door5

Piracy is good but fascism is bad. What's the problem here?

Capitalism has certain systemic features, one of them is concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small few. Look at how wealth is concentrated in the U.S., especially over the last 40 years. Unions have eroded, markets have been deregulated, our social safety net has been dismantled, etc. and as a result, the power of capitalists has expanded. Capitalism is by its nature struggle between workers and capital. Capital is winning.

Capitalism.

That investment shouldn't be made by individuals, it should be made by society as a whole, ie by increasing taxes so tuition is free. The burden of student debt is not shared equally or fairly.

They would be say that an inheritance tax hurts "family farms" and "family businesses", because they are dishonest about the fact that their policies benefit the power and privilege of a only a tiny minority of the population

There is not one single way to publicly fund media. Hell you could just leave the whole system as is as provide no strings attached grants or tax credits to all publishers. The point is, there is no technical solution to this, we need policy change.

The only way to have free content is if the user is the product being sold.

Or we could provide robust public funding, like the BBC

It's what we must accept if we don't want the government to provide the news.

Public funding of media does not make it "government news". In fact, it's subject to far more scrutiny than private media. You would rather Jeff Bezos and friends control the news rather than a transparent & highly regulated independent publicly funded organization?

The U.S. president has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault. He has called women bitches, whores, fat pigs, ugly, etc. Multiple states in the south passed legislation effectively banning abortion, stripping women of their sexual and bodily autonomy. Where is there open, institutional misandry of this level?

Critiquing male power and men's sexist behavior towards women is not "misandry"

I didn't frame it as men vs. women. I framed it as challenging patriarchy, which is a system and ideology of male dominance and control.

No, I'm saying the economy rewards the choices men make. Women get paid less because employers pay less in female-dominated fields.

Even if you assume all this research is correct, why are people with certain characteristics or interests that are disproportionately associated with women get rewarded less economically? Also sexism.

It's not sexist to point out that men historically have held disproportionate cultural, social, economic, and political power and continue to do so to this day.

I agree, however I think it's important that we do not use "implicit bias" as a cover. Implicit bias seems very vague and allows people to evade responsibility. I think there's a lot of very explicit bias (in the form of sexist attitudes, discrimination, biased hiring practices, etc) that need to be tackled. The "implicit bias" narrative (that a lot of tech CEOs are a fan of) makes me uncomfortable because it depoliticizes the issue, chalking it up so something more innately human (our biases and mistakes) rather than sexist attitudes and policies.

It isn't, there is an enormous body of evidence demonstrating that the gender pay gap is driven by overt sexism and institutional barriers. This evidence is far more compelling than speculation about height.

Another way in which rigid, patriarchal gender roles hurt men as well as women. Straight men should be far more critical of sexism and misogyny than they are. This attitude is directly tied to oppression against women in the workforce.

There's a ton of overt misogyny and sexism in the U.S., nothing "subconscious" about it.

Socialism is a material struggle, it isn't an idealist Utopia where everything is perfect. It's a process. And most socialist regimes have been in the developing world, which had much less to work with and much weaker infrastructure. Regardless, China has lifted nearly a billion people out of extreme poverty over the last 40 years. I also think that Cuba's accomplishments have been admirable, despite decades of aggression and embargo from the United States. You may compare these regimes unfavourably to a developed country, but that's an unfair comparison, because they weren't developed countries before socialists took over. Compare them to other, capitalist countries in the global south and I think there is no question what model works better

This is ahistorical nonsense. The west industrialized hundreds of years ahead of the rest of the world and spent a century and a half plundering the global south. Regardless, China has managed to almost eliminate extreme poverty and hunger despite following a model very different than neoliberial Capitalism. As was the Soviet Union. Not defending these regimes, just stating a fact.

The majority of the world does follow neoliberial Capitalism and has for decades. And it has totally failed to reduce poverty. Almost all global poverty reduction since the 70s has taken place in China.

You also neglect the role of imperialism. The west has acquired much of its wealth through exploitation of the global south. So of course they are wealthier, because they have stolen wealth from everyone else, trapping countries in debt or dependence and overthrowing any regime that challenges neoliberial rule. Leftist regimes have done phenomenally well given the global economic context they live within -- Cuba has a similar life expectancy rate to the United States and phenomenally low malnutrition among developing Nations. China and Vietnam have experienced staggering economic growth for decades. Just compare India and China in this regard -- a country totally dominated by Western imperialism vs a left wing government that managed to forge its own development path

they are not the reason why there is still actual poverty and malnutrition in the western world.

Why is there poverty and malnutrition in the western world if not because of capitalism? Neoliberal capitalism has been the dominant economic system in the west since the 80s.

Then why not focus on the anti-competitive behavior, instead of trying to remake the entire society in your leftist image?

because my leftist image is good

We could do this all day, but the fundamental difference here is you look at the normal functioning of capitalism and think it is just and good, while I look at it and see it as highly exploitative, unethical and inhumane. I think concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an unelected few is bad, and I think the world that these people have created is also bad. I think that we as a species can, and must do better.

You ignored my point - that the concentration of wealth is an inhibitor of solving poverty, and you failed to explain why you feel the need to defend billionaires' interests when they couldn't care less about yours, unless you're a billionaire.

Some of us do not believe the leftist alternatives being proposed are better. This does not mean we actually like the status quo. You are knocking down a giant strawman here.

