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The Only Thing, Historically, That's Curbed Inequality: Catastrophe (theatlantic.com)
ColdWetDog writes: The Atlantic has an interesting article on how societies have decreased economic equality. From the report: "Calls to make America great again hark back to a time when income inequality receded even as the economy boomed and the middle class expanded. Yet it is all too easy to forget just how deeply this newfound equality was rooted in the cataclysm of the world wars. The pressures of total war became a uniquely powerful catalyst of equalizing reform, spurring unionization, extensions of voting rights, and the creation of the welfare state. During and after wartime, aggressive government intervention in the private sector and disruptions to capital holdings wiped out upper-class wealth and funneled resources to workers; even in countries that escaped physical devastation and crippling inflation, marginal tax rates surged upward. Concentrated for the most part between 1914 and 1945, this 'Great Compression' (as economists call it) of inequality took several more decades to fully run its course across the developed world until the 1970s and 1980s, when it stalled and began to go into reverse. This equalizing was a rare outcome in modern times but by no means unique over the long run of history. Inequality has been written into the DNA of civilization ever since humans first settled down to farm the land. Throughout history, only massive, violent shocks that upended the established order proved powerful enough to flatten disparities in income and wealth. They appeared in four different guises: mass-mobilization warfare, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake, and by the time these crises had passed, the gap between rich and poor had shrunk."
Slashdot reader ColdWetDog notes: "Yep, the intro is a bit of a swipe at Trump. But this should get the preppers and paranoids in the group all wound up. Grab your foil! Run for the hills!"
Slashdot reader ColdWetDog notes: "Yep, the intro is a bit of a swipe at Trump. But this should get the preppers and paranoids in the group all wound up. Grab your foil! Run for the hills!"
Seriously this article makes it sound like life just after a devastating conflict is better than economic prosperity because most people are equally poor.
That's pretty fucked up, and I'm calling BS.
If you want to have constructive conversation, you don't try to get people "wound up" and you don't start it with insulting them, either. I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but it does come off as the kind of smug crap that I see everywhere these days.
Love sees no species.
inequality. Employees tend to get "common stock" while investors get "preferred stock." I've worked for start-ups since May 1986 after graduating with a Comp Sci degree so I've dealt with this a lot. In every single case, the common stock got diluted so much that it wasn't worth the option price. In the case of drugstore.com, which was the most successful start-up I've worked for, my boss left with $11 million in stock that was not long after that worth less than my option price, so I got nothing. We need better laws to protect people that own stock or have options in private companies. There are less than 4000 companies are actively traded in NYSE or Nasdaq so the vast majority of people in tech aren't protected by the SEC.
What I take away from this summary (didn't RTFA) is that people thinking that they could solve the serious, endemic problem of growing inequality without any chaos in the whitehouse and elsewhere are delusional. A career politician who knows how to talk the talk and walk the walk was never going to make any difference.
OTOH, do we really want a catastrophe just to fix the growing inequality? That depends on the observer i suppose; and there seem to be enough really unhappy people in America who say "Yes".
False equivalency. The push for equality is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Conflicts after the Civil war are just as likely to have quelled movements toward equality as well as helped them.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Income inequality is an indirect, at best, and irrelevant at worst, measurement.
One cares about the average health, wealth, and longevity of a population. That continues to skyrocket as much of the third world becomes modernized due to economic freedom, the one measurement directly proportional to such measurements.
This continues to improve in the west, too. Their health is stalling, but due to too much cheap food and a lack of needing to physically labor.
Both of these are historically novel "problems", where most places and all other time periods, dollars per calorie and dollars per nutrition were the limiting factor to average health and longevity.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
What changes? Change for change's sake is rarely beneficial. Which political actions? Who requires them? Who really benefits? Education that makes people learn and 'internalize' ideas? Which ideas would that be? Internalize is the key word there, isn't it? Sounds more like propaganda to me. Propagandizing is not education of any kind.
I really hope your post is just a really good trolling.
