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A comment on The Equality Conundrum: What kind of equality is good?. Parent comment

Re:The Equality Conundrum: What kind of equality is good? by logicchains on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @02:18AM (#22042581)
If you have a system that caps personal wealth, you've just given more power to the people running the system. And if it's like any such system that's existed historically (e.g. communist Russia and China essentially capping personal wealth at zero), the people running the system will end up accumulating way more wealth than the cap (and way more power than in a system that didn't give the rulers such strong influence over people's lives).
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Re:The Equality Conundrum: What kind of equality is good? by thaumasiotes on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @02:24AM (#22042611)
Wang Mang ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Mang ) capped personal wealth in the first century at a level much higher than zero. It was still a total disaster as far as history tells us, though in this case the official histories are overtly hostile to Wang Mang.

The theory is always available, though, that history hates him so much because his policies were so awful.

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Re:The Equality Conundrum: What kind of equality is good? by js8 on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @02:29AM (#22042633)
Capping personal wealth at zero (or less than wealth per capita for that matter) is obviously a nonsense, so you should be careful with this strawman. Reasonable amount probably starts at some multiple of that.

Of course, you need democracy too. Since the beginning, the democratic concept was about equality of access to political power among citizens.

In many ways, it's what traditional anarchist/liberal left is about - equality in power (egalitarianism?) and not necessarily in the outcome.

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Re:The Equality Conundrum: What kind of equality is good? by logicchains on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @02:41AM (#22042700)
>Capping personal wealth at zero (or less than wealth per capita for that matter) is obviously a nonsense, so you should be careful with this strawman. Reasonable amount probably starts at some multiple of that.

There's not much more power needed to cap wealth at zero than at 10 million: the enforcement infrastructure would be the same.

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