Except that you can provide evidence for why the wealthy minority is too powerful whereas jews are just attacked for... being jewish. You know, the nazis for example were a minority, that doesn't mean attacking them was bad... populism isn't inherently bad...
Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Also, please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. That's very much against the rules also.
What you're saying is that critical thinking is required to determine morality. That is indeed true.
To oppose a wealth tax on majoritarian grounds you need to demonstrate that the wealthy are oppressed in some way. Simply saying "but majoritarianism" is not sufficient, and appealing to Jewish oppression is plain whataboutism.
I'm not advocating for guillotines or whatever. Simply that a small percentage of individual wealth over a certain amount (say $10MM) be redistributed to the rest of society. The end result of this is that individuals are still going to be able to hold $10MM even if the wealth tax redistributed 100% of the rest of their wealth. They will still be incredibly rich and not have any meaningful financial constraints on their lives.
> To oppose a wealth tax on majoritarian grounds you need to demonstrate that the wealthy are oppressed in some way.
There are multiple ways in which this is wrong.
Firstly, the term “oppression” is overly charged here. I prefer a more general term, so I’ll use “injustice”.
Secondly, you are making a circular argument. In my opinion, confiscating people’s wealth on the basis that they have too much of it is unjust. You are pointing out that the wealthy aren’t, as a whole, subjected to any kind of injustice as it stands; but you’re doing that in the context of proposing to commit injustice against them.
The point that you’re missing is that the primary human motivation for injustice is to perceive a successful group of people as fortunate and privileged, and to resent them for it. So your test for majoritarianism actually fails almost every time that it is tested because, in the perceptions of most majoritarians themselves, they would pass your test.
This piece is barely a page long. I've been so disappointed with Paul's work recently, he's just been getting lazier and lazier with his essays and I think his political worries and biases are starting to show.
It's more important to look at why the rich might be a problem than why their money might be useful to us. I know a lot of non-billionaires spend their lives defending them, but there is a case to be made for why their industries and disproportionate social power have been hurting society and a wealth tax is a small way of balancing out wealth inequality which, yes, is a bad thing, and you can do a thorough read of wikipedia if you don't think it is a bad thing.
45% of wealth OVER 50 million. How do you not see the difference? The idea is that you wont discourage anyone from doing anything because they're already a multi millionaire. Who is going to be bitter about being a multi millionaire?
