Comment by hfern | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hfern | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Complaining about some people having more money than you just screams envy and childishness.

Where did he do that?

> No, they really are not. One is driven by envy and petty jealousy, and the other is motivated by a legitimate concern that someone might be living in poverty.

Screw off with the ad hominem. It doesn't suffice in lieu of a point.

> Complaining about some people having more money than you just screams envy and childishness.

So by your logic if you are poor and mention billionaires and income inequality then you are envious and full of petty jealousy. Therefore, only people who are well-off are able to even bring the subject up without being labeled as such. People who are well off have a vested interest in not bringing the subject up, as they maintain a comparative advantage with a cheap, underpaid supply of labor in their economy.

Every now and then, however, a well-to-do and handsomely paid software engineer with a conscious will bring up the subject. In which case, you can simply move the goalpost and label him as having petty jealously since they are probably not a billionaire.

In your framework, an economy with fatal inequalities will not be fixed. That's how you get revolutions.

> Where did he do that?

Everywhere. It's the central thesis. All statements were rooted on complaining about how some people are rich. If you remove them you're left with no assertion at all.

> Screw off with the ad hominem.

Excuse me? You're actually making that statement in defense of a personal attack based accusations of how someone is "on their side"?

> So by your logic if you are poor and mention billionaires and income inequality then you are envious and full of petty jealousy.

That's correct.

You can also pick other scapegoats such as the queen of england or Bill Gates, but they are not the reason why there is still actual poverty and malnutrition in the western world. You don't attack poverty by mounting petty propaganda attacks on the mega-rich.

>they are not the reason why there is still actual poverty and malnutrition in the western world.

Why is there poverty and malnutrition in the western world if not because of capitalism? Neoliberal capitalism has been the dominant economic system in the west since the 80s.

You're asking the wrong question. The right question is, why is there nothing else but poverty and malnutrition everywhere but in the western world? The answer: because in non-western societies, nobody has any incentive to create a lot of wealth, so they don't.

In other words, the problem is not that there are some people in the western world who are poor and malnourished. The problem is that the western world is the only part of the world that has a significant number of people who are not poor and malnourished. If the rest of the world would stop chasing after leftist chimeras and adopt neoliberal capitalism, they could create a lot of wealth too. The western world is way, way ahead in bringing people out of poverty and malnutrition.

This is ahistorical nonsense. The west industrialized hundreds of years ahead of the rest of the world and spent a century and a half plundering the global south. Regardless, China has managed to almost eliminate extreme poverty and hunger despite following a model very different than neoliberial Capitalism. As was the Soviet Union. Not defending these regimes, just stating a fact.

The majority of the world does follow neoliberial Capitalism and has for decades. And it has totally failed to reduce poverty. Almost all global poverty reduction since the 70s has taken place in China.

You also neglect the role of imperialism. The west has acquired much of its wealth through exploitation of the global south. So of course they are wealthier, because they have stolen wealth from everyone else, trapping countries in debt or dependence and overthrowing any regime that challenges neoliberial rule. Leftist regimes have done phenomenally well given the global economic context they live within -- Cuba has a similar life expectancy rate to the United States and phenomenally low malnutrition among developing Nations. China and Vietnam have experienced staggering economic growth for decades. Just compare India and China in this regard -- a country totally dominated by Western imperialism vs a left wing government that managed to forge its own development path

We evidently aren't living in the same reality so it doesn't seem like discussion will get anywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com