He is saying what he believes but you are right, what he believes is trolling. The most powerful tro11ing is the trolling against the common sense and against individual freedom and it has been done over and over again under the flag of justice for all, brotherhood, motherland and other similar concepts that define a group that the masses can feel they belong to. Defining this group requires internalization of ideas, internalization is the key word, it means thoughtless acceptance and the base point to fall back to when rationality and reasoning drive you to the point of internal conflict, to an internal contradiction.
Once any contradictions caused by inconsistencies in reasoning against your own position are dismissed and the base point is established the work of the 'educator' is done. The person is ready to become a fully integrated member of the group.
The group can then be directed and used to increase the power of the governing elite within the system, with the messaging being so out of touch with the actual reality that no rationally thinking individual could mistake the message for any form of truth, but the group simply falls back to the base point and carries the message anyway, providing the power to the government that is needed to crush any form of dissent.
In its cohesive entirety I consider this to be the ultimate form of tro11ing, the trolling by the group against any form of reason and rationality, the trolling that requires fundamental denial of any form of individualism and of independent thought.
You can't handle the truth.
I have read the original article at the Atlantic. This is a horrific horrific article, written by the sympathizers and apologists of the red terror in France, Soviet regimes (China and Soviet Union). Article also says that reduction of the number of the workers was a factor increasing the income the working class and decreased inequality.
First, it casually mentions Soviet and Chinese revolutions with their confiscation and redistribution. Article fails to mention, that such changes were followed by the civil wars against peasantry and the workers, the use of chemical weapons against insurgents, massive red terror, massive incarcerations, loss of the academic, scientific, professional, business and cultural elite by both troika death sentences and emigrations. Don't try to mention this "equality measure" in Russia, for you risk to be roughed up by those who hate communism. Also, article fails to mention, that these revolutions created a super-elite class which keeps most of the wealth in these countries, basically brainy yet criminally dishonest former communist party members who got filthy rich.
Secondly the article mentions confiscatory rate as the solution. Author simply fails to mention that if a marginal rate exceeds 50% people are less likely to try to make more money, and, most importantly, marginal income tax rate does not touch the principle, which is rarely if ever taxed.
This topic of inequality has been covered ad nauseum by Austrian economists, with the one and only conclusion: it is the excessive government regulation that is causing inequality. Here are some basic examples:... medical profession is completely regulated in the USA. The number of medical school graduates is strictly regulated in order not to produce surplus professionals. Many other factors, such as regulations and, for example, requirement to a have malpractice insurance, do add up to the medical practice costs and, subsequently, to the prices. As such, even now with Obamacare in effect, healthcare is un-affordable luxury for many, and some people are suffering from lack of it. If the profession is completely unregulated, and would allow unlimited immigration of medical specialists from anywhere in the world, combined with loosened importation of medications, malpractice reform, would seriously give death blow to the healthcare industry, which does not provide a meaningful increase in the longevity of lives of Americans compared to the countries such as Costa Rica or Albania.
Finally article fails to mention that there are countries where catastrophe was not required to have exceedingly high standard for their citizens. Switzerland. Super low federal taxes, most of the decisions are done locally by the cantons, historically libertarian governmental approach by the Government. There was never a catastrophe in Switzerland, but their living standard is one of the highest in the world. Also, inequality is not considered an issue, there are plenty of rich people, who live there with many regular Swiss minding their own business and not worrying about inequality: why would they?
Rich people used to build things. Now they scavage. They take all the things that greater men built and tear them apart for profit.
We could call it Bastille Day.
I think most people argue that income inequality is bad on two accounts.
At the upper end, they argue based on a kind of labor theory of income. They ask, if a certain CEO makes 1000x the income of the average worker, is their work really 1000x as difficult, or 1000x as laborious? The answer is obviously no, but that's not the way our economy works. You could ask the same of movie stars or professional athletes. I don't think this is a useful argument. People at this income level get paid what they can negotiate.
At the other end, they argue that it isn't right for some to be so desperately poor. That's why raising the floor of income (perhaps by a Universal Basic Income) is the other part of the argument. To this I'm much more sympathetic. I live in Los Angeles and don't have to go very far in any direction to find a tent city. People are hurting and they need help.
