Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)".
It's tough as someone who is a strong proponent for strong civil liberties seeing their philosophy's verbiage being co-opted as such (but the former PM/PMM in me respects game)
> At the end of the day I expect the quality of discourse to dip: being afraid of contradictory opinions is the first step in intellectual decline.
In Turkiye, Hungary, a lot of Latin America (notably Mexico, Brazil), Russia in the early 2010s, CEE EU member states (Yes Czechs and Poles, continue to be high and mighty on HN and Reddit until Babis and PiS win again the next couple months thanks to your parents in Brno or Wroclaw), Israel, South Korea, and India, this meant the rise of independent blogs and media - sort of like what Substack is trying but failing to do.
Plenty of senior journalists who felt over-muzzled would split off and form their own independent blog companies and those increasingly supplemented legacy press orgs amongst leadership, because even an illiberal democracy, you need some unbiased info.
Of course, unlike the US, plenty of journalists in those countries have bar licenses and know how to parry judicial overreach.
It also meant the opposition had balls and wasn't afraid to lie if needed as well. Politics is a brawl, not a Socratic session in a Gov94 Seminar, but these are also countries where junior party members from opposing parties beating each up with fists or a tire iron is a rite of passage.
> Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)".
"Personal liberty" is a euphemism for discrimination against "out groups," based on their ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or political orientation. The Masterpiece Cake Shop debacle[0] was framed on the right as an issue of religious liberty.
"Free markets," the other "pillar" in the Bezos letter, is obviously a euphemism for opposing government regulation or oversight. In this case, I imagine it means in particular opposition to labor unions.
The solution was trivially easy: go to another cake shop that doesn't not have such an objection, but that wouldn't be heroic enough.
[0] https://www.aceprensa.com/english/united-states-approves-fir...
That is your opinion,but that was not the opinion of the Supreme Court. They found that the Colorado statute in question was based on religious hostility and therefore discriminatory against the cake shop. (That is, the "personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer.) Agree or disagree, I encourage you to read the full opinion.
Moreover, there is no law against "compelled custom work." Had the cake shop discriminated based on the customer's race, rather then their sexual orientation, the refusal would have been illegal.
They did not evaluate if the ""personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer". The Court explicitly avoided ruling broadly on the intersection of anti-discrimination laws and rights to free exercise.
But I don't see how the logic is wrong in my equivalent example. You can't ban people from your shop based on protected characteristics - everyone should be able to buy the same things from you, but that doesn't mean you can enforce that people do custom work for you. Maybe that statement works really well here, but breaks down in other examples, but that was my interpretation of the validity of the case.
But we're here to discuss the rhetoric in the right around "personal liberty." The cake case is an example of using that rhetoric to justify discrimination, which is exactly what happened. That is the effect of the SCOTUS decision, regardless of whether they used those words verbatim.
It is similar to when a criminal case get thrown out because investigators messed up and mishandled evidence. It says nothing about the merit of the case.
It's not wrong, it's literally the free market FFS. People are mad at the cake shop for denying business to gay people, and they do not care whether it's legal or not. If it is suddenly legal to employ literal children, I will boycott places that do it, regardless of the law, because the law is not the be all, end all of morality
"But but but it's legal" has never been an acceptable excuse for doing something morally wrong. If christians are upset that lots of people consider it morally wrong to treat gay people differently, they should consider that it's okay people do not agree with them, and that the US legally protects people who have different values than you do, and that's an important part of freedom. Banning me from boycotting the cake shop that doesn't serve gay people is literally against my freedom of association.
Christians have done the same thing for decades. Porn is protected speech, but that hasn't stopped them from literally advising the president, on both sides of the aisle, for decades, to ban it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl...
Funny how it's just good christian values when they do it, but "cancel culture" when they don't like the free market outcome.
But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck. If you as an independent commentator are tied to a centralized platform, you are a feature to be sold, and will be muzzled or deprecated if needed.
Well, they're not an independent news organization. It was supposed to be a newsletter service, whatever the pivots.
But in any case, even if they don't have the "news", the breadth and quality of commentary there, one never sees in establisment media. And the option to cut down the shit is trivially easy: just read your subscribed newsletters (in your inbox preferably) and skip any other feed Substack has.
