Quote from: taltamir on December 24, 2013, 01:27:27 AM

Quote from: jinni on December 24, 2013, 12:57:07 AM

"The terms of the enemy"? Come on, this is typical 1950s McCarthyist rhetoric.

1. He has since been proven right.
2. why shouldn't I call those who seek to make me into a slave an enemy?

McCarthy was never proven right, the fascist post-war US was no heaven for ordinary people if not for their domination of other peoples making the ordinary American rich.

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I think your logic is completely binary, where everything is either communism or capitalism

You couldn't be further from the truth.
It is a continuum, but one where there is a direct connection between the variables. More communism = lower quality of life. More capitalism = more wealth "disparity" yet higher quality of life for even the poorest.

the main disagreement we have is on what the term "wealth disparity" means. You think it means "shrinking middle class, lots of extremely poor people"

Everyone else in the world thinks it means "if you take the X% top richest people, add up their property, you get a value which comprises a % of the total property in existence. The higher this value, the more wealth inequality"
This is a term that was invented by the communists and I am refusing to use it, but I don't pretend to seek to redefine it. There is no point in redefining it because it's definition is actually fairly accurate. The problem is that it looks at percentages instead of actual values.

I don't care if bill gates lives in a palace so long as I have a decent standard of living. I do care if stalin/mao/etc live in a palace if I have a horrific quality of living.

This is mostly because so few individuals had any wealth under such regimes.

The united states is also marching towards wealth equality. in 2012 we had 40% fewer millioneres than we had in 2008. It isn't JUST the poor that are getting poorer, the middle class are getting poorer, the rich are getting poorer. Everyone is getting poorer. Except for a few corrupt individuals who are getting richer, for now.

Too much wealth disparity is a problem. Firstly, it means protecting the wealthy will rely on using force against the poor to fend them off; secondly, it means people who are less well off don't have the same opportunities as the more well off and hence society is less meritocratic; thirdly, crime will increase.

I don't subscribe to the fallacy of "if the rich get richer in the relation to the poor, then the poor get richer in absolute terms". It is not an absolute truth, but merely something that happens sometimes.

To me, a true capitalist or anarchist society is one where no matter what amount of wealth you have, you have good (if not equal) opportunities to make your skills valuable and useful to their full and real extent. If inequality is too great this will not be possible.

I agree that if you separate wealth and political power by getting rid of the state, one could make room for larger "wealth disparities" than otherwise without sacrificing too much lost opportunity. But we have many problems, ie proto-governmental multinational companies, so jut getting rid of the state is not enough. As we see with Bitcoin, most things work better decentralized. And one of the biggest threats to Bitcoin is the centralization of mining. I think that a decentralized state of affairs would be in the long-term make less problems, better culture and as a result of that less wealth disparity.

In essence, gross wealth disparity is a hindrance to free competition, makes people estranged towards each other and encourages nepotism. I don't want to use force (taxes) to prevent this (as I think that will just make things worse), but I do think that it is important to assume the role of leadership when one is put in that position and hence one has responsibility for a lot of people. This is what I mean by wealth disparity. One cannot ignore it because if you have the faculty to help people out of a bad situation by teaching them how, you are morally obliged as a fellow human, that quite possibly have happened to end up in your comfortable position more by happenstance than by merit, to help out.

This is merely how I think it is necessary for a culture to be in order to avoid revolution (and in the end possibly shootings of early adopters of Bitcoin, just like the Russian imperial family where executed).