaviour of the EU negotiators is true (I have seen evidence to suggest it) then he is absolutely in the right to show how unwilling they were to negotiate. If you haven’t read that, then it’s worth reading. The home grown currency was a good idea that would have reduced EU leverage.
The EU presented a deal that was unsustainable to Greece but that prevented french and German banks from collapsing and refused to negotiate an inch.
I know who was in the wrong in that situation, and it wasn’t him.
I'm from Greece and I already did my research on Mr Varoufakis. He's surrounded by his big ego and suffer from narcissism, I would declare him nothing but a book seller IMHO. He's selling himself and considered a dangerous person.
I appreciate his direction and goals but whenever he speaks all I hear is sophisticated noise.
Now he's very educated .. but I still can't extract any substance out of what he says. I'm probably to blame but I feel there's a pattern of people inviting him to talk without understanding what he says (just like me) but having a position of intellectual authority and noble goals it keeps going.
Your narrative really doesn't sound real, and your argument of "ignore them!" comes across to me an attempt to psychologically bias other readers who are even less knowledgeable.
Yiannis is like those guys who seek to have a photo with every celebrity on the red carpet. You can count the parade of famous names in this article (or any of his articles), as well as the pronouns "I", "We", "Me". Maybe he thinks he will win personal points by osmosis. In this article he fashions himself as some kind of hero left activist by listing a parade of platitudes, but he barely registers as a leftist in his country (in Greece the left has a special historical significance due to its role in the Greek resistance and the ensuing civil war -- his father was one of them). He also fashions himself as a minister of finance, but he had literally nothing to show for his short 6-month tenure (apart from a whole night of arguing with the eurogroup). That whole show he puts on, it kind of works with the media, as he obviously gets invited a lot, but in his talks and writings one can barely understand "what the hell he s on about".
This obviously sounds like an ad hominem, but it's really hard to distinguish the writing from the writer when it comes to his articles (which are everywhere, apparently). In fact this is common in his writings, and his articles consistently attract this kind of criticism.
- i didn't say i disagree. in fact i find no argument (except from the fairytale part that really isnt worth discussing) (PS @ameetgaitonde sums it up pretty nicely, really nothing more to say)
- The supposed recap of recent history, full with affectionate dimunitives like maggie. It's just bad writing
- Again, everything. I ve read a lot. Can you point one article that has an actual point? His articles are the GPT-3 of economics.
And i mean, its not just me, none of the comments here are about the text. Perhaps because theres nothing to talk about there.
Just because he spoke to Noam Chomsky, he does not make HIM Noam Chomsky. We are talking about someone whose actions have been in public view for a year and a half. Read about what the other side says about him to have a more balanced opinion.
I also think that that Varoufakis likes to give speeches, and that's about it.
In his long rants, there occasionally appears an interesting hypothesis, but this might be due to chance. And it is not followed up upon with any clear reasoning, but mostly with overly self-confident blather.
Fair enough, this article of his in the Guardian is a more polished piece.
Agreed. I read the guy's autobiography and he was pretty big on excuses. He can continue sniping from the sidelines but he is an economic pundit who got the chance to apply his big ideas to run a country. He failed and was fired by his colleagues. If he's not going to re-think his ideas or himself after that, he's all ego.
In which way he crashed Greece? I'm not knowledgeable on this enough and would like to know more in details. I thought that the situation in Greece prior to him being instantiated as MoF (for a rather brief period of time) was not necessarily on a good track.
By suggesting that a road not taken should be taken, he's committed the sin of being a possible source of regret. Without him, Greece could just pretend their situation since is due to the weather.
If you're an ideologue, you can somehow twist that regret into blaming him for German banks making massive loans to Greece to pay for things like military equipment that they didn't need, and the inability of Greece's currency to adjust in order to keep this from happening. That's a lot accomplished for an economist who was mostly ignored, except by the voters who his party ultimately ignored.
That's a fair question. This is a long and semi boring answer but I think it's accurate. I shouldn't have used the word "crashed", a more nuanced description would have been "made the crash much worse, longer and more painful for people leading to excess deaths and a great deal of suffering for no actual gain". But that's not as piffy.
