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Comment by Frieren | Hacker News Reader

Inequality breaks capitalism. Spending so much money as the 0.1% spends in luxury makes no sense. To let millions die of preventable diseases, or even hunger makes no sense. The fact that as a society we let them do that is a failure that needs to be corrected.

It is not their money. It is our resources that they are wasting. We need to better provide for our fellow humans even if that costs the rich a percentage of their luxuries.

And let's not forget about the top 0.01%. The smaller the percentage, the more depraved the rich are, and the more they use their money to influence politics and increase poverty and suffering.

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This is absolutely correct.

And, moreover, inequality breaks democracy.

Their ability to spend effectively infinite amounts of money makes them nearly immune to prosecution, and even moreso to litigation. They also spend it on lobbying, which in many cases amounts to buying the loyalty of Congresspeople.

Actually with Carbon inequality, the problem is that driving and flying is not expensive enough!

Parent’s point is that economic inequality is so bad that the costs are meaningless to the ultra wealthy.

Thank you. Exactly that. Prices do not adapt to the scale that super-rich manage.

And it seems that it touched some sensible point as the comment is at -3 right now.

That does not change that billionaires are incompatible with capitalism. They have too much power, so instead of reducing costs, increasing production or providing better services they just play to be god with our resources. And they monopolize the economy, stop competition, and kill capitalism. And I think that capitalism is not that good and needs a lot of help from the government to function, but it was better than authoritarian waste.

I happen to agree that extreme inequality is bad for Capitalism, but I still think it is a moot point here.

The overall world carbon gini coefficient is less than the wealth coefficient. And this is totally expected: ultra-rich people cannot consume fast enough to pollute more in proportion to how much richer they are. For example, to do this would private jets, they would have to be paying for other people to ride separate private jets, as there is only so much time they want to spend in an airplane themselves.

A carbon tax might not hit private jets hard enough, but it would definitely hit "regular people's" (still rich by global standard's) air travel, and that would lower a lot of emissions.

I don't think you're strictly incorrect, but I don't think you're strictly correct either. Inequality is a precursor to discontent, and discontent breaks any social system, if there's enough of it.

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