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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

There is a popular argument being made that any amount of inequality is evil and must be stamped out. I’ve asked several people to define in logical terms the line beneath which someone is not evil, and above which they are an evil rich person taking too many resources.

There is no logical explanation for such a line, it’s always an emotion against people who have more than them. Everyone always compares themselves to someone richer, whether they make 15k, 150k, or 1.5m. If you keep voting for such policies, you will eventually outlaw anyone for trying to do anything but living on government dole. It’s a sad future some people want. Venezuela collapsed rather quickly.

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I mean if you take the income inequality argument and apply it to the world it is clear that pretty much every person in a developed country is an evil rich person taking too many resources.

A valid point. Every American should feel bad about the fact they were born in America, if you follow that logic.

You gotta factor in cost of living though too. Someone in a crappy part of the world might live on $2 a day, but regardless of where or how you live in the US that would never keep you alive or a roof over your head where there it might, even if it is crappy.

Why not? Is it impossible to survive in a forest in the US through hunting and gathering? Because that's exactly how our ancestors lived long ago. The people living on $2 a day in the poorest parts of the world are essentially living on that level of wealth. They don't buy most of their goods, they make them.

Go check out primitive technology on YouTube and see the stuff he does in a forest. That kind of stuff is available almost anywhere with a temperate forest.

The cost of living is higher in the US because people expect better stuff and they've put a limit on how low the quality can go. Eg building permits and other housing regulations. All of that significantly increases the cost of housing, but it also makes your minimum housing much better than in poor parts of the world.

Yeah, but the same could be said for domestic income inequality. Hard to live in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, on an average American income...

> outlaw anyone for trying to do anything

Are you saying that people who don’t earn few millions a year are doing nothing? Mind you, the majority of people are in this situation and contribute a lot to the society (teachers, doctors, researchers, any workers really). I’m not a leftist but I recognize the concentration of money in a few hands is probablematic, and a lot of business models to get to this point are harmful to the society at large.

But is it problematic? A teacher or doctor in America is better off than almost anywhere else in the world, including western european countries: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/gov_glance-2017-35-e... (See 3.27)

The countries with higher teacher salaries, like Canada, or in our general vicinity all have low corporate taxes.

There are things we need to fix in the US, like people who don’t have healthcare, and the housing market. (All the losses in the share of GDP of labor since the 1980s went to landlords, not capital owners.) But it’s not clear to me that income inequality is in and of itself something worth fixing, at the risk of novel measures that could give other countries a competitor advantage over us.

You could make a similar argument about pollution. A certain amount of it is necessary, it’s not possible to have a society, especially a developed one, that doesn’t pollute at all. So where do you draw the line?

It’s arbitrary, and yet saying that means we should just let people pollute endlessly doesn’t make sense either.

Income inequality becomes an issue for the rich in cities like SF and NYC when costs of living rise faster than wages for the lower class and you end up with a rising homeless population.

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