In my opinion, it's not income inequality that is the real problem, but wealth concentration. The concentration of wealth into fewer hands is bad for the economy. If there is less wealth for most people, then there are less purchasers for an economy's output. It's a deflationary scenario where less available money means businesses have to lower prices to sell, making profits smaller and debts harder to pay off. Bill Gates is only going to buy so many TVs, cars, and houses. Doubling his wealth is not going to change his spending habits. If that amount of wealth was placed in the hands of a thousand people, then there would be a thousand new customers for TVs, cars, and houses. This more distributed kind of customer base can sustain an economy.
From this perspective, extreme income inequality is bad because it leads to catastrophic wealth concentration. The small number of very rich can only be customers to a small number of luxury businesses. Every other business relies on the existence of a much larger customer base that can actually afford their wares. If wealth is too concentrated, there's not enough money in enough hands for most businesses to operate. Businesses suffer and lay off their employees, leading to greater unemployment, leading to even fewer customers, leading to worse business, and on down the vicious cycle.
The US after the world wars might have been an exception (since we were hardly touched), but when you have devastation from war, your infrastructure and systems get thrown out of whack, the "equal" after might be worse than the "poor" beforehand.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
You are the only one that mentioned equality of outcome, which is an anti-American theme. The only way to ensure equality of outcome is to violate other people's rights.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
So I'm very familiar with two countries, Vietnam and Thailand.
Vietnam, as you all know, went through a difficult occupation by the French, then the Americans, before having their country divided in two and then suffering a devastating civil war which killed millions of people (4 million?) before unification. The result? Everyone, more or less, started out very poor (during the late 70s and early 80s starvation was a real fear). So everyone was equal. Now though, inequality is climbing (fast) as the winners have "capitalized" (ironic comment intended on the supposedly communist country) on their ability to extract a greater and greater portion of the country's rising wealth. Still, for a time, society was remarkably fluid and anyone could be anyone (for example the ex-prime minister came from humble beginnings).
Thailand has not been conquered by a foreign power (ever?), certainly not by the westerners who did so to every other country in S.E. Asia. (That was due to the astuteness of their past king(s) who played the foreigners off against each other). So the power structures in Thailand have remained static for hundreds of years. In the last century, because of the great increase in wealth coming from modernization and technology, much of it was captured by the ruling class. Thus you have an urban elite that was (until recently) running the show from Bangkok (the "Hi So" or High Society) and getting richer and richer in the process. A populist (yet corrupt) billionaire politician used this great divide to sweep himself into power (sound familiar) only to be ultimately blocked by the military (acting on behest of the existing power structures).
I care about me and my family and we're not doing so hot. Income inequality is a hot button issue with me because the gains since 2008 have all gone to the upper class, of which I am not. My kid just hit college and she'll not only spend her life making somebody else rich but the first 10 years paying them for the privilege. I'm struggling and she's going to struggle. Putting it in historical context doesn't make my objective reality any better.
Maybe if you're in Europe things are getting better. Here in the States millennials make 20% less than boomers adjusted for inflation. We're losing ground while our ruling class is gaining. Those aren't feelings. Those are cold, hard facts. 20 minutes in google will prove that.
I want Americans to stop settling for less. I want us to stop fighting among ourselves while the ruling class take everything. Everything you just wrote and every sentiment you just expressed makes it that much less likely that they will.
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Attempting to analyze the causes and effects of war on Economies would require a rhetorical eloquence no less than those that authored the Federalist Papers, and, at the very least, the same volume of words. Fudging it all down to something as small as your typical The Atlantic commentary read is proportionally equal to asking a five year old to draft their own theories of government.
But, let's at least have a little fun with this, and perhaps attempt at sharing something of insight. Here goes:
A brief study of the history of the United States economy would generally yield a result looking no different in approximation than an increasing sine wave, generally increasing at an exponential rate. While there are upward trends and downward trends, of more-or-less of equal duration of time, the economy has been trending upwards since its inception. As for why it's continually trending upwards, no matter how complex the argument, it generally boils down to one simple word:
Balance.
