I think these people would prefer everyone sit on rocks rather than poor people sit in wooden chairs while rich people had leather couches.
One day, hopefully not too many days away, our descendants will wake up and discover that the last poor person has been lifted from poverty.
To get there from here, we have to take it one day at a time, and focus on changing what we can.
To illustrate this point, in our current era of the mega rich, we also have record low levels of poverty.
Wealth isn't a zero sum game. It's possible (but not always the case) for a billionaire to create more than a billion dollars of wealth for other people.
Is that actually true? I’m very curious if there’s any theoretical evidence that a society where everyone is at minimum “middle class” can exist.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
A tech like AC is not available to everyone all at once. It starts out very expensive and gets cheaper over time. It may end up cheap enough that it can be ubiquitous, but before that point there must be a time that only most people can afford it.
If you then include it in the must-have category before the point of ubiquitousness, you will never get rid of poverty. Whereas if you include it after the point it's a pointless exercise, because everyone that wants one already has it.
The fact that we're not providing the above basics universally to all citizens right now, as a matter of priority above all else, is a damning critique of government and one of the main reasons that set me down the path of anarcho-capitalist thought.
Consider a couple of other stats from that site:
> the proportion of population with access to electricity in 2020 was 100%.
and a 2.5% unemployment rate.
For concreteness, I'll say that I would define "poor" as not having the capability to satisfy the lower tiers of Maslow's hierarchy. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs ) By that standard Bhutan isn't poor despite being technically a Third World nation.
Poor just means they have less than most other people.
If it’s enough calories and roof other your head… Then we have very few true poor. Especially if we don’t include those who are there due to choice and/or mental illness.
I mean if we are only using the most convenient definition it's easy to say we have few poor people. If you are eating only rice everyday in your rusting trailer somewhere in the Midwest, you're poor.
And yeah, when that happens, your mental health is not going to be great.
Mental health as in mental health issues making people make decisions where they end up on the streets. Many homeless people were living normal lives when their mental health deteriorated.
> It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people.
At the end of the day, the goal is to create enough incentive for someone to stay and face justice. Anything that furthers that goal without marginalizing people is a good start.
The best we get is this "effective altruism" bullshit, which is just regular billionaire puppetry with a shiny new coat.
No, things (e.g. transactions in the economy, contracts that get signed, tax & transfer payments, etc) are almost never zero-sum. They are usually positive-sum, and sometimes very negative-sum. Almost never zero-sum.
They appear to be zero-sum if you only focus on the raw dollars that change hands in a transaction. But they're not zero-sum in the utility that's created, which is what matters for any meaningful analysis.
If you ‘give’ an addict rehab they may fight you every step of the way, but if you give them heroin they’ll love you.
That said, there are other ways to help those with addiction beyond giving them heroin.
Yes, if the person you're helping has a calibrated moral compass and is mentally sound.
We need both.
Also, somehow you seem to be under an impression that the US does not implement the welfare state paradigm. Did you ever look at the budget and see how much is spent on mandatory and discretionary welfare programs? The fact that it did not fix poverty should give you an idea that maybe it's not Elon Musk being too greedy that is the problem here.
The US has some good welfare state elements, but overall it’s very bad and far inferior to places that do it well. The consequence is vastly higher poverty rates.
Redistribution increases demand in the short term, but in the longer term production shifts accordingly to match. Which really is the whole point: Changing the economy to produce more of what ordinary people need.
Isn't the long-run aggregate supply curve basically completely price inelastic?
This is GP's point, AFAICT.
They're not hoarding grain or iron or silicon or network bandwidth - in fact the only reason they got rich in the first place is because they allocated these physical resources effectively to serve a wide group of people. (See AWS for example. The average computer runs at maybe 10% utilisation for 2 hours a day; whereas theirs are at a high utilisation 24/7.)
As you rightly said, the things that Bezos, Musk and Gates are "hoarding" is capital in the literal sense.
Their net worth isn't made of gold coins sitting in a swimming pool doing nothing, but car factories, server farms and massive logistics networks.
I want to point out that first of all, this isnt even a good comparison, because nobody is talking about just giving people a massive lump sum of cash. Its about putting the money back into the workers creating it, as well as public welfare systems to ensure future safety nets.
And second of all, even if we just gave the money away and people "pissed it away", the money is still being circulated and put back into the economy.
