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[Jervill]

As a side note, the "American Dream" is bupkis. A nice lie told to working class heroes.

As a side note, '"the American Dream' is bupkis," is bullshit, a nice lie told to people who can't be happy with life and blame society instead of themselves.

Only if you subscribe to the "Just World" logical fallacy.  Bad things happen to good people, and sometimes people simply cannot pick themselves back up.

[Strife26]

Yeah, bad things happen to good people. Sorry to break it to anyone who didn't realize that life can suck. When life deals you shit, all there is to do is keep working your ass off until you get the chance to mulligan it and try again. And again, and again. Keep going until you're happy with what you've got.

I won't argue that the social contract demands those people who can't pick themselves up be held up by either their brother, or by the government's safety net, and maybe America's is lacking, but at the end of the day, it's the individual's responsibility, anything else is just icing on a cake.


Life sucks, but until you're not breathing any more, you've always got the ability to fight your way to another chance at improving your lot in life and to leave a better life to your loved ones.

That's my definition of the American Dream, and it's no lie while there's one cat practicing it.

[Zrk2]

Life sucks, but until you're not breathing any more, you've always got the ability to fight your way to another chance at improving your lot in life and to leave a better life to your loved ones.

In b4 strawmanesque argument about those that can't.

[kaijyuu]

Life sucks, but until you're not breathing any more, you've always got the ability to fight your way to another chance at improving your lot in life and to leave a better life to your loved ones.

That's my definition of the American Dream, and it's no lie while there's one cat practicing it.

If that's your definition, then great. I'll agree that such a thing exists and can be admirable.


The "american dream" that I've heard of is that "anyone can make it," which is a bald faced lie. There's a limit to how many people can be in the upper classes, and it's directly relative to how many people exist in poverty. For every millionaire there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people starving. Those that "made it" stepped on top of many others, and directly prevented those people from "making it," to get there. The game we play is king of the hill, and the hill is made of people.

Life sucks, but until you're not breathing any more, you've always got the ability to fight your way to another chance at improving your lot in life and to leave a better life to your loved ones.

In b4 strawmanesque argument about those that can't.

People would bring up such an argument to show that "life isn't fair" is a problem that can be rectified, at least to the best of our ability. Life isn't fair because people purposefully make it that way (in addition to environmental influences and whatnot, but still).

[zombie urist]

Well then its still kinda true that 'anyone can make it', but not 'everyone can make it'.

[kaijyuu]

Well then its still kinda true that 'anyone can make it', but not 'everyone can make it'.

Tell that to a Hispanic fellow. Or a woman (glass ceilings, woo!).

Even without the social issues, we have a term for how many people can "make it." It's called social mobility. That's gone waaaay down in recent years, and was highest in the 50s (which also had some of the least wealth disparity in the nation's history). Certainly, if "anyone can make it" is still a good thing despite it still not meaning "everyone," we'd want to maximize the number of people who actually can, right?

[Montague]

Kill all the rich people and use their money to fund camps where all human children are sent to be educated and nurtured as equals, until they are of the age of majority.

Just wait a couple generations and everything should sort it'self out. Not sure what sort of ethical concerns that might violate, but the ends would justify the means if equality is the sole moral principle involved.

[Ancre]

This is a fun thread. I'm in Europe, promotion of public school and restrictions on private schools, government help for housing, health care and a bunch of other benefits, we have that already

Anyways, I don't think reducing private schools is the solution. Up the level of all public schools instead. If public school could deliver high-quality teaching and the kids that got out of it could all do very well in college, then it won't matter if your kid comes out of a public school or a private one - he/she will do fine in college anyways.

Plus, aren't public schools a standard anyways ? If parents puts their kids in private school because private schools are much better than public schools, then everyone benefits from public school levels going up. (I also believe there's a maximum "level of efficiency" a point where you can't do better without overworking the kid, so if public schools' level go high enough, it will trivialize the difference between public schools and private schools too, and everyone will still be better off anyways.) 

"Everyone should go to college" is not necessarily a good idea. I haven't lived it, but it seems that in the US, if you have a bachelor's or a master degree you're ahead of the game, and it actually helps getting a good job and a middle-class life. Here, many, many people have a licence (three years college degree) so it becomes trivial - you're just sitting on school benches for three years more. I don't really know how to get out of this problem - college degree and education is worth more when it's rare, so it can't benefit everyone. Anyways, developing trades is also a good way to live well, as it can pay surprisingly well.

Government help (health care, unemployment benefits, and any other social help) is very important as well. When you're poor, everything costs more in percentage of your income, so you have a lot less room to maneuver, and every setback is bigger and more crippling. If you have some sort of help from the government (or anywhere else really) you can put money aside and it makes going up easier since you don't have to spend all your energy and income on survival.

