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Comment by totemizer | Hacker News Reader

I am actually suggesting that we end all economic inequality. The only reason I don't argue for "end all inequality" is that it's physically impossible as much as we know it. Economy should be about what is good for everyone, it shouldn't contain anything which can be used to exploit other humans due to their "economic circumstances". The current system does allow it, and as long as you can attach a number to any person to get their value or "worth", there will be no change towards equality, maybe less inequality. Which is not enough because while the possibility is open, it will always fluctuate.

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You cannot end all economic inequality without removing freedom. A free society where people can freely express their full potential will create inequalities by default. Even if we manage to give equal opportunities to everyone, some people will manage better than others. Some people are born to be Mozart and Newtons. That is just how it is, and when you are one of these people, with greater potential, you will accomplish more and people will be happy to give you more of their money to enjoy your work, making you unequally richer than they are. There is no way around that. You could have given me a billion to get started and I would still not have written the magic flute or written a revolutionary algorithm.

Societies who tried to remove all inequalities managed to create living hell where everyone was equally poor and unfree and not able to express their full potential while the ones with great potentials tried to flee such society. Just be careful what you ask for. For having grown up in a socialist hell myself (Syria), I wouldn't go back to such a place (even without the war).

And, some people are born Mozarts and Newtons, and we never hear of them because they they lack connections, access, leisure, and opportunity.

I don't know what true socialism feels like, but I do know that whatever mixed system the U.S. has certainly doesn't feel like freedom. Whatever we have, I'd like to try something new because it's not working.

> And, some people are born Mozarts and Newtons, and we never hear of them because they they lack connections, access, leisure, and opportunity.

That's why I said even if we had 100% full equal opportunities, we would still have inequalities. Let's say 100% of people who are born Mozarts and Newtons got to be heard and succeed and all have great connections and equal opportunities, we would still have the same problem with people _not_ being born with such huge potential. That is, unless you believe we all are Mozarts and Newtons that weren't given the right opportunities and connections and here we'll have to disagree. Now, what kind of society gives better chance to succeed for everyone? Socialists ones with no freedom or the ones with the maximum freedoms? Reality says the latter.

Those aren't the only two choices. The west, and even many in the east, are made up of mixed economies. Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Germany, and many others are extremely successful mixed economies by most measures (see OECD stats to start.) In the US, the mix is currently wildly out of whack; it needs to move back towards broadly shared prosperity, rather than the oligarchy we have now. That means higher taxes on the wealthy, better social programs, redistribution, and all the rest.

Read "Twilight of the Elites." Few are arguing for zero inequality; even anti-inequality crusaders acknowledge there will always be some inequality. It depends on how much, and what that affords the society. The amount we have now is wildly out of balance. We have models that work better in the world, and even in America's past, and should look to those.

No one is arguing for communism anymore (the implications of the poster higher up notwithstanding), except those that are largely irrelevant to the debate.

I live in France, I can tell you that most of the countries you list here built their wealth before building their huge welfare state and that it's now turned into a money losing machine nightmare which are being urgently reformed as you read this. It's also turned people against one another and created more racism for a simple reason. Given that the welfare state takes money from people and redistributes it to others by force, as the "others" grow larger due to immigration, people start to hate on immigrants for shrinking the part of the pie they think they deserve (even if the welfare state is responsible for more people being on welfare, not immigrants). A huge welfare state also discourages many people from working, making it more difficult for immigrants to integrate like they used to and creating tensions and resentment from the part of the population that works and the one that does not. This is why most Muslims in the US are well integrated while in Europe they are pushed into ghettos and victim of racism. All this because we believe that it's better for people to be unemployed than being on a lower wage when in reality it's the opposite.

Welfare discouraging work has largely been refuted: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/business/the-myth-of-welfa...

Where it does discourage work, the effects are extremely minor. Your contention that their wealth was before the welfare state is completely incorrect and ahistorical. Even the crudest measures show that to be wrong. Examples:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/denmark/gdp

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/sweden/gdp

For France, the numbers since 1960 have been fantastic overall. Look through the OECD measures:

https://data.oecd.org/france.htm

I'm sorry, but your statements don't hold up to any of the measured data, and this excludes things like perceptions of corruption or gross happiness. No country is perfect, but the ones I listed are doing better than the US on almost every internationally recognized measure.

I know for a fact that here in France we have both substantial unemployment and at the same time many job offers available that people refuse to accept because they can afford to live on welfare instead. By definition, if they could not live on welfare they would accept these job offers. As for these countries building their wealth before the welfare state:

- http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-160.html

- http://www.forbes.com/global/2001/0319/034.html

Your first link is a known biased source.

Your second one doesn't undermine the case; it mainly discusses that tweaks are needed, not that the social democratic system doesn't work as you've implied. No one is arguing that the numbers never need to change; the entire discussion about the US is that the numbers need to change (in the other direction.)

As far as whether those people would accept the offers, it's possible at the margin, which are the minor effects I've mentioned. The numbers matter, though. France is a particularly bad example to use considering its job performance:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/cheese-eating-jo...

Sorry but if you are just going to dismiss my sources because they are too biased then there is no point in continuing this conversation. Not to mention the irony of following that with a Krugman article which as biased as can be.

There's little irony. Krugman has publicly changed his opinion on several items over the years, and isn't an advocacy organization or a think tank. Cato's raison d'etre is the promotion of "negative liberty" to the exclusion of virtually everything else. I regularly read Cato, and I even agree with some of their work (things like replacing the welfare state with a GBI, free speech absolutism, etc.), but I still consider them a biased source even if their views sometimes dovetail with my own.

It'd be different if you cited credible right-wing (economic) sources, but there are few left since the intellectual foundations of much of what passes for economics on that side of the divide (a chaotic Reagan-Thatcherism, a right-of-center Neoliberalism (older FT/Economist-style), or a wild-eyed goldbuggery) have fallen apart in the modern world. It's not symmetric at this juncture.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-03/economics-t...

We can stop the discussion, sure. Let's do that.

I consider myself center-left and I like Krugman a lot, but you can't deny he's just as biased as Cato/AEI (on the right), and the Brookings Institute (on the left). They are all biased. That being said, they are all reputable enough not to outright lie or distort. At worst they selectively omit, or their opinions/editorializations/analysis are wrong or speculative.

No way. There is absolutely no symmetry in the positions; that's part of the false equivalence narrative. Is Krugman, Baker, DeLong, Thoma perfectly unbiased? Of course not. Do I trust their lack of bias more? I do.

If someone were to argue about the less biased nature of Cowen, Hanson, or Murray, or other RW intellectual, we might have a discussion. I don't agree with those people half or more of the time, but I definitely trust them to change their minds and look at the facts, rather than having an a priori position immune to facts. I don't expect the same from Cato, and certainly not from AEI or Heritage (whom I consider far more biased than Cato.)

> Welfare discouraging work has largely been refuted

Did you read your own link? Your own link says: "There is little doubt that welfare can discourage employment, particularly when recipients lose benefits quickly as their earnings from work rise. Still, the effects are muted."

Yup.

> largely

> the effects are muted

The first does not follow from the second.

>>whatever mixed system the U.S. has certainly doesn't feel like freedom.

As some one from India, who knows US quite closely(Through work and visits). I can tell you US is the most free and meritorious society in the world currently. By and large anybody can do anything they want in the US. However the keyword there is 'wanting'. Its not going to be easy. Its a bit like saying you could be your class topper in school/college if the examination was a little easier.

>> I'd like to try something new because it's not working.

You only feel that way because you haven't seen anything worse.

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