Interesting! Thanks for the fact check. I always assumed giving money away would at best just be a temporary bandaid solution since you need a stable income to actually get out of poverty.

Of course, this isn’t a problem with a stable UBI, I imagine.

The reality though is that most millionaires and really rich families and people aren’t really the main problem with our current system.

Even if your family had tens of millions of dollars available while you were growing up, you’re many orders of magnitude closer to a minimum wage worker than to any billionaire.

The reality is that if most societies redistributed a fraction of the wealth of their top 30 wealthiest individuals, almost no one would be harmed and thousands of people could benefit significantly.

Now, of course, if you just give money away, that’s no good at improving people’s lives, so it makes sense to use the money to fund hospitals and schools, to provide adequate conditions to the disabled, the elderly, single parents, the homeless and our most vulnerable. And oh, would you look at that, that’s just a tax reform.

I’m from a middle upper class family, so, I never lacked any necessities but I also couldn’t afford luxuries every day. But I hold no contempt for people who got to grow up living in wealth and luxury beyond what my family could afford. I hold contempt for people who could dramatically improve their entire communities’ conditions and choose to evade their only tax obligations and only invest their wealth to accumulate more and more.

I think societies should at some point put a cap on wealth. No human being should be as rich as Elon Musk.

Yeah, I think that managed to put my feeling into more concise words. Russian socialism cost many many lives, but at its core the principles it was trying to champion seem correct: it proposes fairness and dignity through the active improvement of people’s education and lives. Whereas fascist movements (Hitler, Mussolini, Trump) are actively destructive. They thrive off of people’s hatred and fear of “the other”.

I guess my main question would be… If the Soviet Union was truly raising thinking, critical workers that would one day not become slaves, then how is it possible that immediately after its collapse, Russia became almost immediately a fascist state that indeed allowed only slaves and never masters to exist beyond its oligarchy?

Something seems amiss in the proposition there. It seems to me like fascism is almost an unavoidable illness that comes to all societies sooner or later, and the only thing we can do is find ways to weaken it before it leads to catastrophic results.

MAGA will be a good example of how fascism comes to its end within societies that cannot be militarily opposed.

What is the reasoning behind that conclusion? I can see how comparing the two simply because they’re totalitarian would be superficial (there are many structural differences between both). And to me, what the Nazis did, the rhetoric they used and their rise to power has always felt much more ominous and foreboding than even Stalin’s.

But I can’t put it into words and I see no real reason why Stalin’s crimes and death camps would in any way be less evil than the Nazis’. To me it feels like Nazis went beyond just political power straight into core beliefs and ideology, whereas Stalin’s crimes were just your typical tyrant authoritarian maneuvering, but I don’t know if that really makes an ethical difference.