Comment by adjkant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adjkant | Hacker News Reader

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I can't say I have much time to engage today, but since this seems to have some support and a fundamental misunderstanding, I want to address this one.

Hatred towards the ultra-rich is not based in jealousy but in a moral stance. The argument is not "I want your 30M" it is that "people having this much wealth is bad for all of society".

See: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/opinion/abolish-billionai...

There's much debate to be had over where that line of "too much wealth that it can't possibly be moral" is, but this is where the cultural conversation is. You're missing the point if you think it's jealousy.

As an example, I never plan to have more than about 2M (in today's dollars) of personal wealth. I'm not supporting this tax because I want the 30M, I'm supporting it because I think it may have positive effects on reigning in the human instinct for greed by aligning societal incentives with personal ones.

I'm trying to keep this narrow as I'm not trying to claim I'm correct that this specific iteration of the tax will work, or even of the form, but hopefully my point about the targeted issue is clear!

Your explanation sounds something like when a racist says that he doesn't hate people because of the color of their skin but because they bring diseases, take away jobs and are not cultured.

That’s quite an unhinged simile.

Only if you think inciting hate and violence toward successful people is normal and not despicable in the same way as hating people for their skin color.

Hatred towards the rich when our quality of life has never been higher IS jealousy and petty envy. The fact that slogans like “eat the rich” have been normalized by Millennials and Gen-Z on Tik Tok is clear evidence of it. Imagine the irony of an entire society having leisure time to burn on Tik Tok (or other social media) via a handheld space age device that we couldn’t even imagine 15 years ago, and yet whining about how life is tough and the system is broken. The greed isn’t in those creating value and accumulating wealth - it’s with everyone else, who are enjoying an amazing life in an amazing time and yet are greedy enough to complain about not having more for free.

More could be had. That's impossible for anyone to argue against, I think -- there is a lot of wealth in the pie that most people don't have access to.

This idea that poor people need to shut up and stop complaining because "you have TikTok!" when there are tens of millions of people who don't know where their next meal will come from is, frankly, sickening to me.

I don't understand your perspective at all, and I don't know how you can look at the lives of the millions of people in the in the richest country in the world who can't afford medicine, food, safe housing, good education and say that "they should stop being so jealous."

Please, please change my mind. Tell me how your point makes any kind of moral sense.

Christ almighty, the replies to this are extremely upsetting and missing the point entirely.

"Eat the rich" is not about jealousy, as the parent comment explained, and as the replies all immediately ignored.

"Wealthy people create good things, so why are you mad at wealthy people" is a phenomenally backwards way of looking at things. People who create good things often become wealthy in our capitalist society. That doesn't mean that the accumulation of literal mind-boggling generational wealth is somehow a good and natural thing.

I am so tired of this idea that the natural goal for everyone in the U.S. should be to become a billionaire. If you wanna get radical about it, in my opinion there should not be billionaires. I think the accumulation of that much wealth is inherently immoral. No one person could ever, ever, ever spend that money on themselves, so why should it be theirs?

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