I guess if you think about it that way then everything is luck and we live in a deterministic world where none of your choices matter. That still wouldn’t support the argument in the OP meme though.

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Capital is more like stored labour. The first ever capital was just a starp stick or spear. Someone spent labour and it resulted in a more productive way to hunt animals. This almost immediately would’ve resulted in inequality as the spear hunter caught more game. It’s not that the capital was taking anything from the labourer, it’s actually that capital and labour work really well together and humans are more productive with capital.

You’re also taking a snapshot of the most regulated industry in the US. Building high rises is illegal in huge swaths of urban areas. Before we say the free market isn’t providing an answer cab we actually try it? I’m talking removing exclusionary zoning, speeding up the permit process and reducing the power of local action committees, and reforming the broken heritage process that’s used by rich people to keep their areas from densifying.

Curious why you made the distinction about real personal income when it is also rising. I agree wealth inequality is rising but not that it is coming at the expense of real personal incomes.

The long-term trend is that the average person’s income is rising but we’ve seen recent declines due to high inflation. Can you expand on your line of thinking? I’m not sure I follow your reasoning.

Most households living below the poverty line have at least one unemployed person, so giving people jobs is pulling them out of poverty. Whether or not they are treated fairly at work and are satisfied with their working conditions is another story.

My parents never could’ve either but $500k household net worth only puts you in the top 20% of households so it’s not like they were exceptionally wealthy and we don’t know if they borrowed to invest or what exactly their specific situation was. Miguel Bezos was a Cuban refugee and then worked as an engineer for Exxon and Jackie Bezos was a secretary so i mean this is pretty middle class IMO.

That doesn’t mean that all billionaires clawed their way to the top as i mentioned above, or that we shouldn’t make progressive changes to the tax code. It’s just important that we separate truth from fiction to make educated decisions.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz grew up in a Brooklyn Housing project, George Soros survived the holocaust and worked waiting tables, David Murdock of Dole Foods was homeless. There’s tons of examples.

Here’s a fun article that ranks the whole Fortune 400 list. 80% of them inherited their wealth or at least grew up middle class.

Jeff Bezos actually scores high on the list because his Mom had him when he was 17, he flipped burgers in high school and by and large did not grow up rich.

What do you think he’s saying here?

You didn’t read the article you linked. In it Walter Block states that slavery violates the non-aggression-principle and is not permissible under libertarianism.

This is not at all a debate in libertarianism. Libertarians recognize the role of a limited small government to protect individual rights. Like please pull up one example of this debate going on in a libertarian space.

Libertarians don’t believe murder should be legal and crazy shit like that. Libertarians believe in a guaranteed freedoms like freedom of speech, economic liberalism and are often social progressives who believe in gay marriage and drug legalization.

The bill of rights was brought to you by libertarians.

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The mass shootings are the symptom of a larger mental health problem. Here in Canada where we have much more gun control we recently memorialized one of our most deadly attacks, The Toronto van attack which killed 11 and wounded 15 (some critically). How is gun control going to help the fact that some people out there want to kill as many lives as possible?

So where are you going in Australia?

“No idea mate. Figure I’ll sort it out when i get there.”

Oh I’m sorry i didn’t realize there was empirical evidence for socialism. Please send me a link to some of these successful socialist societies.

You wouldn’t be any better off on a socialist system. The people at the top of the party would control everything and the working class would be even poorer than they are now. You’re just licking the left boot instead of the right one.

Right? There are pros and cons with every system. People disagree based on value judgements not based on misinterpretation of facts. People in their echo chambers will have you believe that everyone on the other side of the political spectrum all thinks the same way “the same people who say X also say Y!” Rarely is that the case. Most people are actually centrists who have their own independent beliefs on a wide range of topics.

Well consider the fact that there is currently no conflict and no evidence that one is going to start. The Roman republic went on for 700 years with both a republican democracy and what most historians describe as a highly unequal and oligarchical distribution of power and wealth. Perhaps it fell eventually due to class struggles between the working class and the aristocracy but if it was truly incompatible, then fine it existed in a state of “incompatibility” for literal centuries and there’s no reason to believe the USA and other capitalist countries will be any different. And no reason to believe something better will come along after.

So if democracy and financial oligarchy are incompatible, why does it matter? And btw there’s probably a ton of “incompatible” things that depend on the eye of the beholder. We had racist laws enacted by statute, foreign wars, internment camps, espionage, immoral scientific experiments done by the government all could be described as incompatible with democracy. The reality is that democracy is rule by majority (nothing more, nothing less). Whatever the ethos or the common morality is will be compatible with democracy. Anything done by the elected leaders of the 51% is compatible with democracy.

Don’t get me wrong democracy is better than any other option but we need Democracy+ to really guarantee a just and equal society.

I am a libertarian. One thing I think people of all political stripes need to do is to start judging policy proposals by their outcomes and stop judging policy proposals based on their intentions. So you want minimum wage because a higher minimum wage will lower poverty? But is raising minimum wage the right way to achieve that goal?

Here are ten studies that provide some evidence that raising minimum wage does a poor job of lowering poverty:

1, 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10

See the thing with every policy is that it creates unintended consequences. If you tax gas, gas becomes more expensive and the price of food goes up, if you add zoning regulations it makes it harder to build and house prices go up, if you raise wages through legislation (even though we all want to make high wages) that raises the costs to businesses and they have to raise prices or reduce labour at the margin. This has the effect of helping specifically minimum wage workers but for people without a job making it harder to find one. In the long term prices will go up to make minimum wage feel like less than it used to, necessitating the need for constant minimum wage increases. Do you really want to be fighting the same fight all the time over minimum wage only to have it raised when it’s far too late and most people are already making more than the minimum wage? What a waste of political will.

IMO UBI is a great option, Milton Friedman was famously very pro-UBI, but also need to be sensible about what regulations and laws we are passing and use a science and evidence-based approach, not one that sounds good when you first hear it.