Wasn't one selling point of Substack that you could easily leave with your subscribers, so substack writers aren't really for sale and can't be muzzled/deprecated? Or did it change since Substack was launed?
Also are you thinking about specific writer(s)/events when you wrote 'muzzled or deprecated if needed.'?
Yup. Just more doublespeak.
Remember "free enterprise"? Sounds awesome right? Yes, please, gimme some more of that freedom.
Imagine my surprise apon learning the "free enterprise" advocates actually meant freedom from consequences.
The power to impose this new wonderland, is almost within reach. Where before it failed, greater are the possibilities for it to succeed this time around. Nothing to worry about, freedom is for those who deserve it.
this is fine if he really means it. This is the most important thing we get from the Constitution recognizing our rights as humans. It remains to be seen if it's really just to copy what what Musk is doing at X which is amplifying far right posts along with enragement (engagement) posts, and he deamplifie everything else.
- free markets
this is worrisome. it sounds to me like they want free markets for billionaires and their arm twisting of the current Congress and Trump, and -NOT- actually giving lower and middle class an equal chance in "free markets", because it can't be free if corps are allowed to run hog wild over rights, monopolies, and colluding between each other to dominate markets.
EU [0], not US. There's a reason JD Vance was harping about "free speech" and "personal freedom" during MSC.
Hot take, but if we as Ds sacrifice Bruxelles to bring back Obama era tech donors who are overly impacted by the Digital Services Act, I'm fine with it.
[0] - https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
Less than 40% of the adult population has a college degree. Less than 45% of voters have college degrees. Yet we took for granted the ascendence of ideas that few non-college-educated voters have been able to digest and see the evidence for. That it happened at all is pretty amazing, yet our only response has been to whine and moan that it hasn't happened faster or more completely. We could see that a lot of people weren't really getting it, and as long as we thought they were a minority, our response was who cares, they're losing. If they aren't educating themselves and keeping up to date, they're simply bad people and if they're confused and angry, fuck 'em, they deserve it.
It is not necessarily wrong as a moral stance, but it's not a strategy for succeeding in a democracy where those people can tip the balance of an election. As we felt more and more entitled to our triumph and got more and more angry and whiny about the bad people holding us back, surprise surprise, those people decided we weren't the best party to represent them anymore.
If there's any lesson we should take from this, it's that if we hold people in contempt, we can't count on their votes.
There's nothing coherent behind the shift to Trump except mutual contempt. I hope we are getting to a point where we can talk about our own political failings without reflexively changing the subject to the voters' moral failings.
Also, we should consider that when our definition of a good person includes the rapid assimilation of new information and ideas, the ability to be a good person is not evenly distributed. We're only a tiny way towards building a world where that ideal isn't elitist and exclusionary. A lot of people were not raised with that definition of moral goodness. Acting in good faith, they did not equip themselves with the necessary skills, because they thought they could be good people without them. What we're demanding from them now is that they either exercise intellectual skills and habits they don't have, or they speak and believe in obedience to those of us who have them. I don't see a good way around it, but we shouldn't be surprised if they're unhappy about it.
Right now, the POTUS is so much reducing freedom in US that it's enough for him to say that it doesn't like something (like DEI) for a lot of companies to trash DEI in the hope to please him. And it's enough for the WaPo to change what will be the content of its "opinion" pages...
And EU is the one reducing freedom ?????? You should really wake up guys
60 Minutes did a recent segment on German speech laws.
I don't buy JD Vance's argument, but I am fine sacrificing the EU if it means Dem-turned-GOP donors (especially on the Tech side) return to our party.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/german-woman-given-harsher-senten...
> Maja R was sentenced to a weekend in jail after her comments because she had a previous conviction for theft and had not attending the court hearing for the case.
I'm not supportive of defamation laws but clearly you (and this journalist) are sensationalizing what happened.
Your comment was near enough to the facts that I was wrong to be a scold.
* https://archive.ph/vml0k German newspaper
* https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/57108 random English discussion of source
I also thought the GP was just throwing fire. But after reading more into the matter, I'm a little too disgusted to dig anymore.
You can find TONS of examples of people in Europe being jailed or having cops come to their house for something they said on social media. In some cases for things as simple as criticizing a politician.
Here’s a high profile one, but I can find you plenty more examples.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson
>On 25 May 2018, Robinson was arrested for a breach of the peace while live streaming outside Leeds Crown Court[170][174]
“Breach of peace” means he was saying something that they didn’t want him to say. This is a real curtailing of free speech.