Background:
Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain all spent more than they took in in taxes after they joined the euro. Greece was especially bad, tax evasion was endemic, public sector workers all retired at 50 etc.
These countries kept borrowing and borrowing. Until the credit crunch happened (when the sub prime mortgage bubble burst in the US). When that happened there was suddenly a lot less cash available AND lenders got quite risk averse. So suddenly (it took about a year I think) all 5 countries had difficulty borrowing.
When a country can't borrow, it had a few options: it can cut expenses, it can raise taxes or it can print money. Since the euro came in, no one in it can just print money. So these countries all needed to cut a lot of spending and raise a lot of taxes to replace their borrowing.
The other option is to default on the debt. But that's a double edged sword because it saves you interest payments but it also means you can't borrow at all. So then you need to completely balance your books overnight.
For comparison, Greece in 2009 was borrowing about 30% of its gdp per year. Thats about 60% of its tax base. So it would need to either halve its spending or more than double its taxes to close this gap. Imagine if you earned 40k a year, but then borrowed another 60k and spent 100k a year. Huge problem right?
At the same time, here in the UK, we were implimenting an austerity program because although we were a lot better positioned than Greece et al, we didn't ever want to slip even 10% toward where they were.
But remember, Greece got itself in this position by constantly lowering taxes and increasing spending for decades. No one made them do that. Some countries have dictators waste/steal money. Some have natural disasters like earthquakes that cause a sudden issue. Greece has no such excuse.
Greece was in the worst position but Italy wasn't far behind. Spain wasn't far behind them etc. And these countries were sort of linked together: Italian banks owned Greek debt, so if Greece defaulted, Italian banks would need a bailout and the Italian government would need to borrow to do that which it couldn't really do. So a Greek default would likely mean an Italian default and so on.
In order to make these unfortunate events less brutal, the IMF offered these countries loans. No one else would lend to them, and its that IMFs job: lender of last resort. But the IMF are strict, they won't just lend you money, they want to see how you'll cut costs and increase revenue and borrow less next year. They want it done and done quick. And that's understandable, you can't just keep lending someone money that they have no plan to repay right? And no one forces anyone to take these loans, they take them because its a better deal than not taking them and doing everything the IMF asked for plus more when you have no money at all...
The EU (really Germany under Merkel) stepped in, and said that they would part fund (a third roughly) the loans with the IMF if the IMF made the terms lighter. The IMF agreed and most countries were pleased. Ireland actually went further than the new terms because they wanted to get their act together and get back to economic growth asap.
To be clear here: the terms were tax increases and spending cuts. Spending cuts means reducing people pensions and spending less on schools and hospitals. It's not "nice", but you can't spend money you don't have. And Greece especially had some pretty corrupt programs (people were paid a 13th month, like a whole extra pay packet for no reason, state worker retirement age was 50 for many jobs, tax evasion was endemic).
That sort of sets the stage for what was going on in southern Europe.
Yanis Varoufakis's Part:
All the other countries grumbled but took their medicine, because they didn't have a better offer. Greece refused, because Varoufakis (and the government he wad part of) refused to accept reality. He gave long speeches calling the IMF the problem and talking about how people have a right to whatever they want for free. He even made off colour comments about the Nazis while in Berlin "negotiating" with Germany, who owed Greece nothing and were making a pretty selfless effort to spare Greece some pain. Sort of like slapping the firefighter trying to put out the fire in your house.
For about a year, it actually sort of worked. Greece were able to avoid actually cutting their spending or increasing revenue and Germany bailed them out, not because he was a genius at economics as he claimed, but because it was cheaper to loan (give) Greece another chunk of cash and keep them from defaulting than it was to bail out Italy and the others when Greece defaulted.
But after a year or so, Italy and the others had cut spending and upped taxes. They were recovering. And the risk of a Greek default no longer meant problems in other places. So Germany stopped writing cheques.
Then Greece had to enact harder, longer, more sudden austerity than it would have, because they could no longer extort Germany etc.
That austerity ultimately worked. But there was a lot more pain and it all took longer than it could have. All because Varoufakis was a popularist who ran around convincing people that Germany/The IMF/Capitalism was the problem instead of simply saying "we should live within our means". Doing so of course increased support for him and crazy right wing parties and there were a bunch of xenophobic incidents.
