this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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History did. Nobody likes to hear that the only real way to improve their situation is through their own effort, regardless of whether you invest your effort in earning more money or by rejecting the rat race and growing in other ways.
Where in history did this actually happen? I'm not talking about people saying they did, or a communist revolutions where the wealth just shifted hands, when did the wealth get redistributed evenly in history?
That's the point.
If "history told you wealth redistribution doesn't work", then that doesn't make sense. It can't show you it doesn't work by not happening, that's more like showing you it isn't achievable, at best.
AKA: Doesn't work
I guess there's two distinct possible interpretations of the OP statement: that you can't do it, or that the results would be bad. For some reason it makes more sense in my head that the standard propaganda would be more about the results being bad, or the idea of even trying being just unthinkable.
That's your problem. You're trying to interpret earnest statements through the lens of propaganda. Not that I can't understand taking such a view of social media.
Well I mean, what defines the meaning of "Redistribution of wealth doesn't work" in the context of this meme is explicitly the intent of an imagined propagandist. A defining feature of mainstream political discourse is to refuse the problem of wealth distribution as a topic of consideration at all, it's redirected to some narrower conception of the problem or made about values. I think what you are saying is not quite the same as a defense of the statement as delivered.
But anyway it's still wrong; even if bureaucratic mechanisms of wealth redistribution were unavoidably self defeating, it is not the case historically that wealth redistribution doesn't happen, it just tends to happen via traumatic collapse.