>companies to trash DEI
DEI is often racist and many of its implementations in modern companies violate the civil rights act. Companies are correct to be ditching it because it poses a big risk for discrimination lawsuits.
I actually spoke with lawyers about this very recently and reverse discrimination lawsuits are a booming business right now because there are so many clear cut examples of violations of the civil rights act.
And that reason has nothing to do with J.D.Vance having any concern at all about free speech and personal freedom. Not just zero of it, his goal is to remove both. He would love Europe to become fascist which is incompatible with both.
What does not contribute to the conversation is to pretend otherwise. To pretend that he has a point or any other meaning then to grab power and punish dissent.
What does this mean? What does the US VP have to do with EU law?
Social Media organizations like FB/Meta and Google have historically been some of the largest donors to the Dems, and their flip was a massive reason why 2024 went the way it did.
Vance has been consistently lobbying against the DSA over the past few weeks, and that's where his "free speech" argument is coming from.
I don't really care one way or the other, but I care about ensuring that large donors who flipped from D to R return to the D fold.
What you end up seeing is the GOP raises nearly as competitive as the DNC when you add Trump PACs plus WinRed.
Not any more, it's been made quite clear that's over and is now an extortion racket against Ukraine. Long term consequences of this are unclear.
Again: what's the argument for trying to ram US social media right wing propaganda into an unwilling Europe, while banning tiktok?
To get the tech oligarchs back on the Dems side of course, just like alephnerd said above.
> while banning tiktok?
Is this ideological contradiction bothering you? Well, unfortunately the world is full of these. Norway is a huge oil and gas exporter and yet maintains very stringent standards on its domestic usage. Why do they profit off exporting O&G to countries with less state capacity to manage the externalities of O&G? Well them's the shakes. Pick your priorities. For me, I'm fine if tech companies stay unregulated if I don't get 4 more years of MAGA politics. I'd prefer neither 4 more years of MAGA politics nor unregulated tech companies but I also want to build affordable condos in Beverly Hills so ;)
Like any other non-Western European and North American country, politics in the CEE is very much about those networks and connections you cultivated - not really ideological - and almost everyone mid-high level in Hungarian politics today started their careers in the 1990s.
Politics in much of the CEE amongst that generation appears much more mercenary than ideological.
Anecdotally, I've heard the biggest reason my Hungarian coworkers parents voted for Fidesz was largely because of the cash benefits they would provide before elections - same as Bolsa Familia in Brazil, TOKİ in Turkiye, and Freebies in India (all illiberal democracies have a similar form of patronage politics, this is a very incomplete list)
The public didn't want to hear that and gave supermajority to Orbán for the next decade and a half.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-results-and-voter-demo...
You're definitely right about Die Linke's demographics though.
(Yes, I know that Die Linke aren't literally Communist, and I know AfD aren't literally Nazis, but Die Linke descended from the legal successor of a Marxist-Leninist party, as AfD descended from the legal successor of a neo-Nazi party, so I think my analogy holds.)
> Democrats have had since 2016 to learn that lesson
Biden won in 2020 pretty resoundingly, so the lesson they learned from 2016 was enough to win decisively in 2020. Parties don't stay in power indefinitely, conditions change and incumbents all across the world — not just the US — lost in 2024.
So while the number of swing states has reduced a lot in 2016, the strength of republicans in the south hasn't changed a lot since 2000.
Not too get too political but if the these people had done their jobs in the first place, there would be no Trump in the WH presently.
The problem with them is that they are all for the status quo which to the average voter means "more of the same".
See the current compete U-turn from the German conservatives who less than 24H after being elected decided to break their main campaign promise and renege on doing what they said they would do.
The far right and the far left are not growing in a vacuum, they are growing because people are getting tired of being lied to.
what kind of promise was it?
I vote for them because they represent change and progress at a steady, measured pace — not stagnation and status quo. You're discounting big campaign achievements like Obamacare and Biden's infrastructure plan.
I look at what we are seeing today. Trump is more powerful than he as ever been. In Europe, European-skeptic parties are rising, the far right and the far left are rising as well and the center is slowly crumbling.
