lemm.ee

5 points

11 months ago

You’re both profoundly ignorant of the subject matter and very confident you know a lot about it, a.k.a. an excellent example of the Dunning-Krugger effect.

Consider the possibility that what you hear about “The Left” (just the idea that it’s an unified thing is ridiculous) from the media you consume (American, right?!) are the shocking things that will make you form the opinion others want you to have - in other words, you’re being treated as an useful idiot.

Even in the US, were whatever passes for “Left” is very much captured by the local Duopoly Of Power politics and doesn’t really tries to effectivelly achieve the “Greatest good for the greatest number” (otherwise they would be way, WAY, WAY more worried about wealth inequality and not obcessed with fragmented identitarian infighting), leftwing thinking is a range - though narrower than elsewhere - not a unified anything.

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SCB@lemmy.world

-2 points

11 months ago

otherwise they would be way, WAY, WAY more worried about wealth inequality

Income inequality doesn’t really do anything at all, so no I pretty strongly disagree with this.

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4 points

11 months ago

The difference of life expectation between rich and poor is more than a decade: income inequality quite literally dictates how long somebody lives.

You must live an unbelievably sheltered life in an extremelly isolated and limited ideas bubble and having lived a life with an extraordinarilly narrow range of life experiences if you think wealth inequality doesn’t make a difference.

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SCB@lemmy.world

-2 points

11 months ago

Income inequality is the difference between highest and lowest earners. This is meaningless statistic

What matters is where the floor is, and how surmountable that difference is. Actual policy positions matter a lot more than “but this one has more”

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2 points

11 months ago

You’ve changed the definition of “income inequality” to match a very specific non-standard metric, which of course is a “meaningless statistic” since that’s exactly what you redefined it to be - that’s what’s commonly known as a “straw man”.

The problem is not how many “wealth tokens” people have, it’s that in the system we live under at the moment there is a gatekeeping by amount of “wealth token” of access to important things such as food, the place somebody can live in, the opportunities their children have, their access to healthcare, how much free time they have, and even their freedom (having to work doing something you don’t want to do to barelly survive isn’t Freedom).

Nobody would give a shit about “wealth” if how many “wealth tokens” somebody has only affected luxuries, and in such an environment there wouldn’t even be a life expectation difference between people with lots of “wealth tokens” and people with few “wealth tokens”.

The problem is the combination of wealth inequality and a system were wealth dictates access to life essentials rather than merelly to luxuries. If all “wealth tokens” bought were bragging rights and a few luxuries, few would care.

If that’s what you mean with “were the floor is” then we’re probably more in agreement than it seemed at first sight.

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https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/Inequality/introduction-to-inequality

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SCB@lemmy.world

-1 points

11 months ago

You’ve changed the definition of “income inequality” to match a very specific non-standard metric, which of course is a “meaningless statistic” since that’s exactly what you redefined it to be - that’s what’s commonly known as a “straw man”.

I’m using the standard definition of income inequality.

I not sure what your overall point is here, but the total distribution of wealth is a meaningless statistic. If you had all your needs taken care of, UBI, didn’t work etc and one person had a quadrillion dollars under that same system, you would not give a shit.

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2 points

11 months ago

You definition: “Income inequality is the difference between highest and lowest earners.” The IMF definition as per your source: “Income Inequality, which refers to the extent to which income is evenly distributed within a population”

They’re not the same thing: you picked a very specific metric, not the general definition which is what I was using.

But yeah, if there was UBI that took care of life’s essentials, “one person with a quadrillion dollars” would not matter.

Then again that wouldn’t be possible in the Mercantilistic Economic System we have because in this system monetary tokens (such as dollars) are claims on a fraction of the goods, services and assets of a country, and I really can’t see how it would be possible to both provide for the life’s essentials for everybody AND have somebody with enough monetary tokens to lay claim to most of the wealth produced in the country (unless we’re talking about worthless dollars, such as the ones in Zimbabwe at some point, in which case most people would be quadrillionaires anyway).

Now, if “dollars” were only claims to very specific kinds of things that excluded essentials and things necessary to provide them (which would also mean Land, since that’s necessary for building places for people to live in), then how many such tokens somebody had would be irrelevant, but the closest to such a “money is not needed for essentials” environment we ever had was basically the USSR and we all know just how well that specific experiment worked.

In a centralized state control system “Income inequality” is is indeed not the problem: there the problems are in the production and distribution of goods and services, not affordability (i.e. the scenario where everybody can afford bread but there is no bread), plus centralized state control is by necessity authoritarian, so forget about Democracy in that one, which brings yet another big-box-of-problems.

It’s only in trying to find an ideology to deal with the social side of policy whilst Capitalism deals with trading and resource provision, that you end up with the wealth concentration problem: if dollars are claims to goods, services and assets, then the fewer the hands holding those claims the more the State has to tax them to provide the essentials to everybody and as you might have noticed, those with lots of money use it to buy legislators and agents of the State to make sure they’re taxed as little as possible.

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