Most rich people won their wealth in benign ways: inheritance, good investments, hard work.
what exactly do you consider 'rich' to be? either in terms of total wealth ownership, or annual income, or something.
because i'm willing to bet whatever figure you come up with once you nail that down is not the people jarhyn is talking about.
Most of us would be quite happy to be rich.
most of us would also be quite happy to be able to fly, but that wouldn't stop those of us who can't from having an issue with those who can continually taking a shit on us from up in the air.
in fact, if the one who could fly persisted on shitting on the rest of us for long enough, and did so in a way that it became blindingly obvious was both intentional and spiteful, one might even conclude that an opinion that the solution to the problem is to 'pull down the flyers' might not be unreasonable.
Wealth inequality is bad for society, but the solution is to take political steps to help the poor, steps like improved schools in low-income areas, increased government funding for healthcare, childcare, education; and so on. Since production is finite, to afford improving the living standards of our poorest it is necessary to insist on higher contributions from our richest: capital gains taxes, estate taxes, and so on. Regulations and transaction taxes are also good to reduce the waste on talent in the financial sector. Better law enforcement would help too; I just read that $100 billion of Covid aid money was diverted to criminals.
so let's just say for the sake of a hypothetical that both of your suggested actions were taken: government programs improved, and taxes were levied on certain wealth activities.
what if that still didn't cover it? what if school improvement was inadequate and more was needed? what if more funding for healthcare was required? what would your suggestion be at that point?
Perhaps he agrees with all this, but Jarhyn's tone is completely wrong.
i recall once reading on these forums from a middle-of-the-road conservative southerner that he was all for programs that helped the poor, but he voted republican because democrats had, and i'm paraphrasing here: "an attitude like i should be thanking them for helping me, like i should be grateful. i'm a southerner and i have pride, and their attitude that i should be thankful for their help sickens me" - and that was quite possible the dumbest fucking thing i had ever heard a supposedly functioning human being say out loud.
likewise, 'the content of the message is right but i don't like the tone so therefor reject the message' is pretty monumentally stupid.
@ Jarhyn, do you mostly care about helping the poor? Or are you more concerned with pulling down the rich? I assume it's the former, but if so, your words are very VERY misleading. I cringe whenever I hear a "liberal" write or speak like this.
you seem to think that the two aren't synonymous, or at least symbiotic.
if you have a circle that represents all of the resources available to the human race, and 99.9% of that circle is taken up by 'the rich', then pulling down the rich will necessarily help the poor because there will be more resources available to them.
personally i favor pulling down the rich and also preventing the rich from even existing. i don't think there is any conceivable rational argument to justify any single human owning more than 3 million dollars - i mean that as the sum total of all wealth and assets controlled by an individual, including personal property and real estate and liquid cash and whatever else.
if you have a combined total wealth of 3 million dollars you should be taxed at 100% for anything/everything else that you do until you're under 3 million. and no member of a corporation in any position should be able to make more than 10x the salary of the lowest paid member of that corporation.
that's how you fix the issue of wealth inequality, by making it non-existent. not by some limp-wristed mewling about maybe sort of a little bit if it's OK with the rich perhaps taking just a tiny bit more from one of their revenue streams BUT NOT TOO MUCH as long as everyone is alright with that.
I hope I'm not wrong about this, but I'll guess that Jarhyn is much more concerned with lifting up the poor than pulling down the rich. I understand that his tone suggests the opposite; I find his attitude very unfortunate.
you are again operating under the assumption that the two aren't the same thing. i find no logical reason for this assumption.
There is a horrid schism in American politics today. You make a severe charge against most on the "left" which I think is unfair (and which I took personally); I over-react by using pejorative words against you. Can you and I move toward bridging this schism now?
the schism in american politics today is not one of civil discourse, despite the right's attempts to frame it as such.
the schism in american politics today is that there is one center-right party in the US that while flawed and generally without vision or political will is sort of at least trying to appear like they're identifying the worst issues plaguing society and trying to implement governmental policy to correct those issues in order to forward the advancement of human civilization... more or less. they might not always have the best ideas about how to fix these issues, and often may only be pretending to care, but they at least put some minimal effort into it.
meanwhile there is another party in the US that has a stated goal of undermining the very concept of human social government, and is actively trying to destroy the foundational notion of human civilization moving forward through time and adapting to emerging challenges with reasonable government regulation and social change.
this party doesn't offer ideas on how to fix problems, it either denies that problems exist and refuses to engage with even the idea that a solution should be found, or it makes the problem worse by pouring gas on the fire of the problem or seeking out all the fire extinguishers and throwing them in a lake.
you can't have rational civil discourse when the question is "how do we approach the issue of inflating health care costs making access to medical treatment out of the reach for a significant number of adults" and the two answers you get from the political parties break down to one side going: "perhaps if we give a massive handjob to the insurance industry they'll be nice enough to occasionally provide the service their business is supposed based on, instead of taking money from customers and then refusing to give them anything for it"
and the other side replying with "LET'S LYNCH ALL THE NIGGERS"