Those are facts. So the question is why are the center right/left politicians not acknowledging the problems and trying to find adequate solutions? Why do they let the far right and the far left being seen as the ones who are/will be doing something?
The horseshoe theory is real. If you look at France, the far left and the far right merged their votes and forced the previous government to resign.
If that is not a sign that something is seriously wrong, then I don't know what to tell you.
> I look at what we are seeing today. Trump is more powerful than he as ever been. In Europe, European-skeptic parties are rising, the far right and the far left are rising as well and the center is slowly crumbling.
> Those are facts. So the question is why are the center right/left politicians not acknowledging the problems and trying to find adequate solutions? Why do they let the far right and the far left being seen as the ones who are/will be doing something?
>The horseshoe theory is real. If you look at France, the far left and the far right merged their votes and forced the previous government to resign. If that is not a sign that something is seriously wrong, then I don't know what to tell you.
I don't disagree with you. I want to be glib – not to you, but just in general – and say that it's simply a marketing problem, and that Biden/Obama have had strong policies, but fear sells better than hope.
For Obama specifically, he has and had the chance to be the face of the left, center-left, democrats, whatever you want to call it – the opposition – but he has continually failed to even appear to challenge the far right. It's disappointing that, for one of the best orators of our time, he's essentially hidden himself away and stayed on the sidelines, only emerging to endorse candidates every election cycle like it's Groundhog Day.
I suspect he does it out of fear of being accused of seeking a third-term (despite Trump openly flirting with that idea multiple times this month alone); or as an attempt to lie low and protect his legacy in the history books. But we're living in an era where the far right doesn't hesitate to rewrite history, and Trump continues to systematically destroy that legacy piece-by-piece.
I don't understand why people give a pass to Communism when it caused an order of magnitude more suffering than Nazism.
No wonder that about 75% Czechs are dissatisfied with current PM Fiala.
https://cvvm.soc.cas.cz/en/press-releases/political/politici...
Opposition is even worse. They do what public surveys and Babis (the leading oligarch here) tells them to do. I expect lowest voter turnout because quite a lot people don't see any point in voting. Which is ok for me. We need rethinking about current approach of giving our responsibility to unknown electorate.
There are also obvious struggles within Brussels whether the unrealistic eco-plans are going to be at least watered down or no, and the EC is still trying to push them through as much as possible.
In that environment, a "media-talented" oppositional politician who professes mild Euroskepticism is going to have an easy time winning.
Join a local party and observe how the discussion is not really centred around screwing their voters over, hopefully.
My take was about as yours before I tried to do something and realized how hard it is.
I expect it to stay exactly the same
It was already like this before, it's just afaik the pillars weren't publicly acknowledged
What were the previous pillars? Social justice and progressive ideology. "Diversity of opinion" matters now all of sudden?
It's always funny to hear about media bias with obvious very large alternatives available. It was very eery hearing about the Media's supposed Liberal biases through the 2020 and 2024 election campaigns with Fox News fully dominating viewership numbers [1]. And now here we go again with print media.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news...
If we assume, for example sake, the country is exactly 50% left and 50% right, it makes sense that Fox, as the sole 'big' right wing news would dominate ratings.
Then you have CNN and MSNBC as left leaning outlets, so they outnumber Fox, but split viewership. According to the link above, if they merged, they'd have about the same viewership as Fox, which makes sense.
So many comments trying to compare to Europe, or try to excise liberal from left seem to miss the point.
When an election so divisive picks a side, there's your new baseline. Not what it was last year. Not what CNN did in the Clinton years, or what it's claiming to do today.
Are they not in favor of Democrats? How is that left leaning?
I.e. to someone else, Fox News isn't advocating to deport all non-whites, therefore they're just the right side of the left-wing blob.
In real life, left-wing means left-wing relative the population, not relative to you personally.
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/anticipatory-obedience-bassin-p...
> What do you think of our coverage?’ ‘Were our reporters being too hard on the White House and Trump?’ ‘Should [CNN chief executive] Jeff Zucker be replaced?’ It was nothing explicit, but I got the drift.”
That’s just like asking for evidence that Chinese media isn’t biased about saying anything negative about the government.
Jeff Bezos wanted the Washington Post to go soft on Trump. Here are concrete examples of his interference:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/25/jeff-bezos-killed-washington...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/03/washing...
Now your turn.
