I see that phrase thrown around a lot. It's a variant of "you're never going to be a billionaire (so you shouldn't be against X)." Why do people assume that you have to think you'll be a billionaire to be against something that would affect billionaires negatively? Is something only wrong if you think you'll find yourself in that position one day?
For example I often hear "The riches 1% pay 80% of the taxes" (or whatever the correct values are). The person makes this argument against the idea of raising taxes, however they aren't explaining why it shouldn't be done
Since they don't offer an explanation the assumption is they are either already rich or think they'll be rich.
Top 1% earns 21% or income, pays ~40% of taxes (has ~34% of wealth): https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...
Principled makes sense though.
Because there is a group who struggles to reconcile what looks like a contradiction - another group who appears to advocate for policies which harm themselves. The quote and its derivatives attempt to explain this apparent contradiction.
So that group of billionaires who think the government can use their money more efficiently than they can in order to advance American society are absolutely free to do so! Go them! They don't need the government to compel them. They can form their own Philgubernatorial group -set their own donation rules and taxation (donation) bands and percentages and come tax season give it to the feds.
These same people likely also donate a huge amount of money to charities and etc. On an individual basis it's easier to draw a line between funds donated and outcomes.
> They don't need the government to compel them.
Do they? Do you? Why not just make the government a charity then.
> It's like they only want it to happen if its forced on everyone
Well if we take a law to mean "forced on everyone" that's really the definition of "it to happen".
Many people think Jeff Bezos should exist and have his wealth because he got there by playing the game better than everyone else, and that this game is just the way things are. He earned it. Attempts to change the game will just make everything worse and people won't get what they deserve, and thus these attempts are unethical. Equal societies are an absurd liberal fantasy.
My attempts to advocate that Jeff Bezos shouldn't have the money he does are actually just selfish attempts to cheat at the game and stuff my own pockets with money and get something I haven't earned. The real issue here is a lack of discipline.
Watch the rest of the videos. People who think like this largely can't be argued with.
With this premise, the author doesn't even identify the argument that while members of the hierarchy have relative positions, the wealth creation resulting from the hierarchy ensures everyone's absolute position increases. A side effect of this is how a country can have poor people who are wealthier than other countries middle classes.
Destroying that hierarchy without a design to replace that progress mechanism means everyone's absolute position would not continue to move primarily up. If conservativism was just "a hierarchy where everyone stays in their absolute positions, but they may move around relatively sometimes," it would be a lot less appealing. The whole point is that it is the most effective driver of overall progress.
I don’t expect I would become a billionaire (…anymore). I imagine that I would be a benevolent one, but fear the gravity pull of such wealth would collapse any good intentions. Capital demands such rigor. I would think that if some some policy or popular uprising made wealth distribution flatter, the billionaires of the world could exhale. The burden to care becomes much lighter when borne by many hands.
> “John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
There's plenty of circumstantial evidence to back this up. The 2000 election is a good example although I can't find a good quote for this. Gore famously daemonized the "top 1%". An illuminating poll in 2000 revealed that 19% of Americans thought they were the "top 1%" and another 20% thought they would be someday. So 39% of the population thought of themselves as the "top 1%".
Americans also love the slippery slope fallacy. The idea, that you allude to, is that people will defend Jeff Bezos's taxes being raised because the next step is apparently them coming for the working class.
This too is propaganda. B does not necessarily follow from A. But political leaders and plutocrats are happy to use this argument to their own benefit. It's the sort of argument people make when they have no argument.
It's a byproduct of American exceptionalism [2].
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...
"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves." (source: https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck)
Ronald Wright somehow turned this into a quip about Gramscian false consciousness, in the great global game of telephone we're all playing with each others' words.
Obviously cappies (meaning people who support capitalism, who are not necessarily actual capitalists--most aren't) don't walk around believing they personally have a greater than 50% chance of being billionaires. It's hyperbole. That said, they do overestimate their future earning potential while severely underestimating the number of ways in which preexisting social class will block them. This is evidently true; behavior and preferences reveal beliefs, and no one supports capitalism and its extreme inequities unless they harbor a belief--perhaps an underexamined and irrational one--that they'll one day be invited to join the capitalist class, since there's literally nothing to justify the system but "It's good if you're one of them."
