Comment by trs8080 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trs8080 | Hacker News Reader

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> Quite possibly. One of the big successes of the law and modern political traditions like liberalism has been demonstrating that the most successful path is when "we" don't respond and provide mechanisms to let individuals sort out their own differences in a 1:1 fashion, personally navigating the power dynamics.

This is definitely not a big success. What we get from this mentality is billionaires hoarding resources and corporations destabilizing democracies. The law exists to establish rules of conduct for living in a civilized society, not for encouraging individuals to sort out their differences on their own.

> Strong group responses are actually quite destructive and squelch non-conformance. Anyone who might be unusually successful with an unorthodox strategy gets crushed. Ends really badly for minorities too.

Strong group responses can be destructive or constructive. Either one can benefit or harm minorities. Organizing into a group to accomplish a goal does not automatically mean that individualism is cast aside -- many social movements have existed to empower individuals.

> We don't want the teachers taking an extremely successful and tolerant society focused on individual action in context of a group and then inculcating group reactions in context of an individual.

It sounds like in this case study, the society in question was far from extremely successful and tolerant. The whole point of the exercise was to promote social harmony among students.

> What we get from this mentality is billionaires hoarding resources

I'm always interested in this idea when it comes up because I don't understand what people think the billionaires are hoarding. For curiosity's sake could you give me a quick enumeration of the physical, real-world resources that you think the billionaires are using up? Like, do you think they have 10 million in rice hidden in a silo for a rainy day?

Land. Billionaires own thousands of empty luxury apartments in city centres, while the poor people who clean them travel in from the outskirts.

And billionaires do effectively hoard things like rice. That's what the futures market they invest in is all about.

I don't disagree, but "the poor people who clean them" are doing that because it pays better than they could get elsewhere, otherwise they wouldn't do it (assuming no coercion on the billionaire's part, which would be illegal).

If the billionaires magically ceased to exist and poor people owned the apartments, I don't think they'd be paying the other poor people as much to come clean them.

Also labor. If a billionaire buys a luxury product like a jet, or a yacht, or even just an expensive car, all the labor that goes into production and upkeep of that product is used up solely for the benefit of the billionaire. If wealth was distributed more fairly, all that labor would go into things that benefit a wider audience.

I think easiest way to understand it that they hoard access to capital. They suck it out of consumers in the economy, denying smaller entrepreneurs access to it.

People won't buy your SaS for $4.99 a month so you can earn your first million if they spent all of their money on iPhone priced higher than it needs to be.

Strongest benefit of the market is competition that allows million ideas to be tried to find the thousand that will benefit the society. One person with billions of dollars won't have million ideas, let alone thousand beneficial ones.

They also hoard other stuff like land and real estate but that's just means to an end. Extracting capital, denying it to everybody and keeping it all under singular command.

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