Comment by kyllo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyllo | Hacker News Reader

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One thing I'd like to add to that:

If you have wealthy/powerful/connected friends and relatives, they can and will shield you from the consequences of your actions. Rich people make bad choices all the time. Drunk driving for example--how many times have you heard in the news about politicians and business leaders getting DUIs? But they hire expensive lawyers and get off scot free.

If you're poor and have poor friends or no friends, you're going to bear the full brunt of the consequences for every single bad decision you make. When you get in legal trouble, you can't hire a lawyer to protect your rights and interests. You don't have powerful parents who can pay the right person to "make it go away."

On the one hand, I firmly believe in what PG said about, if there are two explanations and one of them gives you an excuse to be lazy, it's probably the other one.

But, the whole choice / consequences meme rings hollow, it's a way for the wealthy to justify whatever awful things they may have done in order to get rich (or that they may have simply been born into it), while talking down to the poor and blaming them for the structural causes of poverty.

It's not just that the poor don't know the consequences of their actions, it's also that they don't have connections with people who can help them deflect the consequences of their actions.

>If you have wealthy/powerful/connected friends and relatives, they can and will shield you from the consequences of your actions.

Like a trillion dollar bailout.

With respect, you seem to be generalizing from some wealthy people to all wealthy people. There are people who became wealthy without screwing other people in the process.

His post didn't say anything about the rich becoming rich through immoral ways. His post says that rich people can afford to greatly reduce the impact of their bad decisions, whereas the poor cannot.

There's nothing here about someone getting screwed.

Yes he did actually. He said: "But, the whole choice / consequences meme rings hollow, it's a way for the wealthy to justify whatever awful things they may have done in order to get rich...."

Most wealthy people.

Well, some became wealthy with more moral means than others.

But everybody that became wealthy took advantage of systematic injustices to do so (and to keep his wealth).

Except if he won the lottery.

But everybody that became wealthy took advantage of systematic injustices to do so (and to keep his wealth).

That seems a bit of an overstatement, unless you're going to argue from extremes, eg 'X chose to work at building a business rather than establishing a level economic playing field for everyone before starting that business.' I've met lots of privileged people, but I've also met a lot of people that succeeded through a mixture of luck, talent and diligence and I don't consider them to be taking advantage of systematic injustice.

Can you explain what you mean?

Can you explain what you mean?

I think what the grandparent means is that the fundamental imbalance of the present system (for example, some are born in to greater education and more supportive environments, with greater access to resources) is self-perpetuating. Ignoring the real impact of the system as a whole is morally questionable.

Coming from a luckier background and accruing wealth without making efforts to alter the system is essentially tantamount to supporting systematized inequity and is therefore morally questionable.

Likewise, being poor in a wealthy country but consuming vast quantities of resources, whining about how the 1% is the problem whilst personally producing serious negative effects on the shared environment is also morally questionable.

Many philosophies (eg. Buddhism) eventually get to the point, deducing from there, where it is realized that we are all inherently destructive creatures. Our mere existence is the destruction of others' rights and resources in our vast yet finite environment. Furthermore, each of us possesses limited time and our capacity for constituting positive change is merely to correctly take charge of our own actions (including thoughts, speech, etc.) in the present.

I'm not sure about the monotheistic religious traditions, but in a philosophical sense Buddha's response to this moral quandry was, IMHO, pretty well argued and pretty damn timeless! It's called The Noble Eightfold Path. If interested there's a good deal more on that from a famous American monk (born in New York) at http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/waytoend.ht... and from a Burmese monk at http://www.bps.lk/olib/wh/wh245-p.html

There's a recent quote going around, that if you are male, white and middle-upper class, you're playing life in "easy mode".

Now, this means you get resources from others, those that are playing life in "hard mode". People don't start from equal positions -- and the winners like to think it was their "hard work" and "determination" that got them there. As if a coal miner doesn't work hard, or a single mother of four working at some shitty job to make ends meet is not "determined".

And the higher you go, the easier it gets for you, and the more "cheat codes" you unlock.

Those give you all sorts of powers. Like, firing people. People that own a business fire people that were perfectly good at their job and needed the money, if the company economic conditions require it (whereas, they rarely share their loot when the company makes a killing).

Or take collecting rent. Another injustice. Beginning from an empty land (actually a land inhabited by indians, that were driven out the lands, but I digress), somehow one person now has 4 apartments, and another person has to pay rent to him.

Now, that's a high level view - imbalances and injustice is all around. Even holding on to money, with people starving, is injustice enough in my worldview.

> There's a recent quote going around, that if you are male, white and middle-upper class, you're playing life in "easy mode".

FYI, the source of this quote is John Scalzi: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...

Not commenting on it; just felt like it ought to be grounded in a citation rather than floating around as a meme.

It's a zero sum game. If you won, someone else didn't. Period. Rectify it how you want; it's reality.

There isn't a right answer here. A lot of the welfare state is bread and circuses. Many of the successful folks knocking the welfare state profit from it. One of our local "conservative" luminaries got his start as a body shop providing workers for the welfare department, and got rich on charter schools

It's always easy to knock someone down when type haven't walked a mile in their shoes. It's not a rich/poor thing either. Working folks in the projects HATE people on welfare, even though they receive food and housing benefits.

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