As for number 6, right now 47% of the US does not pay taxes.
That's highly simplistic. Even if you ignore payroll and sales tax, various business taxes paid by every employer you work for and business you buy from are only payable because you are respectively doing the work and buying the product. The tax respectively reduces your wage increases the price of the product you buy.
In an EMPLOYER'S market. Number one, it's not always an employer's market.
If your health is bad and your intelligence is low and you're in the middle of recession, it's the employers' market. It doesn't matter how hard you try.
Number two, that's why we have to encourage entrepreneurship instead of continuing to tell people to get jobs and act surprised and angry when they lose them.
Entrepreneurship requires intelligence, money and customers. Appropriate intelligence is not as common as people assume (or like to think they have) - the best minds are swept up by academia or high-paying positions in existing firms. To get money you need investors or banks giving loans. To get customers you need people with money who also care to buy shit - this latter problem is increasingly hard now technology exists and is deployed by various large corporations to bring all of life's universal comforts to your doorstep. Let's see... go to the trouble of finding something that n sufficiently well-off people want to buy in order to pay m new workers and require more useless work to be done producing shiny toys, or just tax the even more well-off? Well, the latter's half way there, but even better if people need work is to just reduce working hours across the board.
And the majority of new businesses fail, leaving the business owner in even more debt. But as long as you support the social safety net, I guess that's not so bad.
(2) 'sjust another anecdote. But no-one got rich by giving away their money and opportunity to others.
(3) "The hospital in question" may be several different places, each wanting their cut and each expecting what to you may be a trivial amount but to someone on the bread line is not. Moreover, well-known acute problems handled by the local hospital may be happy to take a very small amount, but conditions requiring specialists or ongoing treatment certainly will not. It may not cause you to go broke but it will certainly affect your ability to save, since the outcome of such negotiations will be partly based on your savings such that it is expected that you pay your debts in lieu of saving. I've been treated privately in the US (paying out of pocket) and by the national health service in the UK (via taxation). IME the former won't even consider some procedures unless you provide payment means up front. I've always had the means available. I am fortunate.
(4) Where do you live? Perhaps you are so privileged that even the less well-off around you have a cable and a new TV, but the poor in developed countries have neither of these things. Even if they had, say, an xbox - because poverty isn't a lifetime state and some people may have been well-off once but fallen on hard times - the ability to save up for one toy costing a few hundred dollars wouldn't say anything about ability to build up useful savings. And living in a house? No-one anywhere near the bread line can afford a house of his own, although house sharing is a completely rational option. You're injected with a worrying combination of prejudice and ignorance.
(5) The "content owner" believes he is entitled to protection by the government of his expressions; the commercial banker believes he is entitled to protection by the government of the loaning of non-existent money by fractional reserve; the investment banker believes he is entitled to bailouts when he has made enough profit he felt entitled to hoodwink; the regular store owner believes he is entitled to protection by the government against thieves. Everyone believes they are entitled to the government's working in their interests. The only government which isn't quickly overthrown is one where everyone gets a little of what they feel is in their interest, but no-one gets precisely what they want. If you can think of a better method, implement it and call me when it works out for you.
(6) People who make "below a decent wage" haven't necessarily always made a low wage and won't always be making a low wage. And they're involved in the tax system through taxes paid by their employer (not just payroll taxes) and every business they buy anything from (not just sales taxes). Insurance doesn't work by everyone paying out precisely what he puts in, if that's what you're worried about.
Of course, the least tax in terms of proportion of wealth is paid by the richest. It's not just due to income tax structure - the more you hoard the less money moves around to be taxed.
I agree that only a limited number of the needy are lazy. However, a majority of them have either never learned, or never mastered, the types of behavior that are necessary to survive on limited means.