In reality, CNN and MSNBC ideologically agree as much as FoxNews and Newsmax in that they don't. And CNN especially invented optimizing coverage for attention over viewpoint consistency (esp between 2000 and 2015).
But if we pretend that only those three exist(obviously they don't, you have ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, and many, many more), it's not necessarily wrong to say that media has a liberal bias, since '67% of stations are left leaning.' It just leaves out the fact that nobody really watches them in numbers.
As I see it we have one major right wing news network in America in the form of Fox; along with some smaller ones like One News Network and talk radio. We have several centrist news networks like CNN and ABC. We have several neo-liberal news sources like the New York Times.
However, we have no truly left wing mainstream news and only one major network (MSNBC) that is marginally left wing.
So it seems to me that America's media is biased towards the right whether you are counting number of outlets or number of viewers.
Someone like Bernie Sanders would be central-left here. But he's pretty much an exception in America.
No he wouldn't, have you seen his policies? He is more left wing than even Scandinavian countries, he wants the Employee funds that Sweden tried in the 80s and never went back to because it was too extreme left for them.
The Scandinavian countries aren't very left wing. They're just very rich so they have lots of money for welfare programs. But they're pretty anti immigrant. I would consider Spain more left wing.
The European right and American right essentially speak from the same ideology. As the Republicans have moved away from free markets, free trade and immigration. Trump, Farage, Weidel and Le Pen could all work happily in coalition together.
The European left has become so fractured that it's hard to make clear comparisons. Which German political party would Bernie Sanders want to join of SPD, Greens, or Die Linke? In the UK would he work with the SNP, Labour or Corbyn?
Is an odd fit I would have him with Labour. In canada he would lead the NDP.
Looking at the CDU’s manifesto I think it’s overall more palatable to the Republicans. As the Democrats would likely never support corporate tax cuts or cannabis restrictions.
https://www.cdu.de/app/uploads/2025/01/wahlprogramm-cdu-csu-...
Instead of the obvious problem that Inequality is rising and we need to substantially raise taxes on the rich and reduce them for everyone else to close the runaway gap.
The problem with these solutions is that the math doesn't add up.
Either there are too few rich people in reality, and even if you can collect 200 percent from them - it won't affect the overall picture (and in the end there will be even fewer of them, and you'll have to raise taxes for everyone).
Or, if we expand the category of rich - a poverty funnel is created, where taxes on the "rich" protect the "super-rich" from competition. What difference does it make that you have to pay 90% if all the money is yours, because no one will invest in competing with you, since success will bring them 10%, and failure will take everything?
Everywhere in the world, the rich pay less. Even in countries with formally progressive tax rates, there are a huge number of subsidies and programs that in the end of the day boil down to the fact that the effective tax rate for the rich is lower (even if this means simply reducing their competition so that they get more money and pay a "progressive" tax on it).
Because the problem is not inequality, the problem is poverty. And any measures that discourage production in the end of the day increase poverty. For this reason, any construction of socialism always ends in hunger. Because what difference does it make what just and fair distribution system you came up with if your production fell ten, a hundred or a thousand times because of such a system?
While there is truth is what you say about simply redistributing money is going to directly get people the goods and services required since that is not directly production.
It does have second order effect of changing the weighting of what society produces. If people are too poor to afford food why would you bother to grow it.
Taxing should be about keeping winner take all effects in reasonable check to keep markets actually functional for a good proportion of the participants.
There is no such thing in economic as "people are too poor to afford food". Growing food - is like in the start of economic chain, if people can't afford food - they starting to grow it themselves, and unaffordability disappears. Food can be unaffordable only if you hinder the production of it with your "smart" and "fair" taxation system, for example like socialists do.
I probably should have been more clear in my statement and put "farmers" instead of "you". It wasn't really a statement about food but about market access and participants ability to signal demand.
You second statement is just boringly stupid.
Certain areas are too densely populated to produce food.
Typically, you need land to grow food or keep livestock, many poor don’t own land.
That said, it is unlikely to dip that far.
Then the people who care only about money and power can divide and conquer.
> divide and conquer
Below $1M NW, you are probably labor. Above $10M NW, you are probably capital. These thresholds come from asking the question "does a conservative estimation of the passive income from these assets replace a wage?" -- below $1M, no, above $10M, yes, feel free to adjust by playing with the assumptions or plugging in wacky edge cases. The point is that incentives determine so much about politics and the incentives of each individual tend to heavily favor one side or the other which tends to translate into politically relevant policy preferences that favor one side or the other.
The tax code is comically tilted in favor of capital. We should fix that. Unearned income shouldn't be taxed less than earned income, for a start. Also, if I can pay property tax on my house, mega-billionaires can pay property tax on their stock pile. But these are details, and focusing too much on details can be a distraction from the root issue: the tax code is comically tilted in favor of capital, and we should fix that.
E.g.
> These thresholds come from asking the question "does a conservative estimation of the passive income from these assets replace a wage?"
Net worth doesn't necessarily generate any passive income. You could own a lot of shares in your business that are temporarily spiking, but you can't sell them for some reason. Net worth is a bad way to think about this, because it makes people think billionaires have billions of dollars in cash ready to be taxed away. When in fact if you want people to pay tax on their stock pile, you're talking about taking their property away from them because of how much the market happens to value it right now. Unlike property tax, which is to pay for the services weight of your property on the local area.
What hard line? The hard line I didn't draw with the "what percent of your money" formulation?
> Net worth is a bad way to think about this, because it makes people think billionaires have billions of dollars in cash ready to be taxed away.
If it's not cash it can't be taxed? I brought up real estate as a counterexample to the entire stable of "it's tooo haaaaard" arguments, and that's the weakest of them. I was expecting something taller, like the liquidity argument. But real estate comfortably refutes them all and you didn't even try to deal with that.
> you're talking about taking their property away from them
The government wouldn't hesitate for a second to take my property when they are taxing me waaay heavier than mega billionaires. Why the fuck should I be the slightest bit sympathetic to the sanctity of their literal entitlement?
Some people put property rights on an altar and treat them as a fundamental principle, but here's the thing: property rights (at their worst) have been used to institute and defend literal slavery. If you want to put them on an altar, if you want to treat them as a fundamental principle rather than a tool to economically link investment with return, I'm going to make you own that and defend it. Do you want to go down that road?
So you believe, if a company is failing (owners took the risk and are failing), your job is secure? How? You do realize they can fire you at any moment. Job security is a myth. You risk taking a job just like a investor betting on a company.
But they still risk all their capital as well. If you take a loan and use it to open a restaurant, are you taking more risk than an employee who's paid?
This doesn't seem that complicated.
There doesn't need to be a crisp threshold. Progressive taxation without treating labor income as more heavily taxed than generic income which in turn is more heavily taxed than capital gains would be a good start.
This is objectively false.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
> Instead of the obvious problem that Inequality is rising
I'm old enough to remember when progs all shrieked that poverty was the big scary problem. Capitalism solved that with minimal expense. You know that scary 15% in poverty figure you hear during election season? That's based on census income data, which excludes ~90% of all welfare programs, even CASH programs like refundable tax credits!
So with poverty overwhelmingly sorted, they've moved on to inequality! But even calculations of income inequality are doped up--high earners incomes are counted BEFORE taxes, and low earners BEFORE benefits. Keep that in mind whenever progs advocate for more welfare spending--even if you give it to them, they won't count it! They exclude it from the very calculations which they use as evidence of the need for ever more spending!
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSN40188
And
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134
And
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
You aren't looking at the right data. This is why it's so hard to educate the public about this, even intelligent people on HN get it wrong.
Sure, wealth inequality is growing, but this isn't a problem, it's merely an emotionally resonant issue. The left love it for the same reason they lofted the 'poverty' banner for so long--it's a Philosopher's Stone. This particular stone hails from a failed German novelist and promises to transmute other people's money into votes!
Regardless, median income[0] and median net worth[1] are rising and poverty is in the doldrums--points which make it difficult to make an honest argument that we are in need of radical change.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL192090005Q [3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gini-coefficient-before-t...
>There are limited amount of real assets available at any given time
This is correct.
>and wealth inequality means regular people hold less of the assets each year, making them poorer
This is not. New wealth is constantly being created. There isn't a fixed amount of pie on the table.
How much of the money made by the Harry Potter Franchise went to JK rowling vs her publishers? Supposedly she got a 15% royalty rate, which is considered "High"
That should be revealing on it's own.
