Conservative
A place to discuss pro-conservative stuff
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You can make 2 million through your own labor, without exploitation.
Well I don't know if I am convinced that's true, but even so, I think we have different definitions of "merit". Like, didn't Jesus say something about the difficulty of getting rich men into heaven?
But more to the point, it seems to me that if we supported more brown and black people in their financial aspirations, and if we had more Black and Latino and Asian representation in the millionaire community, would anything be different? I don't think so, we'd just have more black and brown and Asian people trying to maintain income inequality and the power structures of oppression.
Because it's not just about race, but class.
Someone with a couple million isn't rich. Not anymore. A million isn't what it used to be. If you can accumulate it over the career of a mundane office job, you're not rich. He'll, even high earning professionals like doctors still need to work for their money.
You're kneecapping your own class when you draw arbitrary lines like that based on financial information you don't understand. You're attacking your fellow workers, by lumping them in with the actual capital owners.
Yes. I get what you are saying and of course you're right. Two million isn't an outrageous sum of money, and simply having 2 mil in your bank account doesn't automatically make you into an evil exploiter of the proletariat.
I'm not super concerned with what amount of money makes you "rich" or not. Neither am I making an arguement that in order for society to be fair, everyone has to be equally poor.
I'm more focused on the definition of "merit" here. My main issue is that I disagree with the foundational conservative idea that people are naturally unequal, and that those who rise to positions of wealth and authority do so because of some innate positive quality, and that such asension is due to some natural law.
And I also disagree with the very American system of judging peoples merit by the fatness of their bank account. "If you so smart why ain't you rich?" Is the question that equates smart with entrapeunerial. It goes the other way: People believe if someone is rich they they must be a genius but we know there isn't a direct corelation. These are ideas I want to refute.
But since we are also talking about race, a problem arises that when these ideas are mixed together with the fact that the median household income for black Americans is and always has been below the median household income of white americans, people can and do come to very wrong conclusions about merit and income.
Black peoples median income lower than whites is not because of lack of personal responsibility or merit, it's not because of laziness or failure to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps". The problem is systemic, and if one is participating in the system to accumulate a cool 2 million, call them rich or not, they are also participating in the system that keeps our brothers and sisters of all races living in poverty.