If he hadn't done that, if he'd done the opposite (like Ireland) then Greece would have had a much better time of it, exited austerity sooner and had less austerity in general.
That's what I meant by crashed Greece. He didn't cause the core long term problem. But he, personally, made it much worse and made it last longer.
On a personal note, I am a leftist. I really believe in markets working for people not the other way around. But to make that work, countries need to be self disciplined, spend within our means and make hard choices. Varoufakis is exactly the opposite of that: loud and rude and short termist and popularist. He and people like him are the reason we can't have more social programs and less inequality. That's my personal dislike of him. He's wrong and dangerous, but he's confident and everything he says sounds easy, so people believe it. Then you end up in turbo austerity with the IMF running your budget. I think he falls under that rule that it "exponentially more time to refute bullshit that to produce it". Thanks for reading.
I would not consider your view of the problem as "leftist". I'm not challenging your self-designation, but the way you present the situation.
In my opinion, there are a few points that are dubious in this analysis:
- A country is not like a person. It doesn't make any sense to compare the situation of a state to that of an individual.
- Different countries are engaged in trade together. If one, say Germany, has commercial surplus, it is because others buy its production. Hence, all countries can't produce like Germany : who is going to buy everything?
- According to mainstream economic doctrine (Keynes), cutting government spendings does not lead to growth especially amidst a crisis, whereas you have an alternative that does create growth and does not condemn people to starvation. This is done instead by increasing the spendings in the right way.
- Various officials have falsified economic documents in order for Greece to enter the Eurozone (and was helped by Goldman Sachs [0], for example). Why should people suffer from acts of this nature ?
I am so sick to death with the statement that "capitalism isn't working." We don't live in a capitalist economy, we live in a corporatist economy.
Almost all the negative aspects of this current economic climate come down to:
[1] Government misspending/policy at the behests of 'special interests' and
[2] Monopolies that go untouched.
When you realize that the government creates 9/10 monopolies, and that the remaining aspect of the equation is both fiscal corruption (at worst) or incompetence (at best), you realize that more government (socialism - event 'democratic') IS NOT the answer.
True capitalism is responsible for much of the innovations, competition and successes of the 20th & 21st centuries. Sure there are aspects that it needs to answer for, and be held to account for - but that should be/is baked into the capitalist model.
I believe you're right, but you must realize that your statement is similar to that some communists make: "real communism/capitalism/whateverism has never been tried yet," i.e. the No True Scotsman fallacy. The fair question to be asked is, "How can we restrict the state to prevent bastardizing capitalism and falling prey to corruption?" Capitalism seems to be much more resilient to it than communism, but we need to figure out how to further strengthen the state against this, because it's clearly slowly failing.
The problem here is that too many of the detractors of socialism only recognizes a single version of it, a.k.a USSR and its off-spring. It doesn't matter how much democratic socialists were against it (and persecuted by it) at its inception, during its reign, and after its collapse.
What example do you see of Socialism that started out democratic and still went down in misery?
This implies a capitalism that somehow exists outside corporatism - what many contemporary leftists argue in various ways - from Graeber to Pikety to Varoufakis is that these distorting forces have been baked into capitalism since the beginning in much the same way that authoritarianism was baked into the attempt at communism.
That is - there are market-based socioeconomic systems and socialist economic systems out there waiting to be experimented with and built that could avoid these things, but they aren't capitalism or communism, they are something different.
(also by the by, you can accept a Marxist critique of capitalism without accepting a Marxist blueprint for the solution. The (very) basic premise that capitalism is a machine for accumulating power in ways that allow one to distort the market simply because of the way that return on capital works, and the results of focusing on maximizing extracting value from human labor is pretty straightforward and, in my mind, pretty easy to demonstrate empirically at this point.
I see no reason at all why corporatist, crony, regulatory capture etc Capitalism isn't the natural outcome of capitalist capital accumulation (and thus power). The incentives to pursue those things seem completely logical to me.
Government funded research is responsible for much of the innovations, competition and successes of the 20th & 21st centuries.
