> keep people poor, underfed, and uneducated so that they will always be a cheap source of grunt labor.

Poor, underfed, and uneducated is the default position for human beings. We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing.

There is no conspiracy to "enslave" anyone, nearly all public health and wealth measures over the last 100 years are overwhelming up and to the right. That growth did not happened through magic or luck and certainly not from some misapplication of noble intentions (see communism), but through the slow accumulation of societal benefits, over time, across an open market economy.

It is not and will never be "fair", there will never be equality of outcomes, but jesus, we've faired a lot better under this system than by the whims of kings and politburos trying to distribute "fairness" with a clumsy iron fist.

>We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing.

Some people are born with nothing, others are born with just about everything. Many laws, regulations, etc exist so that JUST existing with nothing is not feasible.

It is nigh impossible to live in this world like the birds do, flying from one food source to the next, roosting wherever you find comfort. Those with means have entire departments to police the underclass off of their property and setup obstacles to make sure riff-raff does not even get on the public property next to their private property (just look at how public transport is set up in big cities).

We protect those with means, ensuring those without cannot even live without selling their labor. Die or work. It's a little like slavery (I KNOW there are large differences between traditional slavery), you must be able to see that?

>but through the slow accumulation of societal benefits, over time, across an open market economy.

Pretty sure most of the improvements we have made for the common man, at least in the US, have come at the behest of those born with nothing standing up and saying "we won't work unless the rewards are distributed better/we get a 40 hour work week/we get cleaner and less dangerous work conditions/etc."

>It is not and will never be "fair", there will never be equality of outcomes,

No one wants equality of outcomes, equality of outcomes would not seem fair to most people. Instead we want equality of opportunity.

We can improve, most of us know it, and even though most improvement will only effect our kids or grandkids, I will still keep bitching that we need to improve until we're AS GREAT AS WE CAN BE.

>Pretty sure most of the improvements we have made for the common man, at least in the US, have come at the behest of those born with nothing standing up and saying "we won't work unless the rewards are distributed better/we get a 40 hour work week/we get cleaner and less dangerous work conditions/etc."

Yes. These improvements were won through the most thoroughly and deeply market behavior possible: raising the price on what you're selling.

Labor price-gouging capital is a beautiful sight to see. Usually only capital remembers it can do that.

Don't forget that the initial response to labor price-gouging capital was to hire armed goons (like the Pinkertons) to break the strikes. The fight between capital and labor that ultimately led to something more balanced wasn't a purely voluntary economic transaction - there was plenty of violence involved on both sides.

And don't forget that a big part of why many Western countries started to invest more into welfare is because after 1917, their governments realized that the alternative could well be an armed uprising, and that they need to keep their citizens sufficiently content to prevent that - even if that means they have to force the wealthy to share more of their income.

(Note, I'm not saying that Soviets somehow achieved better results. The point is solely that the threat of a socialist/communist revolution was a significant factor in capitalist countries shifting away from unregulated capitalism and towards welfare state.)

> Labor price-gouging capital is a beautiful sight to see. Usually only capital remembers it can do that.

This was a pleasure to read, although it made me wonder what the optimal unit of labor is to still have a functioning competitive market. If all capital was controlled by one entity, no market could exist -- that's basically why the US has anti-trust laws. The same is true for labor. Seems like for each market there must be an optimal unit of labor (number of workers in a union, for example), to balance well-being of an individual worker with functioning of the market. Hard problem, though.

Yes, the problems that monopoly creates are analogous problems to the problems with large unions. The union management seeks to increase their own power, and the larger the union, the more possibility to abuse that power. However, the upside of having an institutional way to apply political pressure for the benefit of the worker can definitely outweigh whatever abuses and inefficiencies most unions create.

> Some people are born with nothing, others are born with just about everything. Many laws, regulations, etc exist so that JUST existing with nothing is not feasible.

Rubbish. Nothing stops you from wandering off into the wilderness, except for the fact that it's a crap way to live. You just feel entitled to the benefits of modern civilisation, without the costs.

And why should some people benefit from progress, while others are left to live in the wilderness? (Considering only few people actually contribute to progress.)

Because progress is the net result, directly or indirectly, of the work of everyone living in that society. When you pay taxes, when you buy things, when you select which products to buy, you're contributing.