Our country maintains a relative balance between free market and regulation; between public and private sector; between state and federal governments; between taxable income and disposable income...and so on and so forth.
Naturally, given the general liberties our citizens possess, we from time to time will express our displeasure with the existing status quo. Displeasure among a proportion of the populace is inevitable. We all come from different walks of life and form opinions and biases preferring a bias against the balance in the direction of some extremism. As passionate citizens, we may attempt to swing the pendulum hard in a particular direction, as others naturally try to swing it in the opposite. We exercise this through electing representatives who share our views, posting our views online, speaking out at public meetings, attending rallies, drafting petitions, etc, etc. While these motions are a natural result of the state of government that presently exists, they generally do not threaten the state of government itself.
But, occasionally, it does. And it does, because factions within our society generate enough power among the citizens to disrupt the balance in favor of their zealous points of view. Thankfully, the founding fathers created a system of government that generally impedes factions. (To see a much more thorough and more eloquent analysis of this argument, please see Federalist Papers 9 & 10.)
I'm concerned that we may be living in one of those times. Our country is very unbalanced in its political view right now, and the inflammatory rhetoric from a zealous self-righteous minority faction is pouring fuel onto the fire. To make matters worse, one of those zealots is none other than our president. But, I digress.
When it comes to tax policies, balance is key. The United States economy fared very well following both wars, because both wars were funded by high income taxes. The United States economy also fared very well in the 20's, in the 90's, and before 2008, because income tax rates were very low, freeing up vast amounts of investment capital. And then the economies after all these booms crashed hard, much in part due to deregulation and poor investing. My point being this: Creating economic policies that directly reflect the present conditions with the intention of returning to a balanced economy are the keys to success. A zealous application of a tax policy for the sake of the tax policy alone will not contribute to economic success.
Piketty argues that when inequality increases, economic productivity goes down. So that's one reason. Another reason is because it's not really fair: people who have more often didn't work an equivalent amount more to get their wealth. This is especially true for people who inherited their wealth.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yes, just kill everybody. We're all equal when we're dead. Might put a stopper on that global warming thing too.
Wages in Europe were extremely low before the Black Death due to massive overpopulation versus amount of available jobs. After the Black Death there were more jobs than people to work them. Not only that there were less competition for limited resources like land. It could be argued Renaissance would not have happened without the Black Death. Families like the Medici would not have succeeded without some upending of the old world order.
He uses the extra income to bribe the government. Regardless of how many regulations or how few, if the local judge is bought off, I'm screwed. Also my rich neighbor will pay far market rates for hitmen or lawyers to make me disappear if I oppose them, either physically or financially.
What will it be, fires?, floods?, pestilence?, mass riots?, Trump?
Table-ized A.I.
The more forward thinking recognized, about a decade ago, that the poor weren't that poor, and that the intelligent weren't buying their bullshit power grab anymore.
Your right, those homeless people you see begging for money on the street corners are totally paid actors sponsored by the evil left. And those Detroit/NYC/Philly slums they show on TV are all movie sets.
A cardboard box is still technically a roof over their head, and the leftovers from the local dumpster is technically food, so why should they have the right to demand more?
As long as we have a nice house and a nice car, why should we care about anyone else? We got ours. /s
Having most of the wealth concentrated in a few hands is stifling to the economy. There are only so many TVs and cars and houses and food one person can buy.
Having more people with disposable income (even if there is less total wealth) is what grows an economy.
If you give 1 man 1 million dollars, he will spend it on something silly like a yacht, but give 1 million people 1 dollar, and most of them will spend it on groceries or rent.
Which stimulates an economy more, yachts or groceries?
> I care about me and my family and we're not doing so hot.
I'm very sorry to hear that. I've been there - I lived in a vacant lot under a tarp for a while, then moved into a dilapidated mobile home I shared with a roommate (rent $125/month). A few years later I was evicted from a house when I couldn't pay the rent. That was about 15 years ago.
> the gains since 2008 have all gone to the upper class, of which I am not.