[SalmonGod]

getting rid of private property, or at least imposing a limit on how much you can hoard. you can still benefit people based on merit, but take away their power to exploit other people's merit

I'm glad somebody else said it...

All this stuff everyone else is arguing about is minor details that you can reform to band-aid the problem, but that band-aid will only be ripped off again by those standing on top of the hill of people.  That type of manipulation is how they get there and maintain that standing.  Property-based systems are competitive (even in a statist communism, the competition is in politics instead of business), but that competition is not as perpetual as we're told to believe.  Those who reach the top (the .0001%) find themselves in a position where they can change the rules of the game to their favor.  At that point, the very tippy top of the hill is forever reserved.  A massive wake-up and popular pressure can upset the order temporarily, but then the game just plays out again until another tiny group reserves the top for themselves again.

The solution has to be more fundamental.  The concept of property.  Remove the mechanism which allows for hoarding.  It's not inequality that's necessarily the problem.  It's hoarding.  People amass control over many many times more resources than they'll ever truly realize they even have.  Taking away that control won't even effect anyone's quality of life.  The ultra-wealthy could even continue to live in obscene luxury, after all the crap they're not using goes towards alleviating everyone else's suffering.

It's actually really really simple -- a person cannot own anything that they do not personally depend on or maintain a direct relationship with.  No one can own a house they do not live in.  No person or small group of people can claim ownership of a factory when they don't even work there.  You can amass as much stuff as you want that actually effects your quality of life, but you have no control of resources beyond what you personally use.

This is typically expressed as the difference between property and possession.  It's a change that cannot be forced legally.  It has to happen culturally.  As it is, the majority of people cannot even conceive of it, even after it's explained a dozen times via a variety of methods.  It's just so far removed from the way we currently live.

But the concept is simple and fundamental and completely obsoletes the basis by which inequality reaches destructive levels.

[Montague]

I think an easier solution would be a huge inheritance tax or something? We must eliminate the concept of private property, really?

How about letting everybody get as rich as they like for one lifetime and just break up the dynasties of the old money by taxing their estate up to 90-99% when they die? Encourage them to make and SPEND the money they earn so you still have an economy and some kind of incentive to work.

Of course, if you did that all the rich people would just flee the country with their money in tow, but hey, no more rich capitalist exploiters, right?

[SalmonGod]

Go for the inheritance tax.  I'd like to see it.  It'll work for a while, until money influence undoes it again.  I won't complain about measures that relieve the symptoms, but I'll still point out that the disease isn't cured.

And what's the problem anyway?  People always recoil... but the concept of property doesn't benefit anyone, even those who manage to hoard the most of it.  All it does is allow a small group of people to control everyone else's access to resources, and that small group experiences no benefit at all for being in such a position beyond the egotistical satisfaction of having that kind of power.

[Montague]

Go for the inheritance tax.  I'd like to see it.  It'll work for a while, until money influence undoes it again.  I won't complain about measures that relieve the symptoms, but I'll still point out that the disease isn't cured.

And what's the problem anyway?  People always recoil... but the concept of property doesn't benefit anyone, even those who manage to hoard the most of it.  All it does is allow a small group of people to control everyone else's access to resources, and that small group experiences no benefit at all for being in such a position beyond the egotistical satisfaction of having that kind of power.

It's not property itself responsible for inequality, it's more the way money is used to make more money. Capitalists invest money to develop businesses and they receive compensation for it. How would property rights be limited and still have a practical, functioning society? Would just collective entities like corporations control vast wealth and invest it? Who'd be able to invest, develop, manage and maintain these great and wondrous things like factories and farms if nobody had rights to any of it?

Even with something simple like an estate tax, there is an issue of who else could put it to better use. I'd think it'd end up in the possession of corporations ultimately. Giving it all to the poor, it'd all be spent on consumer goods that businesses provide. Giving it to the government, I guess it'd be like a tax break for everybody else.

[SalmonGod]

Whoever used those things would own those things, and have equal say regarding the use of those things.

The equivalent of investing would be community agreement that a thing should be done, and problem solving/organizing to get it done. 

Our style of thinking is left over from an age that we have just recently left, where large-scale consensus decision making was impossible.  Centralization of decision-making and resources was the only way to get things done.  All previous models of society have been nothing but different centralization algorithms.

With modern communications, this is no longer the case.

[Strife26]

With modern communications the account of cooperation that you'd need to pull a collective application of all investment wealth is kinda ridiculous. You're either going to end up with government dealing with it or you've got a nice, tiny, utopian, collective

[SalmonGod]

And when you remove the basis for competition (that being the desperate scramble to become a property owner instead of a slave to property owners), the only things left are cooperation or non-participation, neither of which is a problem.