So someone who inherits a pile of money, and spends their time doing nothing is contributing to progress?

Begin with fallacies and you shall conclude nonsense.

As a species, once we reached apex predator status, we were already born with the entire Earth's resources as our inheritance, not nothing. Somehow those got divided up and almost never was it via the mechanisms of an open market economy -- only in exceptional circumstances did those mechanisms provide a modicum of mobility, especially during technological transitions. The rest of the uplift was through outright redistribution, either through the occasional enlightened king's edict, the politburo's fist, or the exercise of raw political power in the legislatures of the world.

An unfettered open market economy that gets farther and farther from initial conditions ends in a revolution.

My guess is that a lot more people would support the redesign of how the land and natural resources are being distributed, but for some reason only redistribution of income generated from work is discussed in such conversations.

Land redistribution is indeed what drove many communist revolutions in the third world, more than philosophical differences about economic systems.

Maybe not what you intended, but I see your statement as a dichotomy, while the reality is more nuanced than that. For instance, most mainstream right-wing parties in Europe accept some kind of universal health coverage, which seems almost socialist in the US. Sure, I'd choose the US over Cuba or North Korea without thinking as my home, but several European countries, as well as Canada, before the US.

>Poor, underfed, and uneducated is the default position for human beings. We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing.

Have you had a look at 19th century philosopher Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread? Here's an excerpt:

>For thousands of years millions of men have laboured to clear the forests, to drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and water. Every rood of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the sweat of several races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced labour, of intolerable toil, of the people’s sufferings. Every mile of railway, every yard of tunnel, has received its share of human blood.

...

>The shafts of the mine still bear on their rocky walls the marks made by the pick of the workman who toiled to excavate them. The space between each prop in the underground galleries might be marked as a miner’s grave; and who can tell what each of these graves has cost, in tears, in privations, in unspeakable wretchedness to the family who depended on the scanty wage of the worker cut off in his prime by fire-damp, rock-fall, or flood?

>In virtue of this monstrous system, the son of the worker, on entering life, finds no field which he may till, no machine which he may tend, no mine in which he may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what he will produce to a master. He must sell his labour for a scant and uncertain wage. His father and his grandfather have toiled to drain this field, to build this mill, to perfect this machine. They gave to the work the full measure of their strength, and what more could they give? But their heir comes into the world poorer than the lowest savage. If he obtains leave to till the fields, it is on condition of surrendering a quarter of the produce to his master, and another quarter to the government and the middlemen. And this tax, levied upon him by the State, the capitalist, the lord of the manor, and the middleman, is always increasing; it rarely leaves him the power to improve his system of culture. If he turns to industry, he is allowed to work — though not always even that — only on condition that he yield a half or two-thirds of the product to him whom the land recognizes as the owner of the machine.

I'd really recommend a read, I used to think as you did, that we are born poor. In reality, we are born with the riches of the world around us, yet ungraspable.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-c...

I actually agree with much of that assessment; I just don't think it paints the full story over the arc of history. I also don't think access to and domain over raw materials or "riches" equates to wealth in the same way having access to charcoal is not the same as creating carbon fiber. Transforming those materials into useful technologies has happened exactly because of things like property rights (ownership), open markets, and the rule of law. It might not be perfect, but so far it does seem to work for our common benefit, over time, even acknowledging the hardships those toiling in the mines do seem to bear.

Its feels a bit myopic to pretend like the the miner mining iron ore 150 years ago used in the creation of a steam engine somehow only benefits from his direct wage, and not indirectly from the product he's helping to create. Yes, the direct monetary benefits accrue to the owners, but by and large those owners produce things of value (increasingly so) to society in a way that that makes that miner's great-grandson far far better off than a "lowest savage" today. I think this is the same false litany that tells us the world is getting worse and worse (especially for the poor), whereas data tells us the exact opposite.

So not everyone gets to be an owner and be directly rewarded, and that work is certainly hard, but we do all seem to share in the collective benefits ownership creates.

Thank you for the reference. I look forward to reading this.

The thing is that technology and society has progressed much further than our social and economical structures. I think the sharing economy is a great insight into one aspect of where we are going, but it isn't enough.

