You’re entirely correct!
There’s a chart/article
(somewhere!)
that shows regular folks
donate a higher percentage of their
income to charity.
Perhaps due to the
“I’ve been there” recognition of
their current circumstances
Whereas the ultra-rich use
Accountants/lawyers to make sure
they get a tax break if they donate.
The Bible says (paraphrasing!)
“don’t Give to Get” (your name on a building, etc )
along with
'Unless one Gives sacrificially, it’s not counted"
(in God’s eyes).
Example being “The Widow’s Mite”, where
the widow gave ALL she had,
not her spare change.
I’ve always wondered why some folks
bother to “donate”
(supposedly from "the goodness of their heart),
then make sure every receipt/check
is carefully collected and turned over to their
Tax Accountant.
And more often than not, it’s US regular
folks who will hand a few bucks to the
handicapped veteran on the corner.
The ultra-rich would never get
close enough.
Your long run thinking. With responsability and respect, thou shalt provide the best product and/or service to thy customer as to thyself. Ask for the same practice from your supplier.
I repeat. We should first aim to increase the efficiency of each unit of currency paid as tax.
The health care in Sweden is very good, probably far better than in the U.S., but is far from perfect.
There is a shortage of Swedish medical staff, because of better salaries beeing paid in Norway. The positions are beeing filled mostly by Polish medics.
We are more stupid.
The problem is not with billionaires, but with politicians who mask their true intentions with farces of good deeds, with the real goal of increasing personal power and wealth. More than a thousand times, they create enemies and / or problems in order to be able to sell their convenient solutions.
Please quote where I contradicted either of those Commandments of Capitalism (commandments that are, in practise or historically, broken regularly by some very wealthy business owners – hot dog tycoons included).
Just like a hundred years ago. But this time, the fat cats and the rich pigs have learned from the past and have established among half of all the poor people through demagoguery tactics that anything with the words government, union and social in it is bad for them.
There have been societies where selfishly hoarding resources and neglecting to share was about the worst offense one could commit. This seems to work in small groups, such as hunter-gatherer societies, in which sharing is a matter of survival, everyone knows everyone’s business, and shaming/shunning can be a real punishment.
When information about everyone is available forever on the internet, perhaps we are moving back to that condition, if the ultra-rich don’t manage to lock down all their private info.
I think the tweet is overoptimistic, but we can dream.
That’s not the dark side of it. That’s just normal life, but for most people it doesn’t include the chance of making a billion dollars. Don’t be child-like in your thinking, there’s no magic. There’s also no relationship between hard work, personal sacrifice, and wealth. That’s a myth. Sorry, but it’s mostly biases that don’t get examined that lead people to think that way. Wealth accumulation is actually achieved without much effort in many instances because it is specifically not tied to how much risk or work you put in. It’s not tied to how good a person you are. It’s not tied to how valuable you are to society. It’s tied to how much wealth you started with and how much you were able to hoard since that point. Literally nothing else can be inferred by wealth about the life of another human being. Lick their boots all you want, but I’m not fond of that particular lie.
As it so happens, I am currently living along the upper Amazon and among some of my friends there are those who have gathered up enough ingredients for some great poison dart concoctions that they would happily reduce their overstock in trade for those great red Make American Greed Ashamed hats they’ve heard about. I see an opportunity to establish a balance that could greatly help the world. My current address is turn left off the Amazon, go about 3 miles along the Yarapa Rio. The path to my hut is paved with great intentions, bibles and bras.
Certainly no automatic one, per the Just World Fallacy. Hard work and personal sacrifice in and of themselves matter less and less as a means to achieving great wealth in late-stage capitalist society. These days, it’s near-impossible to build a fortune “from nothing” in America without existing social and financial capital and privilege. All the “hustle” in the world is neglible in comparison to knowing the right people or coming from a family in the top economic 20%.
All that before one factors in blind luck, and the breathing room provided by existing privilege that allows one to exploit it when one comes across it.
There’s a dissertation to be written on the childishness inherent in Libertarian ideology: the magical thinking and belief in the above-mentioned Just World Fallacy; the petulant “mommy can’t tell me what to do!” attitude; the unquestioning acceptance of Social Darwinist just-so stories; the unwillingness to face uncomfortable truths; the grudge-holding inability to transcend slights suffered in high school; the frequent ignorance of basic business and economic concepts despite touting themselves as budding tycoons; and hilariously fallacy-laden argumentation methods (including attempts to put words in the mouths of others).
Do you really believe that the only role human beings should play in this world is that of producer or consumer? Is your wife or children your customer? Would you dump your parents on the side of the road if it was more cost effective than caring for them yourself?
The university admittance exam is the Högskoleprovet - or Swedish Scholastic Aptitude Test.
In a startup there is always the moments of the dark side. Please refer to: “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz.
You are making too far fetched supositions on the motives that led her to drop medical school. It was her final justification to drop it, probably a “self-lie”.
In pretty much literally ever single post you’ve made here, especially where you suggested that we’re all merely producers and consumers… we’re not, we’re far more complex creatures than that, driven by far more then the supposed “need” to become wealthy. Human beings are rarely the rational creatures that we’re portrayed as by those who promote homo-economicus. The markets are not laws of nature, but social relationships that we can change to better benefit us. We can redistribute wealth, because we have the ability to make better choices that doesn’t wreck the lives of billions of our fellow humans and our environment. WE should make those better choices, or else mother nature will make it for us.
I’ll bite. Assuming you’re not talking about just another tinkering of the capitalist system, but complete removal of the market system, what sort of replacement system are you contemplating?
I’d disagree. What has changed over time is who is included in “all”. Most of mankind’s history is simply a matter of slowly making “all” larger and larger. We started with “all” probably meaning the 100 odd individuals in my tribe, and by the American revolution, it could encompass male white land-holders in a large geographic region.
Over the next 200 years, we’ve managed to make “all” mean all citizens of a nation state (kinda, sorta), For example, when I use “all”, it’s really mostly code for people who have the unearned privilege of the right kind of citizenship. (e.g. I support universal healthcare paid for by my tax dollars, but not really. I support universal healthcare for Canadians paid for by my tax dollars).
I’m going to push back on this.
In my male dominated industry, I’ve seen a fair amount of discrimination based on “to her, programming is just a job”. And to be honest, it was just a job - a job she (or he) did as well as those who considered themselves died-in-the-wool code-geeks.
While being mystically drawn to your job is an appealing romantic narrative, it comes with tons of cultural assumptions about how you won’t do an excellent job if you aren’t the “right kind of person”. And while as a youth, I believed it (and my narrative loving brain still wants to believe it), as as older adult, I see the damage that belief does in unjustly keeping people who don’t fit the narrative out of contention for many jobs.
