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Comment by ryandrake

2 days ago

Exactly. "Look at that guy, who has it slightly better than you. He's really the problem!"

How does that work? That guy, pensioner, who has it slightly better than you, is a different way of saying that:

1) that guy gets your labor, for decades. 4 decades to be exact

2) for less than you'll get for that work

(that's what getting a higher pension actually means in the real world, with money being an abstraction and all that)

3) he (or she) doesn't get more because they worked harder or better, but because they were working when a random political vote needed to be made (paid for, really). And that, not only won't repeat, but there's absolutely nothing you can do to change the situation to your benefit, even just to equalize. That last part is of course what makes taking away their benefits attractive.

Sounds pretty unfair to me. At least with a CEO they did something to get what they got, and there is a way to get their position, even if most will never achieve that.

  • It's absolutely unfair. But the solution is to raise the rest of us up, not tear these people down. Why don't I have a retirement like that? Why don't you have a retirement like that? Those are the questions we should be asking. Not "He shouldn't make that much!" The people who earn literally 100X that pensioner are laughing at us as we fight each other

    • How would that work? Could you explain? Because the only way to do that is to lower the price of labor. To greatly increase the availability of labor. You can do this with a lot of births, and we're finding out you can't really do it with immigration even.

      So how would that work? The children that would need to provide that labor for me when I'm 65 would have to have been born already (they start work at, say, 20 years old). This has already happened, therefore, and cannot be fixed.

      ... which is of course another argument to take the pension away ... after all that's the only way to make it fair. You can play games with money, but money is an abstraction. You cannot raise up the necessary amount of people, the amount of people politicians promised us in trade for votes. It's not a matter of priorities anymore either, we're past the point where using 100% of the labor force would work.

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