Most of the growth was being appropriated by "the 1%" of its time - see e.g. the Gilded Age - right until the point where the governments started forcing some redistribution through taxation and welfare programs. Until that happened, the social benefits were extremely meager.

Well, what's going on in Qatar IS slavery for all intents and purposes. The workers are imported from southeast Asia, and their employer holds their passport, preventing them from leaving. In a free market people need to be able to have a choice to freely leave. Many of those workers would probably leave if they could.

The same motivation driving Southeast Asians to work in Qatar drives Mexicans and Central Americans to the United States to work as legal or illegal migrant workers ... some of the latter working independently, most working for a series of established companies.

The big difference between Qatar/middle-east and the U.S. is that in the U.S. the business culture does not have as much recent history of indentured servitude, and has ever-diminishing use of unsafe practices (e.g., dangerous pesticides applied by farm workers without adequate protection). My father-in-law saw over the past 20 or 30 years many such Latin American workers come through furniture and manufacturing plants in North Carolina where he managed H.R. ... and they were paid very fairly and worked very hard, conscientiously, thoroughly. A fair number were found to have registered with false Social Security numbers and had to move on, but my father-in-law says it always was a loss for the plant. Those in the U.S. illegally still had to hazard the trip, and face deportation always ... but they mostly can leave any employment situation, or go back home, at any time.

Those workers stuck in Qatar / middle-east are unfortunate suckers reeled in by bastards and an uncaring system both in their countries of origin and in Qatar.

So ... on to the interesting part ... what are those Latin American workers in the U.S. doing with the majority of their wages? >>> They're by-and-large remitting that money back home to plow into joint RENT-SEEKING ventures with family / friends back home. They endure the hazardous journey, sub-standard housing, time away from family and their own comfortable culture, and two or three simultaneous jobs, because they have the initiative and need to build the nest egg so they can escape the "wage slavery". <<<

That's an interesting comparison of the cultural situations of migrant workers in the US and elsewhere. I used to live in Texas and also saw that legal/illegal migrants were in general hard-working, paid relatively fairly, and sent their wages back home to invest.

I'm curious about your use of the phrase, joint "rent-seeking" ventures. I looked up the definition of rent-seeking on Wikipedia: "seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth", which tend to "result in reduced economic efficiency". Was that implied in your use of the phrase? If so, what kind of ventures did you have in mind? I imagine that migrant workers send their money home to invest, typically by starting businesses (or buying land..?) with family and friends - which isn't necessarily "rent-seeking"?

Which is a pretty good deal for the owner class.

> As a society (and this goes from a community to a global scale) we should make it a priority to give everyone the resources to meet their maximum potential.

Provided that I am willing to concede this point for the sake of the argument: what makes you think that your redistribution model will actually allow everyone to achieve their maximum potential?[1] Given that similar redistribution systems have been tried before, where governing bodies were thinking they actually know what's good for "everyone/society", but all of them miserably failed, what differentiates your proposed approach from what have been already implemented?

[1] I don't even know what "achieving maximum potential" means. Is it achieving someone's goals in life? Producing the most widgets possible? Killing as many unbelievers as possible to get into heaven?

They all miserably failed? The US does this to an extent right now: we have a decent (of course it's not the best) public education system, and we have programs like SNAP/TANF/Section 8 so that children don't grow up underfed on the street. There's no reason it could not also be done globally; the global GDP/capita is about $15k.

Of course, simply providing these services doesn't always cut it. Look at the generational poverty in the US "ghettoes" for obvious confirmation of this. But in general it's a good thing to do and it benefits people. It's certainly not impossible and definitely does not always miserably fail.

For maximum potential, I mostly mean the ability to do what you want in terms of jobs with only intelligence and work holding you back, not the circumstances you were born in.

> we have a decent (of course it's not the best) public education system

What's your take on the current student loans situation where almost everyone is able to obtain resources to go to a limited number of colleges and pay for whichever degree they like? Should we expand this and instead of loaning money give it away for free, if this goes towards achieving maximum potential? In your opinion, how much would a regular 4 year degree cost in such a case?

