Sure, there are have been different answers. But the question hides odd assumptions, such as that we are all separate monads with no connection and no intercausal well-being. Or the way nations, for example, say we are one in times of war - or, often, you poor people are we, get in there and die and kill, but a bunch of separate Aynian immaculate individuals otherwise. Do the rich deserve to control the media? Do they deserve to undermine democracy via lobbying and campaign financing and…the rest? Is ‘deserving’ the model? Why does a model based on ‘deserving’ deserve to the be model? Waht does it really mean?
On whose labor did the radical individuals, the disconnected monads, rise to that place where they no longer wanted to be part of a we? Why can’t they stop controlling the institutions that assume a we? Why did they fight to have corporations treated as people and to create regions of control that are radically we based and punitive in those we based ways? Cultures of wes? But run by Is who like not being able to be held individually accountable for what these we-institutions do locally, nationally and internationally? while at the same time making sure that other individuals are held responsible for their acts?
Why do bankers now deserve via fiat banking and create more times the amount of money they loan out of nothing? It used to be just a few times the money they could do this? They’d loan out 10,000 several times, sure based on some sum they had. A small number of times. Now they can loan out many, many more times that, and then invest this hallucinated money, based on the fact that someone will pay them back with many that person has to work for. Why do they deserve to be able to create more times the money nowadays than they used to in say the 70s? Were they extremely good people since then and so they deserve to have hallucinate more money out of nothing and invest it?
Why do the rich not deserve to be punished for their crimes? I am not merely speaking about having better legal representation and ability to avoid prison. I am talking about the current systematic bias in courts towards feeling sympathy for rich criminals in ways they do not for the same crimes committed by poor criminals. Systematically being concerned about the shock a hedge fund owner will have in relation to prison, a shock that is never considered when the crime is committed by a plumber. These are not just individual judges taking into account an odd empathy for criminals who have, in the end, worse excuses for their behavior, but is in fact a systematic trend, in the US at least.
do the rich deserve to create scarcity through pushing for policy that creates it and then employ people in the way they want because it is a ‘free’ market?
So the rich have the right to loan money to dictators who misuse the funds, then demand in lieu of missing loan payments the gutting of the social support systems, the protection of local farmers, etc.?
I hear this model ‘deserving’ applied by the right only to those without much money and power. Both the model (metaphor) and the application seem hallucinatory to me.
Why does the tobacco executive deserve to earn five times what a police officer does?
Why does someone who invests using derivatives - that is, makes nothing - deserve to earn more than a baker or a farmer?
Once we can clone with ease, or at least the wealthy can, will they ask their children, why should I give a shit about you? You’re close, but not close enough genetically, not any more? What makes you think you deserve our love, you’re 12, your debt plus interest - our investment - is now 800 bucks a month, you responsibilitiless little welfare queen?
It’s very hard to explain to a lizard the workings of the mammalian brain.
If they want to throw out the long period of the development of the limbic system and the attendant behaviors of social mammals, there is obviously no proof for these partial humans?
Deserve actually translates into: what’s in it for me?
Well, there is nothing in it for a lizard. Nothing at all.
Well, except for the fact that a certain point, and one already reached in much of the West, even the rich suffer more stress, when the gap between the rich and the poor gets too great.
But since lizards don’t really give much of a shit about themselves, too focused on the chunk of their brother’s leg the other lizards haven’t yet eaten, even this appeal falls on deaf timpani.