Let's be honest: Every single company which is dependent on the internet has the govt to thank for their success. There's just no way that the internet would've been a success without govts.
I do agree that we live in a "corporatist economy" (neo-feudalist more like it) though and I agree that [1] and [2] are issues.
I believe that the solution is more democracy, more equality, and more socialism.
He's definitely right about problems. The state has too much power, and it abuses it to curtail the liberties of its citizens and enforce a crony-capitalist structure. But his solutions are wrong, and furthermore, beyond small critiques of his policies, I take broad issue with his vision. The world which he imagines - a world in which everyone is more or less equal, with some a little richer but not too much so, is not one in which I want to live. He also seems to enumerate the many wrongs of state force, then conveniently omit the sort of force that would be necessary to seize all this property. He mentions that all land would be held in common - this wouldn't just be taking the wealth of a few billionaires and giving everyone a few extra bucks. I am glad we do not live in such as society, and hope America will never head in such a direction.
Edit: I cannot reply to comments on this thread for some reason, so I will reply to 'uxcolumbo's response here. You ask why, say, $100m is not enough. Perhaps it is - it's probably enough for most of the things I could think to do, though not all. That said, the article implies that very rich people would have much less than $100m. And finally, I don't believe it's moral to cap wealth. It's a poor attempt to address the symptom rather than the disease - taking away their wealth won't fix it. Perhaps under a government with less corruption it would be difficult or impossible to amass the levels of wealth we see today, and I'd have no issues with that occurring under those circumstances.
Even just assets in general or access to resources.
He makes a good point about equality in merit but people often misread the scales on what a meritocracy should be.
It's not what you do produce, it's what you can produce. And in this egalitarian world, people who need access to resources should not have to hurdle to get them.
> Do we need billionaires for our society to function? Is having 100,000,000 USD not enough?
Nobody knows. Maybe yes. Maybe no.
Notice that billionaires can't spend all their money on themselves. They can't exactly buy a billion dollars worth of cheese and eat it all. They can sink whatever they like in to property but realistically they probably only spend a few million dollars on property and the vast bulk of their wealth goes in to directing the economy via shares and real estate.
So if all the billions of dollars was removed from the billionaires they will experience a very modest (potentially no) change in quality of life and there will be far reaching economic consequences because the control structure was just reworked. It is totally unclear if it would be a win or a loss for most people.
> Can you provide more details why you don’t want to live in a world where everyone is more or less equal?
Because every time someone tries this to create a world like this... it ends up a living nightmare. Creating equality usually ends up involving taking away freedom and oppressing people.
Maybe it's inherently not such a hot idea for some social reason we don't yet fully understand?
I don't know but I'm not sure we should keep trying as millions of people end up dead every time someone gives it another whirl.
In particular, you can only create a world where everyone is equal by taking away the freedom to not be equal.
Now, if we want to take away the "freedom" to be not equal on the downside, I'm not sure that I have much problem with that. If people aren't "free" to live in abject poverty, to have to choose between there medicines and their food, to not have air conditioning in summer or heat in winter... yeah, I don't have a problem with removing that "freedom".
But I have a problem with removing the freedom to be unequal on the upside. If I want to have more than you, and I can get it by producing more than you... why not? If I can't get rewarded for producing more, I probably won't produce more. That leaves less for everyone. Who does that help?
Thus those who try to prevent inequality on the upside remove freedom, and make everyone worse off. Worse off in two ways. First, society doesn't get the extra that some people would have been motivated to produce. And second, they made everyone less free.
Less free plus less stuff? Sure, sign me up... not.
But that's not how any of it works to begin with. Inequality isn't caused because people produce proportionally more or less. The very wealthy generally own property that has appreciated in value, or have inherited it. Among working people, the differences fundamentally come from labor markets, not our productivity. An engineer might make more or less than someone else on their team, but they both make multitudes more than the people assembling beams for an apartment building.
You should totally enjoy the freedom to be a productive member of society, that's not where inequality originates.
> An engineer might make more or less than someone else on their team, but they both make multitudes more than the people assembling beams for an apartment building.
That is, an engineer produces more of what society values than an assembler does.