Of course it is easy to say 'put money back into workers creating it'. But the labor market is just that - a market, and no-one is being forced to give away their labor for free or less than it's worth.
If the tax code is riddled with tens of thousands of exceptions that incentivise a gazillion different behaviours, again, that's the will of the people asserting itself via the tax code. It's much harder to unpick those, right? Thus the highly enlightened conversation about making billionaries illegal and such.
> And second of all, even if we just gave the money away and people "pissed it away", the money is still being circulated and put back into the economy.
Yeah, that worked out great and totally did not result in historically high inflation that will now cause a recession with massive job losses (thus hurting the cause of the workers it purports to support). Also, the inflation is totally not a tax that will be paid mostly by poor people or those on fixed incomes.
So the average American wouldn't need to take in a homeless person. The homeless people could fit in ~3% of the vacant homes.
Obviously it's more complicated than that but sometimes capitalism does suck.
[1] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/the-size-and-census...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/realestate/vacancy-rate-b...
But for me, your example is capitalism in the sense that people do it of their own free will. They give up their time and resources to help others without coercion or compulsion. Capitalism is freedom to me, and a natural state that exists outside of the state where people can interact freely with one another. What they do with it is another question entirely.
Others, however, equate capitalism with greed and evil though.
It's hard to run a soup kitchen with no food or volunteers.
44 billion dollars could take most if not all homeless people in this country and see them in apartments for a year.
A couple billion would feed every hungry child in the country.
3% of railroad company profits would give their workers 14 sick days instead of 0.
Theres an infinite amount of good that billionaires could do without even noticing the cost, but they choose not to.
Resource hoarding.
It's very easy to demand accountability of billionaires and supremely difficult to collectively hold our political leaders responsible. The law doesn't require billionaires to be accountable to the general public beyond obeying laws and paying taxes that are due, but our public representatives have higher standards to live up to, and our focus should be on them, not billionaires. All the wealth of American billionaires would add up to a couple years' federal budgets (or perhaps less than a year of federal and the top 4 populous states' budgets).
- The recipients get a greater share of existing resources.
- The changed demand changes supply accordingly. So there might be fewer private jets produced but more food produced, for instance. Thus future production changes too, and the economy is reshaped.
Why do you imagine these things wouldn’t happen?
Ironically, SBF's mom wrote about that and even made a claim that if se has any sense self awareness would make her question her entire career given how her son and his colleagues turned out [0]:
> The reality is that we are all at best compromised agents, whether by biology, social circumstance, or brute luck. The differences among us are differences of degree that do not admit of categorical division into the normal and the abnormal. A morally serious inquiry into the requisite meaning of free will needs to face some basic facts about this society—for starters, that in the United States parental income and education are the most powerful predictors of whether a three-year-old will end up in the boardroom or in prison; that most abusive parents were themselves victims of abuse and neglect; that the norms of one’s peer group when growing up are powerful determinants of behavior; and that traits of emotional reactivity and impulsiveness, which have a large genetic component, are among the more robust predictors of criminal behavior. Such an inquiry would also need to address what evidence would suffice to conclude that Smith could have behaved differently. Is it enough that someone in a similar situation once pulled herself up by her own bootstraps? That the average person does? And how can we be sure that the situations are in fact similar in relevant ways?
0: https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blam...
Furthermore, it was the Sacklar family who used it's wealth to protect its self from personal liability, despite it being a family operation, and avoided some much needed Civil lawsuits in order to put harsher Corporate Laws in place and instead let Perdue pharma take the bulk of the fines [0] and they only had to kick some in an offer a contrite apology for all the death and misery they profit(ed) from.
I'm as anti-CCP as they come and I'm very vocal about it, and I see them as an illegitimate group of thugs and cronies who should be overthrown; but to think that US Pharma, with the help of paying politicians for favourable laws isn't to blame for the opioid crisis is outright delusional.
Moreover, its been suggested by those with ties with the major Mexican drug cartels who supply the US--and have added precautions to help ID contamination--that the rise in fentaynol is coming from domestic sources as poverty has risen dramatically since COVID and made things worse for so many, and thus US based drug dealers (be it of American, Chinese or Russian lineage) have been cutting their drugs with them in order to either stretch them as demand has exceeded supply due to the wide reach [1] on social media as a lucrative but short-lived cash grab, or in order to attract more serious addicts who built tolerances is a more likely scenario than the CCP trying it's hand at re-creating the addiction tactics used in the Sino-Anglo war--they're too busy destroying it's economy and rattle-sobering in the Taiwan straight.
