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Comment by admissionsguy | Hacker News Reader

Not sure about the first sentence, but how is "most of us are just working to prop them up and keep them rich" a conspiracy theory? Isn't that the whole basis of capitalism? I am asking honestly. The social order being a mostly immutable pyramid has always been the natural model of how things work in my mind.

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I just think the distribution of wealth that we are shown, “only .x% of the country have 50 million” is way off from reality.

> Isn't that the whole basis of capitalism?

I think it's only exacerbated by government intervention (corruption) and regulatory capture.

I do agree that human nature tends to winners and losers, but right now the losers are being bashed over the head by a tool they think is helping them.

I mean fundamentally, accumulating capital would be pretty pointless if not for legions of poor(er) people willing to do whatever the owner of the capital wants them to.

One of the standard anti-capitalist arguments for redistributing wealth is that the super-wealthy do not, in fact, use their wealth to have others at their beck and call to an extent even remotely proportional to how much better off they are. The usual framing is that less wealthy people spend far more of their money on goods and services, therefore we're better off if they have the money instead of the super-wealthy, but of course it's the same thing really.

At the same time, the natural flow of capital is upward. Without government intervention you end up back at feudalism as a very small percentage of the population controls effectively all of the wealth. The way to combat this is progressive taxation and government spending on social programs and infrastructure.

In Australia they appear to be voting in favour of continued bashing.

I think there's some kind of analogy to the Dunning-Kruger effect where people are deluded that they are in fact in the group of people that will be advantaged by lowering corporate tax rates, for example.

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