It’s often not even self interest; fairly often it’s obvious that some participants in these discussions are searching for arguments to validate pre-held beliefs and policy positions.

Although sometimes self interest is also a factor.

> fairly often it’s obvious that participants in these discussions are searching for arguments to validate pre-held beliefs and policy positions.

This is true of discussion of almost any topic by almost anyone ever.

Yeah, this is just how the human brain works.

The big thing to understand is that we lie about these things to ourselves, so we can easier lie about them to others. Unconscious parts of your brain lies to the conscious part!!

I learned this here: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...

I hate to break it to you, but literally all of humanity does that, most of the time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

This includes me. And you. And everybody else here.

Changing your mind is actually really hard.

> I hate to break it to you, but literally all of humanity does that, most of the time

I'm not sure why you'd assume that you're breaking anything to me.

Stating that "some participants are searching for arguments to validate pre-held beliefs and policy positions" is roughly akin to saying "some participants eat food and breathe air".

Confirmation bias is part of the human condition, and should be expected by default.

Wealth tax is majoritism and nothing else. And we all know how that ends.

Once a democracy realizes it has the keys to the treasury...

Majoritarianism is bad because it can oppress powerless minorities. The wealthy are not a powerless minority.

Majoritarianism usually justifies itself via populist arguments that some particular minority is too powerful and needs to be cut down. This is the basis of nearly every conspiracy theory about the Jews, for instance.

In the case of a wealth tax, the target not simply a "particular minority", but capital, which is very literally power itself. And it's increasingly clear that it really is too concentrated.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2020057pap...

Indeed, meta-level reasoning is insufficient to determine morality. The object-level facts matter most.

Except that you can provide evidence for why the wealthy minority is too powerful whereas jews are just attacked for... being jewish. You know, the nazis for example were a minority, that doesn't mean attacking them was bad... populism isn't inherently bad...

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Also, please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. That's very much against the rules also.

You can provide “evidence” that the Jews are “too powerful”, too.

What you're saying is that critical thinking is required to determine morality. That is indeed true.

To oppose a wealth tax on majoritarian grounds you need to demonstrate that the wealthy are oppressed in some way. Simply saying "but majoritarianism" is not sufficient, and appealing to Jewish oppression is plain whataboutism.

I'm not advocating for guillotines or whatever. Simply that a small percentage of individual wealth over a certain amount (say $10MM) be redistributed to the rest of society. The end result of this is that individuals are still going to be able to hold $10MM even if the wealth tax redistributed 100% of the rest of their wealth. They will still be incredibly rich and not have any meaningful financial constraints on their lives.

Calling this oppression is absurd.

> Calling this oppression is absurd.

I never used the word “oppression”. You did.

> To oppose a wealth tax on majoritarian grounds you need to demonstrate that the wealthy are oppressed in some way.

There are multiple ways in which this is wrong.

Firstly, the term “oppression” is overly charged here. I prefer a more general term, so I’ll use “injustice”.

Secondly, you are making a circular argument. In my opinion, confiscating people’s wealth on the basis that they have too much of it is unjust. You are pointing out that the wealthy aren’t, as a whole, subjected to any kind of injustice as it stands; but you’re doing that in the context of proposing to commit injustice against them.

The point that you’re missing is that the primary human motivation for injustice is to perceive a successful group of people as fortunate and privileged, and to resent them for it. So your test for majoritarianism actually fails almost every time that it is tested because, in the perceptions of most majoritarians themselves, they would pass your test.

Bad faith actors can fabricate "evidence". Therefore all evidence is useless?

What's strange is that the same cohort that doesn't deeply discuss higher tax rates on tens of millions in wealth, love to get out tomes of research to support the social cause du jour.