- Market prices: ~15% annualized increase over the last two years
- House prices: 5-7% annualized increase
- Gold: 10-12% annualized increase
- Compared to GDP growth of only 2.1-2.7% annualized
If GDP growth is only 2.7% while the wealth of the top who own assets is up 15% annualized, where is the 12.3% coming from? It's coming the bottom.
We live in an economy that has wealth redistribution. It's being distributed from the majority to a small minority.
In other words, yes the pie is growing, but the slice of a the top 10% of the pie is growing much faster.
Top 1% Top 5% Top 10% Top 25% Top 50% Bottom 50% All Taxpayers
Number of Returns 1,535,899 7,679,495 15,358,991 38,397,477 76,794,954 76,794,954 153,589,908
Average Income Taxes Paid $653,730 $187,468 $108,251 $50,963 $27,891 $667 $14,279
Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $6,182,180 $7,745,525 $10,613,602 $13,191,209 $1,531,038 $14,722,247
1 2-5 6-10 11-25 26-50 51-100
Number of Returns 1,535,899 6,143,596 7,679,496 23,038,486 38,397,477 76,794,954
Income Taxes Paid (Millions) $1,004,063 $435,594 $222,966 $294,234 $185,068 $51,225
Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $2,309,785 $1,563,345 $2,868,077 $2,577,607 $1,531,038
Average Tax Rate 25.9% 18.9% 14.3% 10.3% 7.2% 3.3%
Average Per Capita Income $2,521,256.28 $375,966.29 $203,573.91 $124,490.69 $67,129.59 $19,936.70
[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/th...
That's the crux. It's the same in almost all developed countries, we all have been getting more income, but most of us are not getting richer. The widening of the scissors is becoming more and more obvious, because even middle incomes suffered hard during the cost of living crisis, and continue to suffer.
For example, Kennebunkport is a very fucking wealthy town in Maine, including having a large vacation property for the Bush family. My father's entire business as a half retired contractor is predicated on rich, gay, techbros moving here from California and just throwing money at him until stuff is built. He can literally double a project price overnight, and they give him a bottle of $200 wine for it. The same is true of many businesses in the area.
This is one of the reasons nobody builds lower class housing. Profit is usually percentage based. Why would you build ten starter homes, and work your ass off pleasing a bunch of poor people who have to be careful with their money because even getting a loan nowadays is stupidly difficult, when you can just build a couple mcmansions for the same output effort, where a bunch of rich fucks will come in and buy it in cash, for above market price, no questions asked, so you don't even have to build it well because the rich people are buying vibes and dreams, not an actual house, and they will happily eat a much higher profit margin per product.
Large income disparity means that people stop serving the lower market, because Wall St won't invest in something that doesn't make line go up as much as just treating rich people as idiots that will pay stupid prices for things.
This "makes sense", or at least is obvious when you remember that at a certain point of wealth, you have more money than you know what to do with, and you still cannot buy even a single extra second of time with infinite money, so spending time being discerning with your purchases is explicitly a waste.
The US was #1 on the Human Development Index in 1995, and is now #20, sandwiched between Slovenia and the UAE.
What your link does show is widening income inequality.
Levels of income have risen. Comforts and services available are not as simple to measure as income, but consumption (a decent proxy) is also trending upwards.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.CON.TOTL.CD?location...
This trope is getting tiring to be honest. There are very clear issues with immigration in many countries. The issue is that for the last 20 years when these issues where brought up, the main parties just dismissed them and ostracized anyone who dare bring up the subject.
This failure to address the problem is what is fueling the rise of the far right everywhere except in 1 country, Denmark. Why? Because they actually decided to listen to their constituents and do something about it. Is it perfect no? But if you look at the result of their action, the far right in Denmark is comparatively low compared to many other European countries.
It's time for the leaders of many countries to stop pretending that problems don 't exist and acknowledged that the way the immigration issue was handled for the last 20 years is an utter abject failure.
There is a very interesting article that can be found here: https://dnyuz.com/2025/02/24/in-an-age-of-right-wing-populis...
Like I said, it's not perfect and even they know that.
I live in an European capital and haven't seen any of these issues that immigration is supposedly creating. AFAICT theses issues only exist in the minds of people, and thus in the media.
Regardless, let's say I'm wrong and immigration is indeed creating some issues. Are these issues really so important relative to other problems a state might have that they command the amount of attention immigration gets?