And why does society value it more? Scarcity. More people can assemble beams than can do solid engineering.
You can say that society isn't valuing the right things. That might be a defensible position. But in general, attempts to "fix" that problem run into the problem that the fixers don't know enough. The results are sub-optimal - not just theoretically, but in very concrete ways.
But even if you put everyone on roughly equivalent wages... the people who enter YC aren't doing it because the wages are higher. They're trying, with a very small number of people, to build something useful to many people. That's productivity. Why do they do it? Somewhat because they believe in what they're trying to do, but also because they see it as a chance to make a lot of money. They're not doing it by owning property. They're not inheriting it. They're making it by building something.
Now, are you going to let them become inequal? Or not?
> If I want to have more than you, and I can get it by [exploiting labour and existing material resources]... why not?
>If I can't get rewarded for [exploiting labour and material resources], I probably won't [exploit labour and material resources].
>First, society doesn't get the extra that some people would have been motivated to produce.
"Society" doesn't get that extra anyway, if we are talking about billionaires keeping hold of an 11-figure income. The same labour and material resources exist in the world either way (perhaps moreso, if they are not used up unsustainably to the point of scarcity); the "extra" only accrues to the person doing the exploiting.
> The world which he imagines... with some a little richer but not too much so, is not one in which I want to live.
He specifically says people will not be equally remunerated in the article; this whole thread is basically attacking a straw man of some other position that he is not himself advancing.
>Creating equality usually ends up involving taking away freedom and oppressing people.
This is hyperbolic and false.
The first and most relevant example that I can think of in the West is the Civil Rights Movement. People were more equal following this. (And, in wealth terms, the US has become less equal again since then).
What freedoms did that take away; what oppression did it create; how many millions died?
You're talking about making people politically and legally equal. But attempts to make people economically equal are what the rest of us are discussing here. Your example of the Civil Rights movement is therefore rather irrelevant.
Attempts to make people economically more equal can succeed, if they are partial and gradual. Attempts to do so radically and quickly seems, historically, to quite often result in oppression and disaster.
I don't think anyone expressed an opinion on whether more democracy was a good thing or not? I think democracy is the best approach we have. And nobody mentioned Stalinism either. Your comment seems off-topic.
We're not talking about socialism, or Stalinism. You're reading words that we didn't use. And I didn't say there's anything wrong with socialism - I didn't even mention it! I live in a country with many socialist policies such as socialised healthcare. It's almost universally supported here. But I don't think most people here would want to try to force everyone to be more-or-less equal.
Why are you asking me to explain things I didn't say?
> What is this sentence referring
It's referring to people trying to forcibly make everyone more-or-less equal.
You're asking me why I'm projecting Stalinism... but you brought up Stalinism, not me. If you think that matches Stalinism then that's something you've introduced to the conversation, not me. People opposed to Stalinism like Trotskyists were also in favour of dictatorship and violently forced equality. Stalin didn't have a monopoly on demonstrably shit ideas for oppressively and violently reshaping society.
Finally. So it's just about the USSR and its off-springs as I thought.
Deny? I'm not denying anything, I'm saying that you're projecting those things onto people with fundamentally different ideas, a.k.a democratic ideas, not totalitarian.
People aren't arguing for democratic ideas though, they're arguing to enforce more-or-less equality. People don't try to achieve that through democracy. They seem to pretty much inevitably decide that 'just to get started it's ok to force it because the ends justify the means...' then before you know it - oppression and totalitarianism.
It's played out like this again and again and again.
> It's hard to reply to these vague generalizations.
Then stop trying if you find it too hard to contribute a serious comment!
You're asking me what I'm alluding to and what I'm projecting and asking me to explain things I haven't said and other backwards and inside-out things, rather than responding to the actual arguments I'm making myself. Seems like you're bringing some kind of baggage to the discussion that I'm not party to.
You're just being abusive now. I'm not sure why you feel the need to resort to this kind of language.
The original question was 'what’s wrong with trying to force everyone to be financially more or less equal'. What’s wrong with it is every time someone tries this it ends up hell on earth.
That’s it. That’s the whole point. No implications, no allusions.
If that's not good enough for you, sorry nothing I can do about that. Maybe move on?