This says it all:
> “Drug dealers are using American innovation to sell lethal products,” executive director Paul DelPonte wrote. “Social media platforms bear some responsibility for these deaths.”
Honestly, it's as if the core story of Breaking Bad, which was a dramatized critique of social divides within the US medical system, law enforcement and hyper crony Capitalist system, has been entirely forgotten despite it being a land mark series of the 2010's that exposed some of the obvious hypocrisy of the US Society.
The truth is if the US had any real interest in solving any of this, they'd likely offer free testing of drugs for users without punishment but since it mainly affects poorer people they really have no interest in doing so since the war on drugs, and homelessness is such a cash cow to funnel public funds into NGOs and non-profits; ironically the very website/DNM the FBI took down (Silkroad) had a reputation system to solve this in addition to a licensed Chemist (Dr.X) who DPR paid [2] to keep it's members safe and who is now serving multiple life sentences in a Super Max prison for doing something innovative to reduce unnecessary deaths and violence in drug deals and a pubic health service!
Ross was many things, naive most above everything else, but this goes to show that it isn't a lack of talent in the US to try and address the immense drug issue it has (and continues to get worse) but rather self-interest, regulatory capture and the Industrial Prison Complex an an entrenched legal system to blame.
0: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/03/purdue-pharma-us-states-agre...
1:https://www.seattletimes.com/business/group-urges-feds-to-in...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20210413041647/https://www.daily...
In my country, technically there's a bail bond of $500 due to an archaic law, advanced to you by the Police, and you have to pay them it if you breach bail conditions.
In reality, if you breach bail, your arrest will become high priority, and you're very likely going into the remand wing once arrested until you can appear in front of a judge, and then you'll also be facing a charge for breaching bail, in addition to the charges you already faced.
And breaching bail is an offense that nearly guarantees that the judge will remand you into custody until your trial date, which could be 3 - 6 months away.
So there's no need for monetary bonds, because the existing consequences are severe enough.
No, the problem is not conditional release (bail), or even the financial penalty (bail amount) that is assigned in advance in the even the conditions are broken.
The particular conditions may be problematic, especially when they (say) require, in practice, either a deposit or other security in the full value of the potential penalty or a contract with a licensed bail agent (which some states, and the federal system, generally do not.) But…
> Bail bondsman are a life saver to a person who can’t afford their bail and have to work in the morning. Obviously being rough comes with the job, but most bondsman aren’t villains they provide a service during a time of bad policy.
…except that bail bondsmen are a major force lobbying state governments for the policies which create the need. They are working very hard to set up, and preserves, the conditions that make them seem like lifesavers.
Most Western’s police forces are completely dysfunctional. France isn’t able to deport a non-French imam performing hate speech on French soil and living at the same address for months[1]. Police and prison forces are often caught performing lip service against both terrorism or white collar crime, practically all the cases of terrorism now include an attacker who has been liberated 2 to 50 times after murder attempts[2], and police/prison forces seem to be using law to excuse liberating obviously-dangerous people rather than using law to keep them in. So, the theory that if you break bail, you become arrestable, needs to meet actual practices in that country. Let’s hope the US govt sees enough political interest in finishing SBF to actually ensure he doesn’t flee.
[1] https://newsrnd.com/news/2022-12-08-moroccan-imam-iquioussen...
[2] For example William M in yesterday’s Paris attack (Article in French) https://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/plusieurs-blesses-apres-d...
But I might be wrong about that.
But, given the fragmented nature of policing in the US, I can see how what works here might not work there.
You can pay your bail yourself. Say a judge gives you a $5k bail. You give the government 5k and they hold it until your case is complete. Then they either return it or they deduct your fines etc from it and return anything left.
Most people don’t do this. They go to a bail bond company, which charges them $500 and then puts up the 5k for them. They get the 5k back when the defendant shows up and keep the $500.
People do skip out on bail pretty regularly, so there’s no guarantee the bondsman gets his money back. But he’s invested in finding the skipper at least as much as the government. At least in theory. The US generally doesn’t go after people very hard for skipping out on bail, they just wait until you get detained for some other crime and then arrest you for having a warrant out. Well, sometimes they still let you go after that.