I'm trying to be fair here, what alternatives are you defending? I want a world where billionaires have less wealth and power, do you disagree?

I would propose that bad branding is a symptom of a deeper problem, that the services were designed by engineers motivated primarily by ideology, which is very unlikely to reach a wide audience outside of engineers and activists

You're talking about one aspect of businesses -- their relationship with their consumers, which generally is not exploitative (although there are obvious exceptions).

However, Jeff Bezos's relationship with his employees is exploitative (especially warehouse employees). Consider also his relationship with publicly-funded research. We as taxpayers pay for public research, we helped pay to build the internet, and yet we don't see any dividends for that money.

Also, the mere fact that one person controls that much wealth is problematic politically. Jeff Bezos owns one of the largest newspapers in the world, which concerns me greatly. He has tremendous political influence in Seattle, and has been able to bully other cities into giving into his demands for HQ2. Massive amounts of wealth comes with it massive amounts of power, and power is a zero sum game.

These are two sides of the same coin. Our economy is structured so that wealth is concentrated at the top. This isn't just something that happens, it's a result of specific policy decisions. It went hand in hand with the dismantling of unions and the social safety net in this country in the 80s and onwards.

Regardless, if you're not a billionaire capitalist, why are you on their side? The rich are cognizant that capitalism is class struggle and openly state so, so why do you ally with them when they fight against you and your interests?

Sure, spend the $1T or so you would get from all the US billionaires on infrastructure. That's a decent fraction of US federal spending--for one year. Then it's gone. Now what do you do?

Again, you're interpreting my moral claim (billionaires are a policy failure) as specific advocacy of a one-time wealth tax on billionaires and no other shift of U.S. policy. I believe in a massive shift in U.S. economic policy to the left, which would entail a number of different reforms aimed at reducing wealth inequality over the long-term.

What all of this leaves out is that wealth is not a zero sum game. Wealth gets created. If you want to reduce wealth inequality, you need to help more people create wealth, not try to take it away from people who have already created it.

You need to do both. I never advocated for merely expropriating billionaires' wealth and making no other policy changes.

Jeff Bezos made his billions by serving the needs of the people; that's what Amazon does. Lots of people shop there because it gets them the stuff they need, when they need it, for an affordable price.

Jeff Bezos made his billions by exploiting his workers. Despite the fact that they built the company and do almost all of the work that makes Amazon possible, he reaps all the profits. Workers built Amazon, not merely Bezos alone, and you're totally erasing everyone else's contribution.

Another way of putting what I've just said is that Bezos, in creating and growing Amazon as a corporation, created lots of wealth. A huge, efficient distribution system for lots of goods people want now exists that didn't exist before; that's a huge creation of wealth.

The technology that enabled this massive creation of wealth wasn't created by Bezos though, it was created through publicly-funded research. Why is Jeff Bezos a billionaire but not Tim Barners-Lee, when by any measure he did far more to enable the creation of wealth? And again, like I said earlier, it is a huge creation of wealth, but that wealth goes into Jeff Bezos' pockets, not ours, nor his workers'.

Lots of them did so by not creating any wealth at all, just transferring wealth from other people to themselves.

All billionaires get their wealth this way, by exploiting their workers. Furthermore, all the big tech companies participate in anti-competitive behavior (vendor lock-in, etc) which benefits them individually but hurts the wealth of society as a whole.

There's no reason, for example, a publicly-owned or worker-owned company could not have accomplished what Amazon did. All they would have needed is sufficient access to capital -- the basic technology already existed & wasn't created by Amazon, they just built the institutional structure.

First off, Jeff Bezos is not the only billionaire, so your $370 number is off. Second off, there's more that the government can do other than cash payments to individuals, they can invest in infrastructure (like education, housing, public transit, etc.) which pays long-term dividends to society. The wealth from this tax could be used to fund a public bank, which re-invests it and pays dividends back to the community. I'm not advocating for a specific policy proposal -- there exist many -- I'm defending the general principle that concentration of wealth is unethical and ought to be redistributed. Once you agree with that principle, you can work out exactly how best to do it, but that principle is necessarily an ideological one -- one that says that money and capital should serve the needs of the people, not the wealthiest corporations.

I do believe that -- in fact, I have no problem with a relatively modest income and wealth inequality. However, the wealth and income inequality that exists in the United States is far beyond that. In the United States, the top 1% controls 35% of the wealth in this country, while the bottom 40% controls less than 1%. This isn't just a difference in skills, effort, and risk-taking. This is flagrant exploitation and domination by the rich and powerful.

Furthermore, I don't believe that Jeff Bezos or any CEO has a claim to their billions. I agree that "billionaires are a policy failure" -- no one person has any right to that much wealth. Amazon's success is not solely attributable to Jeff Bezos, it was the work of thousands of employees and built upon publicly-funded technology research. That wealth should be distributed to society at large, not controlled by one man.

If you find yourself defending billionaires, I wonder, why? Do you think you will someday be a billionaire? If not, then billionaires are not your friend. Their money is money that is taken from your pocket, and the collective pockets of our society. The traditional argument for wealth inequality is "a rising tide lifts all boats", but that has been empirically false since the 70s -- despite a massive increase in wealth, most of it has gone to a very tiny portion of our population. And if you're not part of that population, what on earth do you have to gain from defending them?

The state can build housing then if it's not profitable. Housing is a public good and a right, it should not be a product or investment.