Actually not true. This is the first time ever these circuit breakers were triggered during regular trading hours. Even still, on election night, stock futures were only under the 'limit-down rule'. You could have still been buying futures while that restriction was in place, so this is very much different and unprecedented
Indeed, we are in a sort of cold civil war in western culture right now over core beliefs and culture. HN definitely seems to have a collective bias to one side of that.
I guess, you have to answer the question as to how the 1% earned it. If they started on a level playing field and just worked harder or were smarter than everyone else, I would say keep it. More likely though it was passed down for generations and they did nothing to deserve it, I find that situation absolutely insane. We found out in the great depression having an insanely wealthy class of people (Rockafellers,Gatsbys, Vanderbilts... )is not good for society.
I did an economic history lit survey back in the '80s (lost now unfortunately) which showed that a very substantial portion of UK wealth at that time had a direct lineage back to slavery on sugar plantations. Even if you judge that meritocracy works justly within a generation, without appropriate taxation wealth accumulates over time, often consequent on terrible injustices. It takes some pretty heroic ethical gymnastics to justify that let alone consider it efficient or useful.
You did nothing to deserve winning multiple genetic lotteries, namely having sufficient intelligence to fall into the HN cohort and being born into a wealthy country and household with access to it and similar resources. You didn’t earn your spot in the global 1%, but it in no way follows that you should be expropriated to correct the alleged injustice.
Ex post facto law has since the Enlightenment recognized as unjust and even tyrannical. Digging back across generations in search of some offense generations ago and punishing innocent parties today is at best a recipe for chaos.
Lavrentiy Beria was head of Stalin’s secret police and famous for saying, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Expropriating present people because of unfair advantages — a criterion never precisely defined and forever subject to political fads of the day, which is to say meaningless — allegedly enjoyed by past ancestors or owners of property is merely another form of the Beria method.
By your own reasoning, neither did the state today do anything to deserve the property that they’d seize. Even if it were justly redistributed, you’re forgetting about the cut taken by the middlemen in charge of carrying it out — who also did nothing to deserve taking a share of the loot.
No sound economic case can be made that the distribution of wealth was a cause for the Great Depression. Considering how many human abilities have normal and power-law distributions, e.g., attractiveness, musical ability, intelligence, vertical leap, height, programming skill, lifetime poker winnings, writing quality, golf handicap, typing speed, cooking skill, time to change a tire, ability to plan and manage complex tasks, future orientation, etc., etc., etc., income and wealth accumulation being anywhere remotely uniform would be amazing. Considering the math of power-law distributions, your approach would have a huge majority ganging up on a comparatively tiny minority but ironically in the name of fairness.
“No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic.”
>Ex post facto law has since the Enlightenment recognized as unjust and even tyrannical. Digging back across generations in search of some offense generations ago and punishing innocent parties today is at best a recipe for chaos.
That's not what's going on here at all. The idea is that property gained through unjust means originally means that the wealth derived from it is still unjustly derived, even if this unjust appropriation happened long ago when it was not deemed unjust then. You would be right if the case were if you were to be punished for the fact your ancestors owned slaves, but the issue is the benefit gained which is currently there.
>income and wealth accumulation being anywhere remotely uniform would be amazing.
Nobody is saying it would be uniform, they're saying that the situation at the moment is not due to the difference in those abilities other than perhaps brute strength in subjugation and plunder. It is difficult to imagine what the world would look like if it hadn't happened, but the distribution of wealth would not be as we see it today in any case.
>By your own reasoning, neither did the state today do anything to deserve the property that they’d seize.
The state may act on behalf of those at a comparative disadvantage, and we have an easier case for arguing they deserve something.
I feel like "people who won the genetic lottery" who become rich,by inventing something or creating something, deserve it because ideally these people made money by improving society and this behavior should be encouraged. I understand this is not how the world always works, but it should be the world we strive for.
In my mind this would be the ideal role of government to encourage behavior that makes society better.
It depends on which Marxists. Some would say that land that your family can cultivate (or otherwise productively use) on your own, without hiring labor, is your personal property, which is not theft. Land that you own, but can't extract wealth from it without hiring other people to do so (and collecting rent from what they extract from it) would be considered theft.
"More likely though it was passed down for generations and they did nothing to deserve it, I find that situation absolutely insane"
It's not insane for people to pass their property from one person to another.
Arbitrary definitions of 'earned it' are far, far scarier.
Surely, it's important to consider issues such as private wealth, inheritance etc. but the OP is effectively correct, this issue turns into 'mob rule' very, very quickly.
In 2019 we forget this, because we don't have any such topsy-turvy situations in living memory, but the 19th and 20th centuries were full of blood and fury over this kind of stuff.
Everywhere East of Berlin does however have this in 'living memory'. Ask a Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Russian etc. immigrant over the age of 60 about it for an earful. Or someone Chinese over 60 as well. Or Cuban.
I think most would agree that property that was stolen or taken by force from somebody who produced it, is not earned. So it's not an arbitrary definition. And if that is so, why would passing it from generation to generation make any difference to that determination?
I am a Russian immigrant, by the way, born in the USSR back when it was still a thing. I don't have much sympathy for the kind of wealth redistribution that was practiced there. But it's important to understand that the reason why it happened was because inequality was allowed to grow high enough that a sufficient number of people in the country could be motivated to revolt, because they felt the risks justified the potential rewards. And it doesn't even matter if they were right or wrong - the point is, if you are afraid of that history repeating, then you should support measures that prevent the conditions that caused it from happening again. And that involves acknowledging what the society deems fair and unfair, when it comes to property ownership.
1) Applying notions of ownership to systems 1000 years ago - is totally arbitrary.
2) The Sovereign's holding are, and always have been something different than a regular person's holdings. They have always beens somewhat matters of State.
3) Today, the monarchies are constitutional. They do not 'own' the land as you and I would 'own' land.
4) Most wealthy people today did not inherit their land from people 100's of years ago who got it from plunder - this is ridiculous. About 1/2 of the wealthy people today are 'self made'.
5) Almost everyone in modern civilization has access to opportunity, and as you'll notice from this thread, 90% of Canadian land holding for example is by the government, i.e. commons - there is plenty of land and resources to go around. Everyone can participate.
Inequality today is not even comparable to what is is even 100 years ago. People receive free healthcare, almost free banking services, cheap water, cheap transport, cheap entertainment, cheap clothing, cheap access to information, free social solidarity.
I don't think ridicule is bad at all (and their episodes which were quite heavy on the union-bashing had quite a few nuggets of truth in their ridicule of middle management overruling common sense). But focusing on unions as the source of the problem is shifting the focus of criticism away from the actual source of issues -- austerity.
The workers (and thus the unions) were opposing government policies that were hurting them. Funnily enough (though unsurprisingly), strike rates as well as union membership fell under Thatcher because of her union reforms (which removed much of their bargaining power) -- and so the commonly held view of daily strikes in the 1980s (something Yes Minister capitalises on) isn't really an accurate portrayal.
By laying criticism on one and not the other, Yes Minister showed their Thatcher bias. And it's not at all a stretch to say they had a Thatcher bias -- Thatcher herself said that Yes Minister was her favourite show. So while Yes Minister was very heavily critical of the civil service, they weren't fundamentally critical of the views of the government. Thatcher was very strong on civil service reform too.
I think it's more that C programmers don't really consider themselves part of a C culture in the same way that python, go, ruby, php etc programmers do. C programmers usually have another interest like kernel dev, firmware dev, or 3d game engines that is more interesting to them than the language itself.
