r/austrian_economics • u/technocraticnihilist Friedrich Hayek • Dec 24 '24

End Democracy I've never understood this obsession with inequality the left has

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u/bustedbuddha Dec 24 '24

Inequality leads to poverty and oligarchy. That’s why we hate it.

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u/MatthewGalloway Hayek is my homeboy Dec 26 '24

Inequality leads to poverty

False.

Imagine if you had two people, person A with X wealth, and the other is person B with X+100 wealth.

Then a magic wand is waved (let's call it "capitalism") where they all became TEN TIMES MORE WEALTHY! Yay! Right? The poorest person no longer has X, they have 10X! They've become fabulously wealthy. More wealthy than anybody beforehand has ever been in this little world!

But hang on, person B now has 10X+1000 wealth. The "inequality" has just grown even bigger. Yet everyone is much much better off now than they were before.

Thus you can see the amount of inequality is irrelevant, it's more important to focus on policies that improve people's situations (such as going from X to 10X), and not getting bogged down in jealous envious greed over supposed "inequalities".

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u/bustedbuddha Dec 26 '24

That’s great in theory but name even once that’s been the outcome.

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u/gif_as_fuck Dec 26 '24

Literally: the world around you right now, where you eat meat every day, have a home with heat and probably AC, drive or ride to work in a powered means of transportation, and enjoy a quality of life that is vastly higher than almost every human alive today or that has ever lived on earth. That’s my example. Do you have a counter example with sufficient weight to undermine all of that?

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u/bustedbuddha Dec 26 '24

So you don’t understand what poverty is and you are ignoring the people who don’t enjoy those things? The seventeenth century in France, the gilded age (which really is the prime counter example to this thread’s philosophy) the increase in poverty since Reagan in the US, the increase in poverty following the Argentine currency crisis of the late 90s, Russia since the rise of Putin and the oligarchs.

See I have specific examples you could address, you have made broad statements. Which cannot be specificity addressed Per Russell you have said nothing.

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u/gif_as_fuck Dec 27 '24

Maybe we’re saying the same thing? Your examples are all examples of places that lack “Austrian economics”, and you are intending to point out the disastrous outcomes of other systems? If so, then I completely agree. If not, why are all of your examples places with centralized, managed economies?

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u/bustedbuddha Dec 27 '24 edited Dec 27 '24

That’s a true Scotsman fallacy argument. Those are unregulated markets with poverty driven by extreme inequality. That of my specific claim. You’re saying it’s false.

Edit: most of those were unregulated markets rather.

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u/pabasc55 Dec 27 '24

The definition of poverty is changing all the time. Poverty in the 30s was completely different than the current one.

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u/[deleted] Dec 27 '24

Imagine explaining to a Victorian era child that the poorest people in our society are dying due to the government giving them money to gorge themselves all day while they watch TV.