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Billionaires and corporations bad, wealth inequality bad, all my problems are caused by these things, so now they’re just getting what they rightly deserve. Same as the Luigi nonsense.
Edit: I’ll add that this all seems to me to be downstream of a belief in labor theory of value and a lack of understanding of what markets do and why they might be good. Same people who thought that pandemic-era inflation was actually just Greedflation. You can only come to believe such a thing if you have no understanding of supply and demand and the price mechanism, and what the government clamping down on these would actually cause.
Billionaires and corporations
badare corrupting the free market through anticompetitive behavior and by bribing politicians and judges, allowing them to overprice their products and services and underprice labor. Wealth inequalitybadinevitable, but can be moderated by effective policy,all my problemsmy poor salary and high costs of housing, food, and healthcare are caused by these things, so now they’re just getting what they rightly deserve. Same as the Luigi nonsense.There's a more realistic steelman for you.
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If your model of what drives the outgroup is this simple and pejorative, you should be at least a little suspicious of it. Can you try to steelman the pro-Luigi case?
Sure.
The very wealthiest people (some very small fraction of the top 1%) are now richer as a percentage of total wealth than they’ve ever been. They could not spend their wealth over the course of their lives, and they are all well past the point where an additional million or even billion makes a meaningful impact on their quality of life. At the same time, many Americans who arguably work just as hard as these people in terms of effort and working hours struggle to get needs like healthcare and shelter met.
The government’s job is to support the health and wellbeing of its people, but to make matters worse, the government is unable or unwilling to help regular working-class people. This is because this segment of wealthy people are able to buy political influence that cashes out either in government services being worse or nonexistent (because the wealthy buy themselves tax cuts), or in corporations (owned and operated by the wealthy) achieving regulatory capture, meaning laws are written to favor allowing corporations to make more money at the expense of customer experience.
Combine this with the emerging trend of companies actually abandoning lower-cost offerings targeting the poor and working class in favor of doubling down on high-cost offerings targeting the wealthy, and you start to see a society that treats anyone but the most wealthy as essentially discardable slaves that might actually be worth more turned into biodiesel. Even worse, these AI freaks are talking about completely replacing labor with capital, eliminating the need of the ruling class to at least act like they care about the working class.
The solution then appears to be to tax the wealthy more, and eliminate their ability to buy influence in politics. Taxing them would have almost no discernible impact on their lives but would have a very positive impact on the lives of normal people. But, the wealthy are now so thoroughly entrenched that there seems to be no way for the voices of millions of working-class people to effect change via normal, respectable, political advocacy. You can protest all you want, but tomorrow a billionaire will write a check to [insert politician] and that’ll be it. And so, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.
Edit: I’ve amended “top 1%” to be more narrow as what I said isn’t actually even true of the 1%.
The threshold for the top 1% by net worth in the US is about $13.7 million. Easily spendable, and an additional million (and certainly billion) makes a difference.
The labor theory of value is just wrong.
I’m not sure if you missed the comment I was replying to but this is meant to be a steelman of a perspective I’m arguing against. These are not my views and I disagree with most of them.
OK, but if you're going to do a steelman, it's best not to include things that are false (like the top 1% being so rich that an additional million or billion wouldn't make a difference)
“Top 1%” is what’s commonly used by the people I’m arguing against, I had a feeling it might not be literally be the 1% but I didn’t feel like looking up exactly what fraction of a percent it was. I’ve edited my comment to be more correct.
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Whatever steelman someone creates for an irrational position to seem more rational is going to be considerably less related to what people actually believe.
It can still be a useful exercise, but one must approach it with the awareness that the steelman is wholly unrelated to whatever drives the fangirls.
But does this matter? I think you will struggle to find any widely supported position where the majority of believers can articulate an intelligent justification. You can argue about whether it is an effective strategy to attack the "head-empty believers" directly (by way of shame or ridicule or whatever you think works), but even if it is, performing that attack here will not reach them and only shit up this discussion space.
Also, it stands to reason that those who do hold the position for more intelligent reasons hold an outsize influence on it; even the ones who just think on the level of "fat moneybag CEO bad" are vaguely reassured by some belief that some smart and high-status people can articulate a more robust line of reasoning for why it is so. Far more interesting and fruitful, then, to engage with that line.
Depends on why you're doing it. If you're trying to come up with a reason an intelligent, rational individual will believe X, steelmanning can be useful. If you're trying to understand why the youths or the elderly or PMC liberals with In This House signs post like they believe X, steelmanning is useless.
I do not think that stands to reason at all. Popularity and influence do not strike me as particularly well correlated to intelligent reasoning.
Robin Diangelo, Tema Okun, Ibram Kendi are quite stupid people that held, for several years, an incredibly amount of influence, perhaps precisely because their reasoning is incredibly simple. Nor do I think this trend is limited to progressive racism.
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