Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I'd much rather live in a country where disparity is not clear like in Austria than the US. And I'm a software engineer but that doesn't change how I think about social justice.


But government-mandated wealth-transfer is not "justice". "Justice" also entails the ability to earn a return if you make an investment rather than having the return taken away by the government.

Scenario A: Your dad is a bricklayer and teaches you how to do bricklaying. You start taking jobs in the black economy, working at construction sites, getting paid in cash and not paying taxes. You start doing that when you're 14 (which is the earliest age you can legally quit school). By the time you're 30 you will have built your own house and paid it off.

Scenario B: You're 28 years old when you graduate from university with a PhD but you still cannot expect a level of income higher than the bricklayer's. In Austria you wouldn't have student debts, as your university education would have been paid for by the government, so that's good. But your daddy would have had to pay for your living expenses until you were 28. So that's a lot of money. Also, you've just spent 14 years not earning anything, so that's opportunity cost. Maybe you worked very hard at university, working late, instead of going out with your friends, doing summer internships instead of going on holiday, etc. All of that is investment not only in financial terms, but also in terms of "life energy" (if that's a word).

In Scenario B, as compared with A, there is no way you will ever be able to earn a return on that investment or recoup it in financial terms. You will never catch up with the level of wealth under Scenario A.

It doesn't work for the individual, and it doesn't work for the country as a whole: This is an advanced economy, and it couldn't work if there weren't doctors, lawyers, bankers, software engineers etc. But people are disincentivized from wanting those jobs, because you can do far easier and less stressful jobs that will get you to the same or even higher levels of wealth.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: