> Ha, oh... oh my, that's rich.

Please don't post this kind of low quality snark here. This isn't reddit.

My apologies, you're correct - edited to remove the snark.

For site survival purposes, it's not enough for a comment to contain interesting content, just like it's not enough for food to contain nutrients. It also must not contain poison.

It's helpful when users gently ask other users to stick to the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Of course it's also off topic, but that is a necessary evil. Out-of-band control signals are what enables the system to right itself. munk-a's response was perfect.

This doesn’t address my point. The majority of Americans are not wealthy, so of course the majority thinks that.

I think down this road leads a tautology because most classical definitions of consensus are such that taxing the wealthy more than the poor is considered a fair and equitable consensus. I don't like to leave assumptions and definitions unexamined so here's an analogy, most people who murdered steve don't believe that people who murdered steve should be punished for it - even though the majority of the population disagrees with that view we need to defend the minority of people that just murdered steve less their opinions be swept under by a tyrannical and unreasonable majority.

The majority absolutely can be tyrannical and the court of popular opinion is not considered the sole ethical decider - see philosophical discussions about whether certain historical events in the 1940s led to a society where some pretty extreme actions actually qualified as ethical. The society they occurred in publicly and openly approved of those actions but most of us would hesitate to call those actions ethical so there is merit in being hesitant to call the apparent ruling of the court of public opinion a consensus, but I think this particular case is more valid and self-reinforcing.

Interesting question though.