Several years ago I learned that there are a few specific things that rich people do to get amd stay rich. I was surprised to learn that over 80% of millionaires never made more than $100,000 / year. I've tried to apply some of those principles and while I've not been very good at applying them consistently, I rarely very have to *worry* about money anymore. Now I'm concerned mostly about making less progress than planned toward becoming a millionaire so I can retire comfortably.
Actually I found out there are two distinct groups of "rich people" - roughly those who are financially comfortable and those who have more than $100 million dollars. The mega rich almost always give up everything else in their life to obsessively pursue money. Screw that, I don't want to do that. The people who have a few million get there by much more reasonable steps such as using a written budget with automatic saving as the first item. I can do that.
> My kid just hit college and she'll not only spend her life making somebody else rich but the first 10 years paying them for the privilege.
Ouch! You say she just started college. My college career was interrupted 25 years ago, so I'm just about to graduate now. At WGU (a state school) tuition and fees is $6,000/year. I get student loans of $3,000/year. The other $3,000/year is covered by the tax credit, my employer's tuition reimbursement, and me paying a bit of cash each year from working. I'll graduate with total student loans of $12,000. Well, I would have, but when I got some extra money (outside of my normal paycheck) I paid off $6,000, so I'll graduate with $6,000 in debt. With the degree I chose, that's about 2 1/2 weeks of income. You *could* talk to your daughter about debt and double check if the plan she has is something she's going to be happy about five or ten years from now. She doesn't *have* to have significant debt to get a college education. Of course she can go into major debt if she wants to.
Maybe, I grew up in a different USSR. What "luxury goods"? Name one private label, that existed in USSR in 1952...
They were called "collective farms" and weren't "private" at all. Though ostensibly the farm's chairman was elected, in reality the sole candidate was introduced by the Communist Party's representative for the members of the collective to rubber-stamp. Whatever they collectively farmed could only be sold to the government as well.
Neither Coca-Cola nor Pepsi owned anything — USSR-owned factories were producing the drinks under license.
Nope. Some Soviet models tried to emulate foreign cars, but Fiat didn't own any stake in the factories.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Ask them why a software engineer in SV deserves 1000x the income of a farmer in The Congo.
War and civilization collapse were desirable things, just because everyone starts dirt poor and has a chance to start anew.
What a load of BS. The developed world is different now precisely because we have had an unprecedented chance to build instead of rebuild, resulting in an increase in relative disparities, but also, in overall quality of life for everyone.
But if you value equality at all cost, even if that is in abject poverty, suffering and death, so be it. Have a portion of your own ideological cake.
Which stimulates an economy more, yachts or groceries?
- neither. The fact that you are using this logic is enough for me to know that I am dealing with somebody who has no understanding of economics, which is the point of modern 'education', to produce population that is incapable of understanding most basic things.
Consumption does not stimulate the economy, production stimulates the economy. Consumption is a trivial consequence of production. A person with a million dollars stimulates the economy by investing that money into new/existing businesses to make profit, this in turn allows the business to start/expand and the productive output of that business is what stimulates the economy while providing the people working for the business with income (and unfortunately providing various levels of government with money as well through the theft of taxation).
Spending money on consumable goods is not stimulating the economy at all, it is irrelevant to the economy. Economy is all production and exchange of produced goods/services. USA cannot stimulate the economy by any extra level of spending because it lives on borrowed money and (500 Billion / year for the last 25 years or so). This borrowing goes towards consumption of foreign produced goods, which is why it is a trade deficit.
1 man with 1 million dollars is more stimulative to the economy because that is wealth that's concentrated and actually can be used to start/run/expand a business. A million people with 1 dollar each is wealth dissipation, it will do nothing to improve the economy, it will only worsen it if the dollar came from the theft of taxation *because* it deprived the 1 man of his million.
You can't handle the truth.
That's really should be when they spend on non-essentials because nobody is buying and the price crashes. Likewise, they should be storing their wealth away while the getting is good. Buffet understands this. Maybe that's why he's rich.