Again, I think you're identifying those who do have various luxuries but claim to be devoid of cash, rather than a large number who are needy in the developed world sense - i.e. those who spend little to nothing beyond rent, food and utilities, yet still fall behind on payments. The only reason such people aren't already on the street is because they do know how to survive on limited means, but they are held back by a combination of factors: their own health or the health of a dependant; lack of (marketable) intelligence; a difficult job market; etc.
assistance programs which do not also provide education on the value of delayed gratification (including some kind of punishment/reward system)
No-one ever learns from being patronised like this. Those who are simply in a difficult situation (health etc.) already are doing the right things within context, and simply need more support. Those who need money management skills may certainly benefit from money management skills, but more money is its own reward: "punishment" has never educated anyone. And the state does not support people simply for being bad with money, contrary to certain propaganda.
My (2) was an anecdote to add to other anecdotes about one's circle of friends. There was a bit of logic in it, though: no man gets rich by giving everything away, whether that's money or opportunity.
Your (3) and (4) aren't actually addressing the problem.
(5) is the Protestant work ethic fallacy.
(6) is the libertarian fallacy. If people didn't pay their taxes then the first person with bigger guns than you would take everything you believe to be yours. But since people do pay taxes, they will pay it on their terms. You're quite right that money is misappropriated by government, but paying out on unemployment insurance is not how.
I have yet to meet someone who was struggling to make ends meet who did not have cable TV, an air conditioner and a game system.
You have a very homogenised social circle - fine in itself, but don't generalise from it! There are certainly some people I know who spend a lot of money on entertainment and then complain about having no cash, but it's outweighed by people who try to be frugal but - sometimes through physical or mental health difficulties - struggle with education and work. And there's an awful lot of hoodwinking in business which can catch out the consumer who isn't completely alert, leaving him out of pocket: from the smallprint and the lying salesman to the crook who runs off with the pension fund. Compound that with some very unreasonable employment practices (e.g. an arrest record is often used to deny employment in the UK, even if no charges were brought) and some people can have a lot of trouble wading through modern society.
The people who are genuinely needy tend IME not to be lazy, while those who whine the loudest probably aren't that needy and could more easily get their house in order. Unfortunately, it's the loudest who are remembered and generalised from. This latter group also tends to wander more in affluent circles, giving the impression to the better off that this is what needy people are like.
(2) I've never met a decent rich guy, and I was brought up in a significantly privileged environment - while I've never used money to decide on my friends, I've never been able to form a lasting friendship with anyone of significant means as they have all failed at demonstrating kindness/selflessness/generosity/etc and end up taking advantage of me when I try to demonstrate same. Causation no, but correlation certainly;
(3) People in debt (e.g. medical bills) don't get to save anything, let alone 10%;
(4) Many people live on the bread line - for any given location, recalling the cost of transport, there is a typical minimum wage which reflects the absolute minimum needed to survive. Many people are on this wage. The idea that you can always "save the remaining 10%" is inherently irrational and contrary to basic market theory: if it's an employers' market, employers will pay the absolute minimum to keep their employees alive and working;
(5) Telling people to "live within your means" is another way of saying, "I should get to enjoy life more than you so please continue suffering so that I can maintain my enjoyment." While I live well below my means, I don't begrudge anyone who feels he should have no less than the greatest glutton;
(6) You pay the state when you work to support you when you cannot. If taxation were at the level of, say, the US 150 years ago, then you might have an argument. It is not and you do not.
Meritocracy is the only moral basis for a society, prima facie.
That's as assumption-ridden as, "The Bible is the only moral basis for a society, prima facie."
To me, it's immoral for a society to try to equalize outcomes for all individuals
What's an outcome? And where did your false dichotomy come from?
that should be encouraged through reward
The rewards of achievement and reputation will follow from talent and effort. If you have good meals and safe shelter, what else would you want? Certainly humanity's primary source of research, the university, is populated mostly by people who feel this way (otherwise they'd be somewhere else).
We must not underestimate the importance of reputation and multiple sources. Modern technology, sleight of hand and a convincing smile mean that any claim can be well supported by physical "evidence" and we need independent tests of the reliability of the evidence.
For example, OBL was killed within the past week. We know this because the US government says so. The US government say they've confirmed it because they performed DNA tests. This means that we must trust the US government and, if the DNA test data is released, that the data is not fabricated. Why should we do that? What about the alternatives: that he is not dead, or - per Benazir - that he has been dead for several years already? We do not have sufficient reliable evidence for any of these claims, so we should not assume that any are true.
Similarly, what does OBL's birth certificate say? It says that a piece of paper was produced resembling a birth certificate. Is this sufficient evidence that he was born in the US? No. Is there credible evidence that he was not born in the US? No. We must either trust him, not care, or explore further. I've always thought the "where you're born" rule about the Presidency is against the principles on which the US was founded, so I'd pick the "not care" option.
It's better than an aristocracy where there exists an arbitrarily-defined "ruling class".
Both about coming from good stock. I don't see why it's any more "fair" to reward someone because he inherits his parents' intelligence vs inheriting parents' money. It might align better with some economic/political ideal, but the reward is just as unearnt.
It's better than communism where people are punished for being better than their peers.
Marxist communism doesn't do that. Soviet socialism didn't do it either: the more talented absolutely got more privileges and higher income. Indeed, applied talent always got you into good schools, with no need to worry about paying your way.
It's better than a caste system where you're perpetually stuck in your position.
A caste system is a more pervasive aristocatic system with a bit of racism thrown in. As you've pointed out, in a caste system you are "stuck in your position", IOW you can make some progress within certain limits but can go no higher than some ceiling. But in a meritocracy the same applies: what limits you is not quite the same, but it's still fundamentally determined by matters related to your breeding which are out of your control.
At the end of the day, meritocracy gives people incentive to be constructive by giving them a chance at social mobility. And that's all that's important in a functioning society.
That's a good summary of the simplistic pragmatism of meritocracy, yes.
The difference is whether the unfairness stems from the individual, or from society.
In every case you've listed (assuming communism = Soviet style socialism), it stems from your breeding.
I appreciate that Einstein moved from one pro-eugenics/racist state (against his own race) to another pro-eugenics/racist state, and that this baggage added to the guilt of the bomb awoke in him quite a social conscience.
But comments like this one were romantic fantasy.
It is certainly true that different people have different talents, some hard to discover. But there's no reason to think that everyone's endowed with the same level of "genius", simply differently distributed. It's a beautiful but entirely unfounded fantasy.
Possibly. What is murder? If your countrymen do not have enough food to survive, has the government murdered them?
For example, it is often argued that Stalin engineered the famine in the Ukraine in 1932-33. But what of Churchill's contribution to Bengal's starvation a decade later? At what point does the reassignation of previously accessible resources or denial of available resources result in responsibility for murder?
We can look at the argument in general terms of property rights, of course. If you believe in the sanctity of private property, you don't consider it a murder if you lock up a warehouse full of food while paupers starve outside. Nor is it murder if a doctor refuses his time to treat a simple condition; a town does not provide adequate sanitation; a police force does not clean up the streets of gangsters; a social worker assigns the old man to the cheapest, dirtiest retirement home. If you have a conception of just war, then perhaps it's not your fault if your bombing of infrastructure means people end up without clean water: you didn't murder the village which dies of dysentery over the following months.
Everyone agrees that walking up to someone randomly and stabbing them through the heart is murder. Beyond that, it's a question of how your moral/political compass determines the legitimacy of particular forms of resource allocation and the consequence of those allocations. Just as Stalin's idea of legitimacy allowed him to justify what many call murder, so in the West businessmen protected their patents via WIPO and denied antiretrovirals, justifying what others called murder. "Murderer" is as political a word as "terrorist". To be neutral, one can at best analyse cause and effect.
Your merits are yours if you earned them via hard work or good breeding.
This is the sentence I was immediately addressing.
The parent discussion on morality of meritocracy relates, I guess, to whether meritocracy is an idealistic approach ("people who achieve more deserve more") or a pragmatic approach ("we'll pay more to attract higher achievers because then more shit gets done"). Modern politics has been dangerously aligned to the idea that meritocracy is a moral ideal, suggesting something about the inherent worth of different human lives rather than merely noting one possible outcome of a market system.
My fiction does not cost millions, nor is it as boring as a wedding.
Lots of people like Hollywood movies, and I'm quite certain that many would find your fiction more boring than a wedding.
Who supports taking from most and giving to the already wealthy?
A good deal of royalists, clearly. In return the Royals entertain the country/world in various ways and provide a perceived rock of stability. If you like, think of it as a tradition/fantasy tax - the Queen and her close relations have more than enough money to retire into obscurity, but the country chooses to pay them to play on.
There was also something more interesting in the whole aristocracy via the recently deprecated hereditary peer system: a House which sat partly apolitically, often more keen than the ephemeral Commons to uphold traditional aspects of British freedom. Blair's machine of civil liberty erosion had been in no small measure lubricated by the House of Lords Act 1999, which allowed him to stoke this second house with political cronies and reduce the chance of absurd new legislation being bounced back for review. You may argue that Britain should instead have an ultimate defence in the form of its own written Constitution like the USA, but all written documents are interpreted by men and the traditional Lords had a unique breed(!) of men who did not need to curry political favour.
I have no problem with helping the poor, I have a problem with using money that could help the poor to keep some jerks in castles and caviar until the end of time.
That's perfectly reasonable. But it is important to see where the other side is coming from, no matter how absurd you consider it at first glance.
If my parents selected a mate based on mental abilities and thus I have high mental abilities should I have to be drugged so that I cannot exceed the mental abilities of the average?
The discussion is whether you earnt it.
One follow-on might be to prevent people having what they did not earn. Another might be to stop considering that society can reasonably be based on people getting what they've earnt.
National pride; escapism/prince+princess fantasy (do you ever read fiction?); admiration of stability; media attrition. And "welfare" isn't a dirty word in all cultures: some support taxation and redistribution of wealth to upload tradition / art / the poor / industry / etc., and consider voting with the ballot box to upload these principles as legitimate as voting with the private wallet.
It's certainly not necessary to be a royalist to perceive both the principles and the emotions which attract people to a British royal marriage.
I've yet to find a contradictory $$$ private school experience documented, either in anecdotal or statistical form.
Tell me, what of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and pretty much any successful actor? Did Steve Jobs, John Carmack or The Beatles work hard enough for you? Any successful person you know of outside of political spheres probably worked a lot of loooong nights for a looooong time.
The information I have available suggests that most of the people you list have worked hard, IOW if their stories are to be believed then they worked "a lot of loooong nights for a looooong time". The same applies to the majority of regular hard-working men and women.
And Gates is one of the best examples of someone who got his big break through family contacts.
But tell me, why is it that when people answer the "help people who already have more than enough to help themselves" cry, they always choose the household celebrity names? Billionaire entrepreneurs form a very small proportion of the wealthy.
It sounds to me like you are resentful of the rich kids who stole your date to the school dance with the cars they didn't pay for.
It sounds to me like you've never been to a single sex school;-).
Their merit was their ability to lead/dominate, and descendants justified their position by the same argument as your own: that not just each individual but the whole family "earnt" its position by good breeding.
I went to a school full of wealthy trust fund babies. I was from one of the poorer families, having "earnt" some of my way via various scholarships (but my family was still certainly richer than average). I thus had no choice but to study and perform better than my schoolmates, who could hapily coast and fall into very comfortable positions in the adult world.
The majority of the wealthy may not be especially lazy, but they work no harder than the average working man.
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As for number 6, right now 47% of the US does not pay taxes.
That's highly simplistic. Even if you ignore payroll and sales tax, various business taxes paid by every employer you work for and business you buy from are only payable because you are respectively doing the work and buying the product. The tax respectively reduces your wage increases the price of the product you buy.
In an EMPLOYER'S market. Number one, it's not always an employer's market.
If your health is bad and your intelligence is low and you're in the middle of recession, it's the employers' market. It doesn't matter how hard you try.
Number two, that's why we have to encourage entrepreneurship instead of continuing to tell people to get jobs and act surprised and angry when they lose them.
Entrepreneurship requires intelligence, money and customers. Appropriate intelligence is not as common as people assume (or like to think they have) - the best minds are swept up by academia or high-paying positions in existing firms. To get money you need investors or banks giving loans. To get customers you need people with money who also care to buy shit - this latter problem is increasingly hard now technology exists and is deployed by various large corporations to bring all of life's universal comforts to your doorstep. Let's see... go to the trouble of finding something that n sufficiently well-off people want to buy in order to pay m new workers and require more useless work to be done producing shiny toys, or just tax the even more well-off? Well, the latter's half way there, but even better if people need work is to just reduce working hours across the board.
And the majority of new businesses fail, leaving the business owner in even more debt. But as long as you support the social safety net, I guess that's not so bad.
(2) 'sjust another anecdote. But no-one got rich by giving away their money and opportunity to others.
(3) "The hospital in question" may be several different places, each wanting their cut and each expecting what to you may be a trivial amount but to someone on the bread line is not. Moreover, well-known acute problems handled by the local hospital may be happy to take a very small amount, but conditions requiring specialists or ongoing treatment certainly will not. It may not cause you to go broke but it will certainly affect your ability to save, since the outcome of such negotiations will be partly based on your savings such that it is expected that you pay your debts in lieu of saving. I've been treated privately in the US (paying out of pocket) and by the national health service in the UK (via taxation). IME the former won't even consider some procedures unless you provide payment means up front. I've always had the means available. I am fortunate.
(4) Where do you live? Perhaps you are so privileged that even the less well-off around you have a cable and a new TV, but the poor in developed countries have neither of these things. Even if they had, say, an xbox - because poverty isn't a lifetime state and some people may have been well-off once but fallen on hard times - the ability to save up for one toy costing a few hundred dollars wouldn't say anything about ability to build up useful savings. And living in a house? No-one anywhere near the bread line can afford a house of his own, although house sharing is a completely rational option. You're injected with a worrying combination of prejudice and ignorance.
(5) The "content owner" believes he is entitled to protection by the government of his expressions; the commercial banker believes he is entitled to protection by the government of the loaning of non-existent money by fractional reserve; the investment banker believes he is entitled to bailouts when he has made enough profit he felt entitled to hoodwink; the regular store owner believes he is entitled to protection by the government against thieves. Everyone believes they are entitled to the government's working in their interests. The only government which isn't quickly overthrown is one where everyone gets a little of what they feel is in their interest, but no-one gets precisely what they want. If you can think of a better method, implement it and call me when it works out for you.
(6) People who make "below a decent wage" haven't necessarily always made a low wage and won't always be making a low wage. And they're involved in the tax system through taxes paid by their employer (not just payroll taxes) and every business they buy anything from (not just sales taxes). Insurance doesn't work by everyone paying out precisely what he puts in, if that's what you're worried about.
Of course, the least tax in terms of proportion of wealth is paid by the richest. It's not just due to income tax structure - the more you hoard the less money moves around to be taxed.
I agree that only a limited number of the needy are lazy. However, a majority of them have either never learned, or never mastered, the types of behavior that are necessary to survive on limited means.
Again, I think you're identifying those who do have various luxuries but claim to be devoid of cash, rather than a large number who are needy in the developed world sense - i.e. those who spend little to nothing beyond rent, food and utilities, yet still fall behind on payments. The only reason such people aren't already on the street is because they do know how to survive on limited means, but they are held back by a combination of factors: their own health or the health of a dependant; lack of (marketable) intelligence; a difficult job market; etc.
assistance programs which do not also provide education on the value of delayed gratification (including some kind of punishment/reward system)
No-one ever learns from being patronised like this. Those who are simply in a difficult situation (health etc.) already are doing the right things within context, and simply need more support. Those who need money management skills may certainly benefit from money management skills, but more money is its own reward: "punishment" has never educated anyone. And the state does not support people simply for being bad with money, contrary to certain propaganda.