And more on bail reform: https://youtu.be/xQLqIWbc9VM
We could argue most people would make a run for it; I’d argue that a trial should be held more quickly. No prison time for more than it takes to schedule a case with a judge. Arrest the person, have a trial starting within a week or so (or don’t arrest).
Part of what happens today is, they set a high bail. Lock people up for months to years without a trial, then people agree to a plea deal before the trial starts. It’s a way around due process. Imo a direct violation of the 8th amendment.
Bail used to make a tad more sense when there wasn’t an organized police force but random citizens arresting you. You could post bail to farm for the season, or what have you. Then they’d have the trial when the judge held court again (after he farmed his fields).
Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes and the like are all scumbags, but if you give me the choice between living next to them, or someone arrested for almost any other crime, I'm picking the fraudster that depended on their now ruined public image to defraud people.
Morally, I think people like Madoff are worse than many gang members or low-level violent criminals. That doesn't change the fact that they are far less of an immediate threat to the people around them, particularly now that they have been exposed. A confidence scam fraudster who has been exposed is a bit like a paraplegic murderer. They may be morally reprehensible, but they're effectively unlikely to reoffend in a few months awaiting trial.
If you honestly would rather live next to the average person arrested for assault or robbery than Bankman-Fried while both await trial, be my guest, but you can probably understand why others might feel differently.
Like many things, cash bail is effectively "discriminatory" in that it tends to hurt poor criminals more than white collar ones. That still doesn't mean discrimination is the primary reason it exists, or that that somehow negates any of its benefits.
Out of curiosity, why do you think this? Grand theft of wealth based on fraud doesn't strike me as morally worse than gangbanging, armed robbery, human trafficking, etc.
(To detail my own calibration, I would say someone like Henry Kissinger is morally worse than low-level criminals. Typically I think it goes theft < violence < warmongering, etc.)
Someone who is intellectually mediocre, grows up around violent scumbags, and ends up robbing others instead of working a job is reprehensible, but I would say less so than a Bernie Madoff who was already wealthy, highly capable, and decided to defraud people of their life savings over decades. Madoff is not someone like Martin Shkreli bullshitting wealthy investors out of some portion of their wealth, he's someone who ruined people's lives.
People often discount "economic" crimes that they can't directly see the harms of, like insurance fraud, welfare fraud, tax cheating, corruption etc. That's easy to do in places like the US, but becomes more obviously problematic in places like Southern Italy or Argentina whose economies have gradually been destroyed by a widespread acceptance of corruption, cheating and "economic" crimes.
There was a guy in Russia who became famous as the organizer of the largest financial pyramid in the country's history; it all fell apart very publicly, with many people losing their savings, and the guy was on the run for years until finally caught and convicted in yet another highly publicized court. That's it, right?
But literally as soon as he was out of prison, he starts a new company. Same exact name as before. And he openly advertised it as a financial pyramid this time! One year later, he walked away with millions more. And they couldn't even sue him for it because he was completely honest about the finances!
Then he went on to do the same shit but with crypto in other countries: India, China, Nigeria, Peru, Ghana, Thailand...
I think the main thing is that we haven't seen what he might do now that he knows for sure that he's (by default) headed for a lifetime in jail.
It seems that before the arrest, he was pretty delusional / "high on his own supply" and believed he was going to somehow talk his way out of trouble, as he'd ostensibly been doing for so long.
So the thought experiment now is: do we believe that there's anything nefarious that he could do now, that he'd stopped himself from doing back when he was still trying to maintain an illusion?
For example, he could have various wallet private keys (secretly?) memorized [1], and could take steps to move the funds to new wallets.
TBH the idea that his (fiat) transactions are limited to $1k is a little laughable for someone who until recently, and perhaps still, has access to billions in crypto.
Of course, that's what he wants me to think. I'm ready to learn that my take is too naive. But so far, evidence of a bigger plot is missing for me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff#Post-release_act...
I'm not so sure that's true... do you have data to support that? I can think of some counter examples pretty easily off the top of my head -- Billy McFarland, Michael Avenatti, etc.
Comments like this are really bizarre. It's like asking for "data" that says looking both ways before crossing the street is a good idea and reduces the frequency of pedestrian fatalities. Your two examples further OP's point. Those two people are asshole fraudsters, but they don't present a physical danger to people around them.
