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Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

Here's a thought: paying to live in a functioning society where people less privileged than us don't die destitute serving us... might mean they don't have to guillotine us to survive when it comes to that. Just, you know, keep it in perspective if you don't have a moral compass about what you "get" living in a society where other people besides you are safe and healthy.

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That is a half-decent practical argument for those with means to donate to charity, though it presumes that the "less privileged" are inherently irrational. Guillotining the rich (or just taking their money and turning them out on the street) isn't likely to do much at all to aid their survival. Barring some regrettable but ultimately trivial examples of conspicuous consumption, the mostly-paper wealth of the rich is tied up in capital investments aided at producing goods desired by the masses. Liquidate that and you have a bunch of useless cash and no goods to purchase with it.

It isn't in any sense a moral justification for taxes.

Social security by and large is intended to keep society secure against desperately poor people.

How’s that working out?

In my country, pretty well.

Obviously it'll depend on your actual implementation.

I don’t need nor want servants.

Neither do I, for what it’s worth. My approach to this subject is probably too brash, but it comes from a time when I was among the servants and being priced out of the place I would live to continue that work.

Almost everyone in the world who provides anything for us already lives in terrible conditions and makes a few dollars a day. The people nearby are even less deserving since they’re so much less cost efficient to help.

Honestly... I wish I could wish the same on you when you inevitably need to depend on others, but I don’t have it in me. I’m not even mad, I’m just amazed that people who think this way are so unthreatened they think they can say it outloud without consequence.

"Almost everyone in the world who provides anything for us already lives in terrible conditions and makes a few dollars a day."

Tim Cook only makes a few dollar a day and lives in a ghetto?

Surely you jest.

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