My (2) was an anecdote to add to other anecdotes about one's circle of friends. There was a bit of logic in it, though: no man gets rich by giving everything away, whether that's money or opportunity.
Your (3) and (4) aren't actually addressing the problem.
(5) is the Protestant work ethic fallacy.
(6) is the libertarian fallacy. If people didn't pay their taxes then the first person with bigger guns than you would take everything you believe to be yours. But since people do pay taxes, they will pay it on their terms. You're quite right that money is misappropriated by government, but paying out on unemployment insurance is not how.
I have yet to meet someone who was struggling to make ends meet who did not have cable TV, an air conditioner and a game system.
You have a very homogenised social circle - fine in itself, but don't generalise from it! There are certainly some people I know who spend a lot of money on entertainment and then complain about having no cash, but it's outweighed by people who try to be frugal but - sometimes through physical or mental health difficulties - struggle with education and work. And there's an awful lot of hoodwinking in business which can catch out the consumer who isn't completely alert, leaving him out of pocket: from the smallprint and the lying salesman to the crook who runs off with the pension fund. Compound that with some very unreasonable employment practices (e.g. an arrest record is often used to deny employment in the UK, even if no charges were brought) and some people can have a lot of trouble wading through modern society.
The people who are genuinely needy tend IME not to be lazy, while those who whine the loudest probably aren't that needy and could more easily get their house in order. Unfortunately, it's the loudest who are remembered and generalised from. This latter group also tends to wander more in affluent circles, giving the impression to the better off that this is what needy people are like.
(1) Median is not mean;
(2) I've never met a decent rich guy, and I was brought up in a significantly privileged environment - while I've never used money to decide on my friends, I've never been able to form a lasting friendship with anyone of significant means as they have all failed at demonstrating kindness/selflessness/generosity/etc and end up taking advantage of me when I try to demonstrate same. Causation no, but correlation certainly;
(3) People in debt (e.g. medical bills) don't get to save anything, let alone 10%;
(4) Many people live on the bread line - for any given location, recalling the cost of transport, there is a typical minimum wage which reflects the absolute minimum needed to survive. Many people are on this wage. The idea that you can always "save the remaining 10%" is inherently irrational and contrary to basic market theory: if it's an employers' market, employers will pay the absolute minimum to keep their employees alive and working;
(5) Telling people to "live within your means" is another way of saying, "I should get to enjoy life more than you so please continue suffering so that I can maintain my enjoyment." While I live well below my means, I don't begrudge anyone who feels he should have no less than the greatest glutton;
(6) You pay the state when you work to support you when you cannot. If taxation were at the level of, say, the US 150 years ago, then you might have an argument. It is not and you do not.
Meritocracy is the only moral basis for a society, prima facie.
That's as assumption-ridden as, "The Bible is the only moral basis for a society, prima facie."
To me, it's immoral for a society to try to equalize outcomes for all individuals
What's an outcome? And where did your false dichotomy come from?
that should be encouraged through reward
The rewards of achievement and reputation will follow from talent and effort. If you have good meals and safe shelter, what else would you want? Certainly humanity's primary source of research, the university, is populated mostly by people who feel this way (otherwise they'd be somewhere else).
We must not underestimate the importance of reputation and multiple sources. Modern technology, sleight of hand and a convincing smile mean that any claim can be well supported by physical "evidence" and we need independent tests of the reliability of the evidence.
For example, OBL was killed within the past week. We know this because the US government says so. The US government say they've confirmed it because they performed DNA tests. This means that we must trust the US government and, if the DNA test data is released, that the data is not fabricated. Why should we do that? What about the alternatives: that he is not dead, or - per Benazir - that he has been dead for several years already? We do not have sufficient reliable evidence for any of these claims, so we should not assume that any are true.
Similarly, what does OBL's birth certificate say? It says that a piece of paper was produced resembling a birth certificate. Is this sufficient evidence that he was born in the US? No. Is there credible evidence that he was not born in the US? No. We must either trust him, not care, or explore further. I've always thought the "where you're born" rule about the Presidency is against the principles on which the US was founded, so I'd pick the "not care" option.
