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Davos 2015: Less Innovation, More Regulation, More Unrest. Run Away!
Freshly Exhumed writes: Growing income inequality was one of the top four issues at the 2015 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, ranking alongside European adoption of quantitative easing and geopolitical concerns. Felix Salmon, senior editor at Fusion, said there was a consensus that global inequality is getting worse, fueling overriding pessimism at the gathering. The result, he said, could be that the next big revolution will be in regulation rather than innovation. With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people's mind, the world's super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes. "I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway," he said. Looking at studies like NASA's HANDY and by KPMG, the UK Government Office of Science, and others, Dr Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, warns that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a "perfect storm" within about fifteen years.
With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people's mind, the world's super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes.
If I recall correctly, Mossad was formed by Israel with one of its primary missions being to go around the world hunting down and assassinating former Nazi officers who had gone into hiding.
If the world gets to the point where the underprivileged gather their pitchforks and torches, and the ultra-rich flee from mob justice, why wouldn't those who remain take over their nations' governments and form Inequality's Mossad? If the super wealthy really do check out, the people left behind will gain all the authoritarian powers that are being built up right now to suppress change for as long as possible. They'll also get all the resources and production of the biggest powerhouse nations on the planet, because that's where the rich will be fleeing from. And they will be very angry.
The 99.9% who would still be in their home nations, having just seen the banks get cleaned out, will have the muscle of the G20, the influence of the G20, and the rage of Ferguson. Yeah, super-rich guy, go hide in New Zealand. See how that works out for you.
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Taxing wealth is practically difficult. It's relatively easy to catch money when it's changing hands. Counting the gold in someone's basement, so to speak, is an entirely different matter. Attempting to do is arbitrary - you don't really know the value of something until you sell it - and incentivizes the movement of large amounts of money out of open and transparent markets, which would be disastrous. Whenever you think of trying to tax something, you also need to think about what the broad consequences of avoiding that tax would be, because the motivation to avoid taxes is always high.
There is a time and place for everything, but there is no case in history where the rich kept getting richer while the poor got poorer that didn't end in pitchforks.
Not one.
There are some cases where the rich wised up long enough to placate the masses. See the New Deal.
Globally, you're probably below the lowest 1%, as nobody in the developing world is allowed to rake up this much debt without being killed or going to prison. Interesting paradox of wealth.
A friend of mine got into reading investment books targeted at the extremely wealthy. They were pretty funny. These books had to trump up nearly impossible end of days events and then promote investment strategies that will keep the reader amongst the 1% when half the world's population dies from a space disease delivered by a comet impact or some other highly unlikely scenario. Elite Panic is big business.
Maybe the new path to the middle class will be in selling doomsday bunkers to paranoid trillionaires.
ralphbarbagallo.com
They are funny to you because you do not have any kind of comprehension how different life for very rich is. Your life is struggle for resources to survive.
Their life is the exact opposite - struggle to keep what they have from people like you who are hungry and want a part of their resource pile. A good example of difference is just how little real protection legal system offers them in practical terms - it's always going to be more beneficial to break the law to get the resources. That is why ultra-rich have to have their own protection from such people and cannot count on law and police in a way that people without enough resources to make them a worthwhile target for such an effort can.
And while from average person's perspective that may look like a paranoia, to these people the worries are very much warranted.
You seem to be forgetting WWII, the repercussions of which are still - to this day - haunting many countries, especially in Europe.
Ok let's look at one of the countries that got hurt perhaps the worst by WWII: Japan. (Two nuclear bombs, starving population, totally decimated manufacturing infrastructure.) Meanwhile they're perhaps second only to the US as far as a high tech economy. They also rank very high on many income inequality lists.
While they might be statist in some respects, economically they are anything but, and in many respects they make the USA look like a command economy in comparison.
Also the US isn't the country with the highest income inequality in the developed world.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
But nice talking points anyways, I'm sure they make you feel good about yourself.
This is what you said:
Those opportunities come from there not being a government telling you what you can't do, meaning there's no cap on your potential for economic growth ...
I am a first generation American, and since I have landed on the American soil several decades back, I have started or helped started (as sole proprietor or as partner or as investor) more than 70 companies
What you said was true, that the fact I have started over 70 companies because there wasn't anyone telling me what I can not do
I came from China, and the China during the time I left was a place where nobody had any right to start any business unless that individual had a death wish
Today's America, however, is no longer that America that I went to, some 4 decades ago
Today's America there are so many restrictions, either from the government (in terms of laws / regulation / rules) or from society ( 'gender diversity in the work place', for example )
Today I have businesses in both America and outside America, and yes, I have business in China as well --- and I can tell you this one thing ... it is much more free-ier to start and run a business in China than in America