I call bullshit, it's purely a wrong skin color problem.
That wasn't what was happening. Suppressing protest with soldiers - which is usually justified by dictators with the excuse of 'order' - is extreme and anti-freedom.
The paradox of government force, and the need to manage that paradox, has been one of the foundational questions -- the foundational question to some -- of liberal philosophy since its first writers. Freedom isn't just freedom from the government, it's also freedom from others who might hurt you and destroy the place you live.
It's worth pointing out the Minneapolis police department completely abandoned the city to let burn.
I witnessed some of the 'riots'; what I saw was perfectly safe except for a very small physical area - maybe spots of, very approximately, 50 sq ft - and even there you were probably safe.
There was no danger to the public, some danger to some windows. I've seen worse in team victory celebrations. I saw much worse at the Capitol, where they were beating people and some died.
You didn’t see worse at the capitol, because that was a riot at a government building and private sector people were not at risk.
If someone crashes into a streetlight, is that an offense against society? Obviously not.
> 25 people were killed in the riots and there was $2 billion in property damage.
In the entire country? And is there a source for it?
Sorry about your fro-yo and coffee. The places I know have long forgotten the 'riots'.
> private sector people were not at risk.
People died. Does it not matter because they worked for the government? How about the democracy and government of people in the private sector? I think boiling it down to property is much too convenient.
If you do it on purpose, yes.
> Sorry about your fro-yo and coffee. The places I know have long forgotten the 'riots'.
There’s tons of evidence that riots lead to long term depopulation of the neighborhoods where they happened.
> Does it not matter because they worked for the government?
Yes. This is America, not Europe: https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
> If you do it on purpose, yes.
Well I guess "an offense against society" is undefined, but that is an extreme reaction. There are matters of degree in everything, and those degrees are everything. The state prosecutes lots of crimes, from shoplifting to mass murder - to call them all "an offense against society" becomes meaningless.
> > Does it not matter because they worked for the government?
> Yes.
Killing people doesn't matter if those people work for the government. Wow.
That’s literally what it is. That’s why the court case is styled State/Commonwealth/People v. Streetlightcrasher. You can quibble about whether the government “is” society but that argument makes you sound like a fringe libertarian.
offense: an illegal act; a crime
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/offen...
My city had 100s of stores ransacked with groups of cars with 100s of people all working together. Say what you want about opportunists - riots happened.
?
> federal courthouse in Portland
What about it? Did it burn down? How many were injured?
> streamers for months were showing people looting
It's interesting that people criticize the professional news media, then believe whatever they see on social media.
> riots happened
I expect some did, depending on the definition of riot, but that's not 'nationwide rioting' and a call to use the military to suppress the great majority of peaceful protests.
If they are harming others or causing significant material damage, that's another story, but even that is a matter of degree (especially the latter).
Was anyone genuinely under th delusion that it was any different when it was Bezos' benefit to placate the progressives?
Of course it doesn't.
> Was anyone genuinely under th delusion that it was any different
It wasn't a delusion, it was.
It's generally been the policy of editorial pages to print a diverse set of opinions pieces that contradict each other. And that aren't under control of the owner, look up the term "editorial independence".
This isn't a question of being "under a delusion", it's simply how American newspapers have traditionally operated because it was good for business.
Media owners have generally prioritized making money, not "presenting their views".
This is so elementary that anyone can see it. It's commonly mentioned in precisely the mainstream "respectable" publications like WaPo.
There's almost certainly industry jargon and marketing models for it, and technical terminology and decades of documentation about it, if I were to ask any LLM what the words and concepts are.
This move seems likely to alienate subscribers (both for potentially being against their ideology, and more importantly, for implying lack of freedom of expression that customers would demand from a newspaper). It is also likely to lose them talent. The move seems to benefit bezos personally by using the newspaper as a mouthpiece, even if the newspaper itself as a business is damaged in the process.
What have Bezos or Lewis said that indicate 'personal liberties' differ from 'civil liberties'? I don't see it in the cited article.
I haven't heard that. Where does that definition come from, and where did Bezos embrace the definition and reject civil liberties?
Good question. This use of the term has become a popular dog whistle [0] in right-wing circles. It would take a bit of research to see how it was coined in its current form. They know that when you say "personal liberty," you really mean "my liberty is more important than your civil rights."
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/jef...