We should be looking at ways to reduce the cost of college. Education doesn't need to be a hand-holdy 4 year summer camp, and I think the expectation that it should be is based on cultural expectations. The loan based payment model is only a problem because it's leaving a certain subset of students in a lot of debt with degrees that don't enable them to pay it off. I definitely don't think we should just give everyone unlimited money to study, nor do I think the solution is going the Western-Europe route of making college free, but only for the X% of students that do best on entrance exams.

Do you want to reduce the cost, or do you want to increase accessibility? There are a finite number of colleges, so reducing cost does not necessarily increase accessibility. An incentive to build more colleges may increase accessibility, but may or may not exacerbate prices.

Another model might be to increase subsidy for fields with more guaranteed profit centers, while decreasing the amount of subsidy for fields in which a career profit is less likely, such that loans are more likely to be paid off. This again may make college cheaper, and/or more accessible, but may fail to yield enough trained workers to deliver in necessary but unprofitable fields.

That said, I'm not just trying to poop on the idea, but to highlight that "cost" is not the only rubric of accessibility, and that "cheaper" doesn't necessarily yield the results you're looking for, and may actually result in contrary outcomes from what we expect.

I think there is a huge problem with the student loan method of funding college in that it causes much more inflation than simply funding public universities who in turn would supply low or no cost tuition.

Entrepreneurs have incentive to ensure everyone meets their maximum potential because this is the place where there is the most to extract.

If my value is $10 per day and someone makes my value $20 per day, there is $10 per day worth of value for us to negotiate over. We _both_ have an incentive to maximize my potential.

Also: >we should ...

thats a morality statement but without a canonical source of ethics that some do not ascribe to. But, I would assume that "self interest" is more or less universal, and thus we can build systems that use self interest to ensure good outcomes for all.

Real life isn't just an elaborate Austrian economics simulator. In this case, there are a lot of complex dynamics at play: will workers emigrate elsewhere if trained well (Basically the IIT problem)? Are constituents/subjects ok with reductions in their quality of life so that other people can be provided these resources.

To act as if the market will magically fix this is lazy and not realistic.

Also yes of course I used "should", as I am giving my opinion on this situation.

I have a really hard time believing that governments will do better at distributing resources equitably than a market.

To act as though governments can magically fix this is lazy and not realistic.

Giant companies are incentivized to kill the competition and then jack up prices while also lobbying for their interests with lawmakers. Said markets will also only give you the choice between products that you don't want, when you really want something that only a government would take on. Another thing that is distorted is that if a transnational corporation has a factory in one country, sends it to one of their factories in another country, and then sends it back again because it's cheaper, that gets counted as international trade. It's hardly an export, it's a way to protect investors from having to pay market rates.. Corporations get massive protections from government, I wouldn't really call it optimal resource distribution if government interference

and the universe of "social organizations" is not exahaustively covered by "governments" and "corporations".

Governments alone won't. Nor will markets alone.

Neither will a combination of the two, bury I think it might come closer. I think the free market people have some legitimate fears; a government that tasks itself with "fair redistribution of wealth" is pretty easily abused. "Fairness" lends itself to loose interpretations which target particular groups, for example, all of the white/male privilege rhetoric in the last decade. I don't particularly want my wealth redistributed because of someone's hate for my demographic.

Sorry for typos; iOS autocorrect is terrible, and HN won't let me edit.

> Real life isn't just an elaborate Austrian economics simulator.

Well, yeah; for one thing, given that Austrian economics is more normative than predictive, I'm not sure what such a simulation would do.

You know what I meant to say: the real world does not adhere to economic thought as strictly as many would claim it does. The main reasons are usually due to some additional complexity that economic models fail to account for. Humans like being able to describe things in terms of cogent, concise rules, and in doing so can oversimplify and lead themselves to faulty conclusions.

> the real world does not adhere to economic thought as strictly as many would claim it does

That's absolutely true, and if anything the assumptive concepts that underly how government creates regulations are more dependent on "economic" principles than the assumptive concepts that underly how businesses work.

"people don't always do the most rational thing" is so often used as an excuse for government to intervene and make choices for people. As if government itself is not made and run by people who also don't necessarily (individually or collectively) make 'rational' decisions, only now given a really big stick.

There are other ways besides government to provide for people, even when doing so does not fulfill an obviously incorrect model of human as the hyperrational self-maximizer.