1 April 1997: Hale-Bopp passes perihelion.
2(?) April 1997: Discoverer Bopp discovers his brother and sister-in-law have died in a road accident after photographing the comet.
15 April 1997: MMMBop released by girl band Hansen.
16 April-December 1997. My eyes remain especially open (OK, it disappeared from the Northern Hemisphere PoV much sooner); my ears especially closed.
This is how my mind works.
Amateur astronomers are cool. Thanks for discovering the comet, Thomas Bopp. Thopp.
Hard physical work is more rewarding and less demanding
What?
It's better than an aristocracy where there exists an arbitrarily-defined "ruling class".
Both about coming from good stock. I don't see why it's any more "fair" to reward someone because he inherits his parents' intelligence vs inheriting parents' money. It might align better with some economic/political ideal, but the reward is just as unearnt.
It's better than communism where people are punished for being better than their peers.
Marxist communism doesn't do that. Soviet socialism didn't do it either: the more talented absolutely got more privileges and higher income. Indeed, applied talent always got you into good schools, with no need to worry about paying your way.
It's better than a caste system where you're perpetually stuck in your position.
A caste system is a more pervasive aristocatic system with a bit of racism thrown in. As you've pointed out, in a caste system you are "stuck in your position", IOW you can make some progress within certain limits but can go no higher than some ceiling. But in a meritocracy the same applies: what limits you is not quite the same, but it's still fundamentally determined by matters related to your breeding which are out of your control.
At the end of the day, meritocracy gives people incentive to be constructive by giving them a chance at social mobility. And that's all that's important in a functioning society.
That's a good summary of the simplistic pragmatism of meritocracy, yes.
The difference is whether the unfairness stems from the individual, or from society.
In every case you've listed (assuming communism = Soviet style socialism), it stems from your breeding.
I appreciate that Einstein moved from one pro-eugenics/racist state (against his own race) to another pro-eugenics/racist state, and that this baggage added to the guilt of the bomb awoke in him quite a social conscience.
But comments like this one were romantic fantasy.
It is certainly true that different people have different talents, some hard to discover. But there's no reason to think that everyone's endowed with the same level of "genius", simply differently distributed. It's a beautiful but entirely unfounded fantasy.
Possibly. What is murder? If your countrymen do not have enough food to survive, has the government murdered them?
For example, it is often argued that Stalin engineered the famine in the Ukraine in 1932-33. But what of Churchill's contribution to Bengal's starvation a decade later? At what point does the reassignation of previously accessible resources or denial of available resources result in responsibility for murder?
We can look at the argument in general terms of property rights, of course. If you believe in the sanctity of private property, you don't consider it a murder if you lock up a warehouse full of food while paupers starve outside. Nor is it murder if a doctor refuses his time to treat a simple condition; a town does not provide adequate sanitation; a police force does not clean up the streets of gangsters; a social worker assigns the old man to the cheapest, dirtiest retirement home. If you have a conception of just war, then perhaps it's not your fault if your bombing of infrastructure means people end up without clean water: you didn't murder the village which dies of dysentery over the following months.
Everyone agrees that walking up to someone randomly and stabbing them through the heart is murder. Beyond that, it's a question of how your moral/political compass determines the legitimacy of particular forms of resource allocation and the consequence of those allocations. Just as Stalin's idea of legitimacy allowed him to justify what many call murder, so in the West businessmen protected their patents via WIPO and denied antiretrovirals, justifying what others called murder. "Murderer" is as political a word as "terrorist". To be neutral, one can at best analyse cause and effect.
Your merits are yours if you earned them via hard work or good breeding.
This is the sentence I was immediately addressing.
The parent discussion on morality of meritocracy relates, I guess, to whether meritocracy is an idealistic approach ("people who achieve more deserve more") or a pragmatic approach ("we'll pay more to attract higher achievers because then more shit gets done"). Modern politics has been dangerously aligned to the idea that meritocracy is a moral ideal, suggesting something about the inherent worth of different human lives rather than merely noting one possible outcome of a market system.
