Source: Equalizer – War and Peas – Webcomic
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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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I’ve never subscribed to the notion that inequality is inherently bad. The lives of people all over the world have improved so radically from just 100 years ago it’s hard to fathom. We went from people starving to having so much food we have an obesity crisis. Given this, it just seems ungrateful when one complains that others have even more. So what?
Of course, as an aside, money needs to be ejected from politics. Democracy is sacrosanct and money should not buy influence.
Inequality breeds the corruption you're talking about.
If a billionaire can come along and give a politician (or their campaign, or whatever loophole is used) a sum of money several magnitudes higher than what they earn in a year, and that same value being effectively a rounding error for the billionaire, you're going to get lobbying and bribes. As the saying goes, everyone's got a price.
You don't get close to that rich by playing by the rules and being a nice person, so they're not suddenly going to draw the line that they should behave ethically with governments—it's just another business relationship they can leverage for profit.
You cannot solve political corruption whilst there is inequality. The people benefiting know this, and will lobby to protect or increase the inequality.
That’s an excellent argument to restructure your electoral system. Most other countries don’t allow rich people to buy politicians. It’s not an argument against inequality specifically. Democracy is how you affect change. If you want money out of politics, vote for it. Start with local elections. One of the most promising trends I’ve seen in American electoral reform is single transferable voting (STV). Of course entrenched parties on both sides resist it when they have a commanding lead, but with enough grassroots support, it will become the norm in primaries in our lifetime. This means, for example, Bernie Sanders getting the nomination instead of Hillary Clinton. How much different would America and the world be if that had happened?
Billionaires can always find ways to bankroll their ideology, even if they can't buy elected officials directly.
Jokes on you, the billionaire is the politician
If everyone gets richer, but the inequalities are huge, inflation will keep making the bottom group miserable. A performant social safety net to force the redistribution is a possible solution to that.
If the poor are getting poorer in real terms then I’m all for some form of redistribution. If the system isn’t making everyone better off, then it needs to be restructured. My argument is regarding inequality specifically, not poverty, which is a moral, social, and economic hazard.