Ultimately this is only because such systems are forced to take on responsibility that our current system completely ignores. Public opinion seems to be that if you can't do something well, it is better to not bother.
The current system of capitalism would also be described by some as a "living nightmare". The poorest would feel that they have little freedom, and a great deal of oppression. And while many millions will die under such a system, they will not be considered to have died because of the system, because the system is cleverly described as hands-off: they simply died, and it was unavoidable. Whereas any step towards socialism requires being more hands-on - and while a lack of policy is just as effective as a lacking policy, the second is somehow worse.
> Ultimately this is only because such systems are forced to take on responsibility that our current system completely ignores.
Perhaps. But there are too many examples of societies that, when they decided to take on that responsibility, were unequipped to do so without becoming horribly oppressive. And not being oppressive is part of their responsibility, too...
Yes this is all true the current system is also bad, but I think anytime someone tries to go in and fix it radically enough to have everyone more-or-less equal it's an absolute shit-show, and seems to open some kind of hell-gate of deliberate oppression, which yes I do actually think is somehow morally worse than apathetic oppression.
For all the complex and serious problems the US has, I think it's still generally a stable and safe place with plenty of opportunity and nice people. I'd feel safer there than many other historical places that had aimed more aggressively at more-or-less equal societies. Few people seem to risk their lives to defect from the US. And they wouldn't even have to because the US lets you leave!
> I'd feel safer there than many other historical places that had aimed more aggressively at more-or-less equal societies.
...but almost every developed country with greater social safety nets and less inequality performs above the US on all measures of “safety,” whether you’re talking about actual violence or more abstract things like infant mortality. How do you square that material reality with the current state of the US?
I think in general moving towards allowing people to achieve equality themselves is good. I think going hell-bent on more-of-less-equal starts to bring out the monsters in people.
I’m sorry to belabor the point, but the US fails wildly on this metric as well. Voter suppression, gerrymandering and other anti-democratic tactics are widespread, the two party systems limits democratic choice to very narrow, right-leaning bounds, far less than that available in other representative democracies. Protests from the left are almost uniformly met with violence. By what measure in the US is one allowed to “achieve equality”? Even if we consider the advancement of civil rights, the average material conditions for the poor and most minority groups have been on the decline for decades. Likewise, the number of incarcerated people in the US far surpasses explicitly authoritarian regimes like China.
> Do we need billionaires for our society to function?
I think so.
Since antiquity, the advantages and disadvantages of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy have been mooted. The Founding Fathers vested the efficiency of monarchy in the executive and its long-term orientation in the Supreme Court.
But there is unique strength in the union of long-term orientation and efficiency. It enables a portfolio of moonshots. Musk, Ford, Edison, Bezos and Gates each pursued long-term non-commercial (or semi-commercial) projects that benefited the public. The government could have done some of these things. But it didn’t. And it couldn’t have done all—there isn’t enough political bandwidth.
As long as that money doesn’t turn into military power, and its effects on our politics are checked, the existence of billionaires is a net positive.
There is a certain irony in you describing what billionaires have done but govt has not as "moon shots".
You really have no proof that the govt could not have done these things, especially as govts has funded a lot of technology which has benefitted industry enormously (DARPANET, GPS, essential parts of Wi-fi).
Could you please account for all of the negatives that billionaires have caused and show us your arithmetic for how they come out as net positive.
>Since antiquity, the advantages and disadvantages of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy have been mooted.
If we want a working democracy, voters should care. Currently a lot of them don't, and thus stay uninformed, or take the elections as a sports event where they need to take a side and root.
Incentives - While such a system seems better for workers, it doesn't show any benefit for entrepreneurs or investors. Why would anyone start such a business if they lose control almost immediately? What is the incentive for investment if it doesn't come with the potential for a return?
Competitive Advantage - The reason you'd need an authoritarian government is because anyone using a traditional ownership model would have an advantage against these types of companies. As we've seen in cooperatives, one-person-one-vote creates freerider and horizon problems, and the pressure to form smaller firms would eliminate the economies of scale that many firms today enjoy.
This feels more like a political solution, and seems liable to succumb to predictable economic behaviors.