My fiction does not cost millions, nor is it as boring as a wedding.
Lots of people like Hollywood movies, and I'm quite certain that many would find your fiction more boring than a wedding.
Who supports taking from most and giving to the already wealthy?
A good deal of royalists, clearly. In return the Royals entertain the country/world in various ways and provide a perceived rock of stability. If you like, think of it as a tradition/fantasy tax - the Queen and her close relations have more than enough money to retire into obscurity, but the country chooses to pay them to play on.
There was also something more interesting in the whole aristocracy via the recently deprecated hereditary peer system: a House which sat partly apolitically, often more keen than the ephemeral Commons to uphold traditional aspects of British freedom. Blair's machine of civil liberty erosion had been in no small measure lubricated by the House of Lords Act 1999, which allowed him to stoke this second house with political cronies and reduce the chance of absurd new legislation being bounced back for review. You may argue that Britain should instead have an ultimate defence in the form of its own written Constitution like the USA, but all written documents are interpreted by men and the traditional Lords had a unique breed(!) of men who did not need to curry political favour.
I have no problem with helping the poor, I have a problem with using money that could help the poor to keep some jerks in castles and caviar until the end of time.
That's perfectly reasonable. But it is important to see where the other side is coming from, no matter how absurd you consider it at first glance.
If my parents selected a mate based on mental abilities and thus I have high mental abilities should I have to be drugged so that I cannot exceed the mental abilities of the average?
The discussion is whether you earnt it.
One follow-on might be to prevent people having what they did not earn. Another might be to stop considering that society can reasonably be based on people getting what they've earnt.
National pride; escapism/prince+princess fantasy (do you ever read fiction?); admiration of stability; media attrition. And "welfare" isn't a dirty word in all cultures: some support taxation and redistribution of wealth to upload tradition / art / the poor / industry / etc., and consider voting with the ballot box to upload these principles as legitimate as voting with the private wallet.
It's certainly not necessary to be a royalist to perceive both the principles and the emotions which attract people to a British royal marriage.
Yes, based on your one particular school.
I've yet to find a contradictory $$$ private school experience documented, either in anecdotal or statistical form.
Tell me, what of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and pretty much any successful actor? Did Steve Jobs, John Carmack or The Beatles work hard enough for you? Any successful person you know of outside of political spheres probably worked a lot of loooong nights for a looooong time.
The information I have available suggests that most of the people you list have worked hard, IOW if their stories are to be believed then they worked "a lot of loooong nights for a looooong time". The same applies to the majority of regular hard-working men and women.
And Gates is one of the best examples of someone who got his big break through family contacts.
But tell me, why is it that when people answer the "help people who already have more than enough to help themselves" cry, they always choose the household celebrity names? Billionaire entrepreneurs form a very small proportion of the wealthy.
It sounds to me like you are resentful of the rich kids who stole your date to the school dance with the cars they didn't pay for.
It sounds to me like you've never been to a single sex school ;-).
Arguments which suggest man has a collective aim to "evolve" through the lifting up of its supermen are as ugly today as they've been throughout C20.
Their merit was their ability to lead/dominate, and descendants justified their position by the same argument as your own: that not just each individual but the whole family "earnt" its position by good breeding.
And we're back to the justification for the feudal class system.
I went to a school full of wealthy trust fund babies. I was from one of the poorer families, having "earnt" some of my way via various scholarships (but my family was still certainly richer than average). I thus had no choice but to study and perform better than my schoolmates, who could hapily coast and fall into very comfortable positions in the adult world.
The majority of the wealthy may not be especially lazy, but they work no harder than the average working man.
If you possess merits which are shown to be the result of your breeding, can you say you earnt those merits? It's a fairly simple question.
The discomfort may legitimately arise from society's assuming that each individual reflects his group's average.
Abuse of science is the most common cause of mass murder.
Your merits are yours if you earned them via hard work or good breeding.
Are you suggesting that you earnt your breeding?