We have prosperous people today and while many of them are engaged in some form of philanthropy, we still have lots of poverty and other social ills. So “compassion” alone seems like a weak guarantee.

We still have poverty, but not your granddad's poverty. It used to be, the poor suffered under-nourishment. Today, poverty can stem from obesity so severe as to be disabling.

Are you arguing that things are better or worse than they used to be? And in either case how does it relate to my comment. Genuinely can’t tell.

Compassion and taxation for redistribution are so much different because the first is the will of the person, the second is by coercion. No idea why you put them side by side in your comment, they are opposites.

Tax is not coercion, we live in a democracy. You pay tax because society has decided to fund certain things via contributions from all. It's like the membership fee in a club used to pay for the clubhouse. If you don't like it, stop using the facilities and leave.

I pay my taxes willingly to fund schools, hospitals, police, justice - all the basic infrastructure needed to maintain civilization. I vote to influence the priorities with which this money is spent.

Have you all forgotten how to nation or what?

Democracy does not exclude coercion, it's just coercion of the minority by the majority. Tell me you have the option not to pay any taxes ... can you?

I grew up and lived in a Communist country, such a speech is not touching me for a very long time. Sorry for the insensitivity to your bubble.

I do have the option to not pay taxes - I just have to cease to use any of the things that are provided with tax money. Including a passport.

What does you growing up in a communist regime have to do with any of what I'm saying? Are there even taxes in communist systems?

Seriously, how do you pay for policemen without taxes? And without policemen, who protects your property from theft? How do you imagine a capitalist system to work without courts?

And I really do not understand what you think my bubble is and how you think you are insensitive to it.

I'm not promoting communism here and stop acting like there is only communism or complete radical free market anarchy.

Yes, taxes are paid in communist countries.

In the discussion about taxes vs. compassion, paying for policemen has more options between communism and complete radical free market anarchy. But it is not the subject of the discussion, policemen don't work for compassion, they don't buy food with it and don't pay the bills with it.

Where do you think the "unproductive" shareholders got the money they used to invest? Sure, some of them had wealthy families and they are using that, but at root all wealth came from someone who was productive at some point.

"was productive" is doing a hilarious amount of work in that sentence.

i don't really understand attempts like these to back-propagate some narrative that there was an epic, fair struggle between some set of individuals and one came out on top, ergo that justifies their estate all the way until the modern day owning some ridiculous share of the world's wealth

seems way more likely that once particular individuals amassed slight advantages in power, they just leveraged it into gaining even more ungodly amounts of power, often times using the state itself as a weapon to manifest that outcome

it's almost like you need to have access to capital to really make it big

hmm, that sounds strangely like what's going on in 2020... probably a coincidence though

Then just keep tracing it back up the hierarchy to a single common ancestor, declare that without that ancestor, none of the productivity would have been possible, and by the transitivity of worth that you've described, where one is indefinitely ascribed benefit of his or her acestors, everyone should have equal right to the output.

> ...all wealth came from someone who was productive at some point.

While this is technically true, this doesn't require that the beneficiary was the productive person. The textbook example of this would be those that accumulate wealth from the increasing value of unimproved land.

So why are you being particularly lax about the parasitic wealthy who inherited the vast majority of their assets?

> People do unpaid work all the time. Ask your mom. Humans have compassion. They want to cooperate and collaborate.

Free work is for people close to me or for special cases like FOSS projects I want to win. It's not for strangers. When the Soviets collectivized farms, output crashed. Let's not so quickly forget the lessons of the 20th century.

> have a system that takes from the productive (workers) and gives it to the unproductive (shareholders)

Profit is not a sin. Tech treats its workers better than practically any other industry, and there's never been an industry with fewer barriers to industry. If you want to renew 20th century worker class consciousness rhetoric, also renew its disastrous consequences.

> Profit is not a sin.

What work do shareholders actually do within the confines of the company?

If you gave a poor unemployed person the investment capital that shareholders have, then from the company's perspective, how do you distinguish them from other shareholders?

That was the parent poster's point.

> Tech treats its workers better than practically any other industry, and there's never been an industry with fewer barriers to industry.

Instead of economic or physical barriers, we have hordes toxic personalities that try to gatekeep people. It's not all sunshine and roses.

> Instead of economic or physical barriers, we have hordes toxic personalities that try to gatekeep people. It's not all sunshine and roses.

I’m skeptical that these are uniquely tech problems; I suspect they occur in relatively even proportion in other industries, but other industries have bigger problems that tech largely doesn’t have, and so they aren’t preoccupied with “toxic personalities”. In particular, the “tech is terrible” proponents need to explain why tech selects for toxic people more than other industries, and so far all such explanations depend on (toxic) stereotypes of whites, Asians, men, and people interested in technology (“nerds”).

Here's my take on that: A marginal amount of gatekeeping is necessary for any group to maintain its group identity. The toxicity comes from the overdose, not the act itself.

A lot of "nerds" have personal insecurities and downtime. The potent mix of the two leads to more gatekeeping behavior than is necessary.

It's for this reason that many people (especially women, PoC, etc.) will be hostilely quizzed when they express an interest in something nerdy. It's not overt racism/sexism, so much as a "oh no, if they share my interests, I'm less special" sort of reaction.

Unfortunately, nerdiness doesn't strongly correlate with emotional maturity.

But things don't have to be this way. We all have the choice of what kind of person we want to be. Some people just choose very poorly-- short-sighted selfishness that hurts them long-term and everyone else at all times.

There are a lot of "nerdy" individuals who choose better. I'm happy to know of at least 100 in my industry.

You're employing precisely the stereotypes that weberc2 mentions in his comment. You've presented no evidence. You've only invited readers to indulge their animus against your disfavored groups. This kind of rhetoric is unacceptable in other areas of society and it ought to be unacceptable here.

I don’t know why this is downvoted; this is exactly correct. These were the stereotypes I was referring to, employed without irony.

Lots of HN power users use the downvote button to defend the indefensible.

They put their hard earned and taxed money into a company to produce something. To build a nail factory you need workers, but you also need the plant; who pays for the plant? Not the workers. Without one of the components, there is no nail plant, you have either unemployed people or an empty building.

This is btw the smartest comment here. The key to economic stability and social progress is the balance of the return on capital to the return on work.

> Profit is not a sin.

Agree 100%, but it can certainly be argued that letting members of your community die on the streets is.

> Profit is not a sin

not necessarily.... it really depends on your (many times religious) world view [1]

[1] http://www.lulu.com/shop/skip-worden/gods-gold/paperback/pro...

The problem with your argument is that you only know capitalism and communism and act like it's the end all of all economic ideas anyone could ever have.

What societal benefit does profit have? Is there a difference between profit put into research and profit put into dividends? What do you think benefits humanity more? High stock prices? High wages?

You talk about the lessons of the 20th century. You mean the golden times, when a single earner in a car factory could feed a family? When minimum wage had more buying power than today? When more people were unionized? Or do you mean the lessons we learned in the 21st century? When an unleashed financial industry crashed the economy?

In today's economy the shareholder of a successful company can earn more in dividends than the workers who produce the wealth in wages. This is the issue. ROI on capital is higher than on work. Model the system, feed in this number and you will see it's unstable.

Disastrous consequences? Take a look at the US healthcare system - congrats for not having any socialism - you pay double than anyone else and have lower life expectancy. Awesome system.