The core fallacy here is believing that we can all agree to supersede biological imperatives and everything will all go fine. The challenge of society is the establishment of a system that cooperates with biology to create a peaceful, prosperous environment for all members of that society.

Humans are naturally competitive. Humans have tribal instincts (which include a default hostility to known outgroups). Humans have a fundamental tendency to hoard resources to ward off the mortal dangers of scarcity and decay, visible in our dietary inclinations just as much as in the way we handle the abstraction of money. Like most other successful animals, we have an instinct to secure resources not just for ourselves but for the generations that will follow after us.

These are inborn instincts and impulses, installed by millions of years of evolution. They cannot be hand-waved away. As a species, we are stuck with them, for better or worse.

Throughout the 20th century, we see the rise and fall of economic policy that refuses to acknowledge these realities. This willful blindness inflicts a large amount of suffering on the populations that fall for the delusion that we are now superhuman.

The argument is not that physical impulse does not need restraint, nor that society shouldn't have structure and authority. It is merely that our social systems need to exist as background processes that optimize and refine our basic natures instead of trying to pretend like they don't exist.

Just as denial of the underlying structure of computer systems will, at best, seriously impede performance, denial of the underlying structures of human psychology will, at best, bottleneck any society.

Hardcore socialist redistribution systems are so denialist that they result in the equivalent of a nation wide Blue Screen of Death shortly after bootup. Let's take notice of the blood and agony of the 20th century and not install SOCIALISM.DLL anymore.

The pretense of tying the state of the system as is to biology seems to amazingly silly. We are the product of billions of years of evolution. Society is a much more recent artifact that has already seemed to go through several stages over thousands of years none of which has had time to leave much of a mark on the underlying biology.

In the words of jack nicolsons character in as good as it gets sell crazy someplace else we're all stocked up here.

Right, that's what I said. Any cultural ideals, let alone modern ones, haven't been around long enough to make a dent in our biology ... so we should stop pretending that our instincts are irrelevant and that we can just say "ALL HUMANS WILL NOW COOPERATE IN PERFECT SOCIAL HARMONY, BY DECREE FROM THE GREAT LEADER" and expect it all to go swimmingly.

Useful social systems contemplate typical human behavior and account for it in a reasonable way, instead of pretending that it won't apply.

When you create a central chokepoint for all ownership and economic resources, the distributors show massive favoritism for the ingroup (generally government bureaucrats and their relatives), while the rest of the population is essentially left to starve.

Anyone who claims the purity of their political philosophy or their strength of character or the quality of the education of their central planners will prevent this from occurring under their implementation of centralized resource distribution is essentially claiming to hold a trump card over human biology, and they should be immediately discounted, because that's not how it works. Instead, we keep trying to reboot it, hopeful that this time, the superhumans are in charge.

It is disappointing to see that juvenile dismissals like yours are apparently now countenanced on HN, especially when they're the result of a misreading in the first place.

We also have lesson from the 1920s to draw from and the breaking up of monopolies. Social security has social in the name, and nobody wants that social program to die off without something better replacing it (except for some crude wealthy folks). This isn't an install/uninstall thing. More of an alloy of waxing/waining ideas.

I agree that it's probably more useful to conceptualize economies as kernel subsystems with complex interdependencies rather than individual drivers. :)

Why is your assumption a better assumption than say children, the elderly, and disabled should be taken care of. outside of a psychopath compassion is also more or less universal.

Your assuming there is just one person. In the real world finding someone well trained is almost always much cheaper and lower risk than training someone.

> I couldn't disagree more. As a society (and this goes from a community to a global scale) we should make it a priority to give everyone the resources to meet their maximum potential. I don't mean that we should give everyone a million dollars to invest of their own. What I mean is that we should ensure that everyone gets provided with a good education and food/water/shelter, etc.

Although I totally agree with this, individuality also plays a big role in development. The unfairness for someone is the good luck of another one thanks to his parents or grandparents. All conditions been equal, individuality will always makes society unequal. I think we should at least guarantee a worthy life to everyone.

But then what you do with someone that can't make a living but don't want to get educated? If you give him enough to live, he will still be a second class citizen.

I think s/he's writing from the perspective of what is and you're writing from the perspective of what should be. You can both be right.