Except it isn't even close to that, and people react to the perception of unfairness by trying to get by grift what they cannot get by the narrow possibilities of honesty.
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Here's the problem. Wealth creation rests on energy and attention of people with banal middle class lives. The more time they spend reading yelp reviews of car dealerships and wondering if their dentist is cheating them, the less time they have to work on making Elon's rockets.
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There's a reason grift-ridden economies tend to be highly extractive. If you own coal mining operations, you only need some miserable miners and a small middle class. If you're building complex software or rockets, you need a big, fat middle class.
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The rentier wealth-extracting class I suspect, is responsible for all the "bad" inequality ("good" inequality is the kind where wealth is partly proportionate to risk appetite, adjusted for safety net, rather than effort). And it's not always obvious.
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Right now, the entire economy is dominated by some sort of obfuscated rentier dynamic driven by financialization. It's not just the Sacklers extracting opioid wealth out of unseen masses. Almost everything is that way, with diffuse extraction going on to power it.
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I'm mostly venting about some relentless grift navigation challenges we've faced recently (mostly handled by wife, so I've been largely protected) and it is so soul sucking I can't see it being sustainable. This shit is going to blow up one way or the other in the next decade.
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The entire inequality debate has been pwned by a socialist narrative, which is part of the problem. There is a stronger, more robust, capitalist argument inequality: it is inefficient, it kills wealth-building, amplifies extractive economics, and erodes competence.
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It might seem self-serving to argue for a middle-class focused economic model, but both trickle-down (from wealth favoring policies) and trickle-up (UBI etc) are wishful thinking. Middle-out is the only thing that improves all 3 classes. Bourgeoise virtues.
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Competence erosion is the biggest risk. And it hurts all 3 classes. The wealth of the rich is of no use if there's no competent people to pay to do what you need. And without competence in the middle, the grind at the bottom turns into increasingly unbearable oppression.
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I lived in the grift capital (So Fla) for a decade. Terrible inequality, and tons of fraud. To me, the volume of grift is related to risk vs reward. The greater the delta, the more people who will sacrifice morals to move up the ladder.
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There is probably a histogram of people who would be willing to commit fraud at certain $ return levels. As inequality rises, more people "qualify" to rationalize fraud.
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