Yes, technology levels the playing field.
That is because, like major wars and catastrophes, it can devalue established wealth and power and empowers others to succeed based on their ability. The great thing about technology though is that it usually does this with far fewer people dying and it does not require wars to spur it on even though they often do.
So they can spend it, and support the economy. And Rent.
Which stimulates an economy more, yachts or groceries?
- neither. The fact that you are using this logic is enough for me to know that I am dealing with somebody who has no understanding of economics, which is the point of modern 'education', to produce population that is incapable of understanding most basic things.
Yes, start with insults, that's always a good way to prove that you have the intellectual high-ground
Consumption does not stimulate the economy, production stimulates the economy. Consumption is a trivial consequence of production. A person with a million dollars stimulates the economy by investing that money into new/existing businesses to make profit, this in turn allows the business to start/expand and the productive output of that business is what stimulates the economy while providing the people working for the business with income (and unfortunately providing various levels of government with money as well through the theft of taxation).
Spending money on consumable goods is not stimulating the economy at all, it is irrelevant to the economy. Economy is all production and exchange of produced goods/services.
What happens to these goods after they have been produced and exchanged, if there is nobody to consume them.?
USA cannot stimulate the economy by any extra level of spending because it lives on borrowed money and (500 Billion / year for the last 25 years or so). This borrowing goes towards consumption of foreign produced goods, which is why it is a trade deficit.
1 man with 1 million dollars is more stimulative to the economy because that is wealth that's concentrated and actually can be used to start/run/expand a business. A million people with 1 dollar each is wealth dissipation, it will do nothing to improve the economy, it will only worsen it if the dollar came from the theft of taxation *because* it deprived the 1 man of his million.
It's consumption of non-domestic products that cause a trade deficit, not consumption by itself. You are right that if more money was available, more of it would go to China, but only a very small portion of what you pay for a Chinese-made product actually goes to the Chinese company that produced it, most of it goes to middle-man markup and shipping fees (which is money that stays in the US).
I'm curious which school YOU went to, where you were taught that taxation is theft. It would be ironic if it was a taxpayer funded public school, but judging by your disdain for public schooling, it was probably some fancy-ass private school.
Yes, start with insults, that's always a good way to prove that you have the intellectual high-ground
- I don't see the difference, how I start is irrelevant. The relevant factor here is your government provided education and it has done the job.
What happens to these goods after they have been produced and exchanged, if there is nobody to consume them.?
- the only way to consume something is to produce something of your own and to exchange for what you are interested in consuming. Thus the people who can actually consume something are those very people that produce. This should be obvious even to you with a simple example: a farmer produces and then consumes what he produced. Got it? A farmer can exchange with a tool maker if the tool maker provides farmer with the tools the farmer needs and the tool maker clearly needs to eat. Etc.
It's consumption of non-domestic products that cause a trade deficit, not consumption by itself.
- consumption by itself is irrelevant, you are correct however, it is consumption of goods that were *not paid for* that causes the trade deficit.
only a very small portion of what you pay for a Chinese-made product actually goes to the Chinese company
- really? Are you an accountant for one of the Chinese companies? I actually deal with Chinese manufacturers for GPS trackers and other electronics, you are incorrect.
I'm curious which school YOU went to, where you were taught that taxation is theft
- I deduced it from the first principles. If you are wondering though, I went to the most communist school of all, I was born in the USSR and attended the public education system there. I was happy to see the country collapse of-course since it only confirmed my understanding of economics.
You can't handle the truth.
The economic productivity problem is being solved via the use of robot slaves. The real problem is the fact that more and more at the bottom of the ladder have got less and less important to do with themselves but make trouble for those at the top of the ladder. Idle hands, and all that.
Absolute equality is probably just as bad as extreme concentration. I don't think anybody is seriously proposing that we target perfect equality, except Marxist ideologues.
The problem with absolute equality is the enforcement mechanism and the way it tends to crush the spirit of anybody who desires to achieve.
The problem with wealth concentration in the upper tiers is that it leads to *power* concentration in the upper tiers--government by the wealthy, ie, oligarchy.