It is possible to see unions as both the source of some and solution to other forms of abuse.
What people are saying is workers need a say in how the workplace is run and companies spending millions convincing folk otherwise should be forced to stop.
Unfortunately unions will not represent my interests in a huge swath of other areas (meritocracy, politics, etc). So choosing a union just trades one set of shitty things for another. For all but unskilled workers, the benefits are basically an illusion imo
Many workforces in Australia are highly unionised. Unions have been largely effective - even in recent years - at using their collective bargaining power for the good of the worker. Hell, our ruling political party is literally called the Labor party. It has strong union ties and a history of passing pro-worker legislation. Union corruption exists as it exists in all areas where power can be had, but in Australia’s case you’d truly be throwing the baby out with the bathwater by saying “unions are bad!”, even in industries like tech where we’ve never really sought collective bargaining on a large scale, the universal protections ushered in by the union movement benefit all workers here. It sounds like you’ve fallen for the same propaganda as everyone else but you particularly think that you have “smarter” reasons. You don’t.
Ever notice how unions are somehow all the same entity, and seem to have to answer for things completely different unions in completely different industries did?
Nobody treats corporations this way, even though (if you look at interlocking BoD membership) there's a more reasonable case to be made for collusion in some industries...
Oh yes they do. "All corporations are evil exploitive money-grubbing polluting anti-democratic anti-worker..." I've seen it, here on HN, on the regular. I don't recall if I've seen it today, but I see it a lot.
> ... even though (if you look at interlocking BoD membership) there's a more reasonable case to be made for collusion in some industries...
The AFL-CIO looks (or at least looked) like the same thing, but for unions.
You can nutpick to find people saying anything, of course.
Show me someone in a position of power saying that. I think they closest you'll find is someone like AOC, who has gone nowhere near that.
> The AFL-CIO looks (or at least looked) like the same thing, but for unions.
The AFL-CIO has been in decline for several decades. If you want to tar, say, the Amazon efforts with things the AFL-CIO did in the 60s, you're just making my point for me.
I don't know whether that was a typo or deliberate, but it's beautiful. I'm stealing it.
Yes, you absolutely can find a nut who will say anything - even several nuts. Absolutely. But in this case, I think it's a bit stronger than that. I see it too often. It could be just a few loudmouths saying the same thing over and over, but to me it feels more like, say, 5% of HN users actually believe that. True, that's far less than the number who believe "all unions are evil", but it still seems to me to be enough people to be significant.
> If you want to tar, say, the Amazon efforts with things the AFL-CIO did in the 60s, you're just making my point for me.
Well, I didn't want to do that, so don't put that on me. All I wanted to say is that, as corporations can collude (or at least appear to), so can unions, and we have historical examples of it happening - and, unlike corporate collusion, happening formally and in the open.
>The government won’t save you from efforts like this. The government represents the interests of the capital owning class.
You realize that the power/existence of "labor organization ie unionization" is dependent on the government? Without government protection labor unions don't stand a chance.
But there were laws allowing freedom of association, so something like unions were default allowed, in the absence of any other laws.
There are many examples of this including Solidarity [1] and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 [2] following attempts to freeze wages following the Black Death where demand suddenly exceeded supply and pushed up wages.
And this isn't even counting the cases where peasant and worker uprisings that led to revolutions.
The concept of a general strike is a relatively modern one but an extremely powerful one regardless of any legalities.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_(Polish_trade_union...
Like if a manager learns something and takes action because of it?
Or learning about employee behavior and sentiment and using that information to suppress promotions…
Or being informed of employee misbehavior and not taking action against it…
The government won’t save you from efforts like this. The government represents the interests of the capital owning class.
The demonization of unions is one of the most successful cases of propaganda in the last century. It’s gone so far s people who will die on the hill of Jeff Bezos paying slightly more taxes because everyone seems to think they’ll be Jeff Bezos one day.