Since when is it "bizarre" to ask someone if they've based their assertion off of hard data? I replied to at-w's fairly remarkable claim that white collar criminals are less likely to harm people while out on bail than non-white collar criminals. That assertion is not a forgone conclusion like the wisdom of "look both ways before you cross the street". Clearly it's reasonable to ask the poster if they're basing their assertion off of some hard data.
> Those two people are asshole fraudsters, but they don't present a physical danger to people around them.
We're talking about the propensity to harm others while out on bail. Harm is not limited to physical harm. The two examples I gave were of white collar criminals who continued to defraud/extort others while they were out on bail.
“BUH BUH BUH WHERE IS YOUR EVIDENCE?”
I believe many/most white collar criminals are morally reprehensible people who often deserve far greater punishment than even violent criminals for the harm that they do. That doesn't change the fact that in the generally brief period awaiting trial, they are far less of an immediate threat to those around them than even a low-level violent criminal.
Street crime may be a better phrase.
That is explicitly factored into the decision of whether to grant bail and determining flight risk. It's probably not going out on a limb to say SBF's $250 MILLION dollar bail had something to do with his wealth and the flight risk it presented, and isn't standard procedure.
>If a criminal is deemed extremely likely to commit violent crime on bail, they simply shouldn't get bail, the amount they pay or are able to should be moot
This is also how it works right now. Sometimes established systems have gotten some things right in their thousands of years of development, even when they're not perfect. Presumably nobody's arguing the pudgy crypto fraudster who has never been so much as accused of a violent crime is "extremely likely to commit violent crime on bail."
One third of incarcerated folks in the US are there for possession charges. Not intent to distribute, just possession. No bail hence incarceration. How is a person carrying weed a bigger threat to society than a scammer like SBF?
Additionally, an interesting question with regards to money is if he's stashed some of those customer funds somewhere. If he has, then even 250 million wouldn't necessarily be an insurmountable barrier since billions are missing. Of course regardless of whether he has access to such stolen funds he'd never need to post the bail as it's unsecured; he'd either abscond and not pay 250 million, or stay and not need to pay in the first place.
Suppose he owns the $400+ million in Robinhood equity that he, FTX, and others are currently in a legal battle over. That asset would be within the reach of the automatic default judgement in favor of government that comes with bail forfeiture, even if SBF had fled to a country without extradition.
To return to topic: yes, a person arrested for carrying weed is more likely to do the same again while on bail than this guy is to repeat his fraud while on bail. The fact that it makes no sense to incarcerate people for small time weed possession is a completely different matter.
Was it before he was let out on bail or after?
What makes someone who deals weed keep commiting crimes after they receive bail but with someone like SBF it's different?
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html
Police do make a lot of drug possession arrests, but the actual prison population who are there for possession is nowhere near 33%.
In any case: it's clearly a minority, yet a sizable one.
Which two numbers? The only number I quoted is 20%, and that's for all drug inmates, not just possession. We don't have the numbers for possession, but they're surely much, much lower.
> One third of incarcerated folks in the US are there for possession charges.
In Most cases, it is the society which forces them to do shit. The same is not true for SBF or Holmes. They chose to fraud people out of choice.
The fact that there is a bail bond industry sounds horrible to me.
Bail has become a bit of a joke here.
Anyway I looked up Washington law and it seems the problem is that everyone has a right to bail, even those who are a great risk to public safety. Judges should have some discretion here.
Cash bail is a horrible, unjust system, but some of the replacements that have popped up are no good either, especially because they make people think that cash bail is the solution and you end up with society regressing.
We would like to know also. Our judges are off their rockers here.
I would honestly be ok with no or reasonable bail for income (like in California?) and then no leniency for not showing up to court.
Yes, what California has done is you cannot set bail at an amount someone cannot post, but judges can deny bail for those deemed a public safety threat or those who have skipped bail. Individuals are assessed based on “risk to the community” and whether they get bail is based on that. Seems reasonable to me.
Very good changes! Very empowering for her
Part of it is that the bail bond industry can afford lobbyists, and probably a bigger part is that "tough on crime" grandstanding by politicians is nearly always a winning strategy. It is too easy to claim a politician that advances any kind of reform will be pilloried as someone who is trying to put savage criminals back on the street, your street.