I think it's often the case that the optimal position is somewhere in the middle. When wealth is concentrated in the upper tiers, a move towards absolute equality seems appealing, but only in the way that moving towards a fire seems appealing when it's freezing.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
* you can draw everybody to the bottom with a catastrophe
* or you can try to give opportunities to people to draw them up
While it is very easy to see why method 1 will reduce inequalities (everybody is dead is also reducing inequalities to zero) but it is quite clear that in our modern societies we strive to point 2, which is something relatively new compared to history.
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It might be a bit hyperbolic, but its far from delusional -- especially the part about bribes. Bribes are and have always been a tactic of the wealthy to get their way regardless of the cost to anyone else.
Murder is certainly more rare, at least in the Western world (Russia might have a different take on that.) Financial fuckery isn't as much. You occasionally hear of companies selling their product under cost in order to drive the competition out of business.
And depending on how loose you want to read the term "fuckery," you could consider the 2008 market crash as a high-end version of such -- rich people doing rich people things that screw the rest of us over and we've got basically no say in it because dollars speak louder than words in many cases.
Rich people still build things. It certainly wasn't the poor who put up that ridiculous tower in Dubai.
Or to look at it another way, rich people have never built things -- they've always paid poor people to build it for them (if you take a rather loose definition of "paid" in order to include slaves..)
No matter how you want to look at it its basically just more of the same, historically speaking. The major difference now is that a large portion of the middle and even lower classes are educated and we have the internet to get informed (sort of..) as well -- that's something unprecedented in all of human history basically. Which means we have great potential to do things differently this time around.
The fact that we seem to not be doing things differently says something about us as a species, I suppose.
If you want to take that tack, you could open up a very good discussion: Perhaps the whole wealth inequality debate could be applied to entire countries: Would the US be better off if people in the Congo made 10% of someone in SV rather than 1/10%?
On one hand, the cost of producing whatever the US imports from the Congo would go up a significant amount but on the other hand, people in the Congo could also afford to purchase more American products. I don't know enough about US/Congo trade to judge which would be more beneficial to America (though its pretty obvious which would be better for the Congolese.)
Sure, after the war, everyone in Germany was equal. Equally broke, equally without a job, equally without a stable home, equally without a stable government, equally...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Now that I know you are from Russia, I can start to understand your viewpoint. You saw the absolute worst-case scenario for how communism could turn out, so it's only natural you would embrace the exact opposite of the spectrum.
The real joke of it all is that the US is the worst-case scenario for capitalism.
All the evils you saw in communism growing up, I see those same evils in capitalism. Both systems served to enrich the powerful at the expense of the weak, the only difference was the particular lie they used.
Instead of a small group of men controlling the means of production in the name of the greater good (the communist lie) it's a small group of men doing the exact same thing in the name of individualism and self-betterment (the capitalist lie)
No system of government or economy that humans can create will ever be immune to the slow rot of corruption, the only solution is to tear it down and start over every once in a while (or wait for a war to tear it down for you, which was the whole point of the original article)
however, it is consumption of goods that were *not paid for* that causes the trade deficit.
I'm not sure you understand what a trade deficit is. It doesn't mean China sent the US stuff and the US never paid for it (like some gigantic unpaid bar tab). It just means that the US bought more stuff from China than China bought from the US, leading to a steady flow of money into China that never comes back. http://www.investopedia.com/te....
The debt that the US owes to China is a totally separate issue, where the US federal government has been constantly borrowing money from China to cover the yearly budget deficit, and is now stuck paying tons of interest on that loan because they can't even begin to pay it off.
As far as taxes being theft like you said before, a government needs money somehow. Every government in the world either collects taxes (Europe, US/Canada, etc) or confiscates natural resources such as oil and gold to sell to other countries. (Middle east and parts of Africa). There is also the 3rd option, which is to just spend nothing on government and let the warlords figure it out (parts of South America and Africa)
If you know of a way a government can pay for itself without collecting taxes or taking natural resources from the people (or simply descending into anarchy), I would love to hear your solution.
