@lxo Its like listening to the 10 billion valued person complain about the 11 billion valued person taking all their money... literally everyone at every level blames everyone above them for all their problems. Guess what, people suck at every level, and will exploit others and the system in about equal proportion whether your poor or rich.

Once people stop focusing on blaming every group they arent in and focus on the contributions to the problem from the groups they are in... then we might have some progress.

equal proportion, as in, a billionaire exploits any single poorer person a thousand times harder than a millionaire does, which makes them the biggest exploiters. but I disagree, the rich don't exploit everyone else proportionally, they exploit those poorer than themselves a lot harder than they could exploit the richer, that in turn exploit them. so the poorest are the only group that ends up exploited by everyone else proportionally. sure they are entitled to complain louder, but that doesn't make the millionaire's complaint any less true. despite all their privilege and exploitation of others, the billionaire gets a lot more privilege, and gets to exploit the millionaire unlike any other group of individuals. I guess it hurts when one does unto them what they do unto others.

@lxo

> equal proportion, as in, a billionaire exploits any single poorer person a thousand times harder than a millionaire does, which makes them the biggest exploiters.

This is offset by the fact that there are millions of non-billionairs to every billionaire.. So the total harm done by one billionaire is far exceeded by the collective harm of a million non-billionairs.

> but I disagree, the rich don't exploit everyone else proportionally, they exploit those poorer than themselves a lot harder than they could exploit the richer, that in turn exploit them. so the poorest are the only group that ends up exploited by everyone else proportionally.

Nah, aside from there being way more poorer, generally the idea that the rich are going t exploit them more simply isnt true.. for starters statistically the rich are much more generous with helping the poor just in terms of percentage of their income they donate to charitable works. Not to mention generating wealth and jobs, but thats another matter

In the end the overwhelmingly larger numbers of the non-biollionairs will easily balance out (and exceed) that harm caused by the billionaires itself.. in the end all classes have a relatively equal responsibility to the problem.

that's one of the cases in which aggregation of data distorts the data
yeah, billionaires as a collective might do less harm than millionaires as a collective, but for any one poor person, it is the case (from what you wrote earlier) that a billionaire exploits per a thousand times as much as a millionaire, so the sense of injustice and injury directed at each exploiting billionaire is a thousand times as much as that directed to each exploiting millionaire. the grouping is artificial, arbitrary and distorting. if you have 1000000 seconds to live, and 50k millionaires take 10 each, while 5 billionaires take 10000 each, yeah, this arbitrary class of millionaires will have taken 10 times as much as the arbitrary class of billionaires, but that does not falsify my claim that each billionaire took a thousand times more from you than each millionaire did.
and it is still the case that some exploit everyone else, some exploit most everyone else, and most exploit no one else. the conclusion that some arbitrarily made up class exploits more because of its headcount, in spite of most of its members' exploiting no one is unjust and offensive, and doesn't appear to serve any purpose other than making the non-exploiting ultimate victims appear about as culpable as the hardest, cruelest exploiters of all.

@lxo
If the line between the rich and the poor is arbitrary to begin with then any comparison between them is just a arbitrary...

Dice it how you will but the rich and the poor do roughly the same total harm due to numbers... so anyone who is out there thinking the rich collectively are doing more harm than the poor collectively is just wrong.

While you can argue an individual rich persons harm is more even if their morality and actions are the same (such as not paying taxes).. sure, but then you have to contrast the fact that when the rich do good, the effects of their good actions are also magnified, and since they objectively contribute more to charity, yet another way it balances out.

how about trying some lines that are not arbitrary. consider 3 classes: exclusive exploiter, exploited exploiter, and exclusive exploited. it resembles very closely the 3 classes billionaire, millionaire, and the rest of us, but it would be a lot harder to argue honestly that they contribute equally to exploitation, wouldn't it?

as for charity... well, orders of magnitude, need to put money it to circulate and get money out, and others make it self interest, but the real kicker is to compare it with "help". what amounts to help is not something for the presumed helpers to choose to make themselves look good, help is what those in need of help consider help.

@lxo Sadly those lines dont exist... Everyone has ways in which they are exploited, and exploiter, no one is exclusively one or the other.. its a mixed bad.

of course they do exist. even if they left everyone at one side and nobody at the other, the lines would still be there. but it's certainly not the case that they do.

but since you'll likely insist that they don't, and I'm not interested in debating that tangent, here's another you'd likely not deny out of your political beliefs: a single line separating those making a net profit out of exploitation, from those making a net loss to exploitation. it would still resemble closely a line dividing the rich and the poor, because wealth flows from the poor to the rich through exploitation, but it would be a lot harder to argue honestly that they contribute equally to exploitation, no? or to deny the existence of the line, for that matter.

@lxo

> of course they do exist. even if they left everyone at one side and nobody at the other, the lines would still be there. but it's certainly not the case that they do.

There are examples where a person may exploit another, and in that action be the exclusive exploiter.. but to suggest any one person exploits others and has no ways they are exploited back (either by the same groupor a different) isnt fair... The divides arent that clean cut.

> a single line separating those making a net profit out of exploitation, from those making a net loss to exploitation.

Hmmm maybe... im going to think out loud as I type this, lets see where I go on this...

So lets say person A goes and owns a sweat shop exploiting little kids and makes 100 profit a year.

Lets say, just for hypothetical sake this person was also exploited in some way... some poor person comes over and robs him of 10 a year at gun point.

So if we are talking direct profit and not secondary effects in this case its nice and clean and easy to say they profit off explotation. In the real world things are more complex, but in the end I think, at least subjectively, we could tally it in a complex system with enough time and effort... so that checks.

However where I might be critical of this thinking is pointing out in only covers direct effects. The trauma, the lost income, and bad mistakes this person might make as a result of their exploitation by beinf robbed might be significant, and in secondary ways may drastically effect how much they are exploited or do the exploiting... these effects are also much much harder to measure.

Then we also have issues with the usefulness of the measure in other ways... for example are we just measuring the profit from exploitation or the intentional profit from exploitation... So an old lady investing in her 401K automatically into a company that is a sweat shop... is she more guilty than the guy nearly murdering someone for 10$? ....

So while I'd agree the line, int he way you framed it, exists... it also looses any useful meaning as a result.