Consumption is a trivial consequence of production
This is your big fallacy. Consumption is hardly a "trivial" consequence of production. You're right (sort of..) that production stimulates the economy.. at least in so much as we measure GDP by dollars worth of goods produced (you could argue that that's a poor measurement but I won't right now.)
But consumption stimulates production. Nobody produces anything that someone else doesn't want to consume (or at least they don't produce it for long..) A working economy has to be (close to) a balanced equation: Too much production and things get left out to rot (draining value from the economy) and too much consumption can't be sustained (everything will get used up.) There's of course a little leeway in there, especially when you allow for international trade such that you can use imports and exports to shore up whichever side you're lacking, but overall the two have to remain in balance or your economy collapses.
To put it another way, the economy works at the point where supply equals demand. If demand was irrelevant as you claim, we'd only ever need to look at the supply curve.
Economy is all production and exchange of produced goods/services
No, that's GDP. Which is a measure of economic health but its just a number -- its not an economy in itself.
USA cannot stimulate the economy by any extra level of spending because it lives on borrowed money
That's actually the most irrelevant thing in your entire post. The US (and every other country) attempts to control its borrowing to avoid going broke just like any normal person, but just like any normal person can potentially borrow a bit more if things go down the shitter, so can the US. Certainly there is an upper limit on how far you can take that but we're nowhere near the level where they can't stimulate the economy in various ways. Have you forgotten the gigantic corporate bailout from a few years ago? That's exactly the kind of thing you're saying they can't do and recent history proves you wrong.
A million people with 1 dollar each is wealth dissipation, it will do nothing to improve the economy
I suppose you've never heard of those things called "corporations?" They're pretty cool. The came into existence precisely because people wanted to do things that no one person could afford on their own, so they pooled their money (via share distribution) and voila.
the dollar came from the theft of taxation
What the hell does that have to do with anything? But to respond anyway.. taxation is your payment for services rendered by your government. Army, police force, road maintenance, infrastructure. Your taxes pay for all that shit. And if you really want to bitch about welfare, you can consider that the "service" of keeping beggars off the streets and out of your sight/way.
And before you start saying its not a true transaction because you didn't choose what to "buy" well sorry but you did -- via your elected representatives. You can argue that the price is too high or whatever, or that your representatives are choosing to "buy" the wrong services or whatever, but calling it theft is rather disingenuous at best.
If you are prosperous, the government won't tax you down to the level of a welfare recipient, and conversely if you are a welfare recipient the government won't subsidise you to the level of a prosperous entrepreneur. Your explanation is so black and white it's lost all value, as reality lies somewhere in between, which your argument ignores entirely.
Common sense is frequently not reasonable and rational, just like your meandering post. Hint: When you are condemning something, condemn that one thing - don't start off vaguely criticising it and then wander off and attack the next scary thing that pops in your head. That makes you look unfocused, and your argument pallid.
Piketty is not against inequality, but he says/shows that when there's too much inequality, it becomes counterproductive. So doesn't condemn unequality as 'unfair'. At the same time he says there is a tendency for wealth to accumulate with those who already have it, leading to an increasingly skewed distribution of wealth. It's a trend but not some kind of law. This distribution can indeed be leveled by catastrophies like wars, but at (almost)everyone's expense. Government policies can accelerate or counteract the effect and neoliberal appraoches typically accelerate it.
A poor person gets stuck with a public defender, a rich person gets an amazing lawyer. That means an innocent person without money is more likely to go to prison than an innocent rich person. Or do you seriously think OJ would have gotten off if he was poor and Johnnie Cochran and his team were replaced with a court-appointed public defender? Because if you don't think that's the case, you agree with the person you condemned and owe them an apology.
Guy, americans are hardwired to start insulting anything which may have the least relation to the forbidden word "communism". That's why I do not even try to explain such matters to a american.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Well, Trump is an excellent con-man, he just demonstrated it again. The funny thing is indeed that most of his voter-base will be those that will suffer the most from his incompetence.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is what decreases inequality. Not catastrophe.
However catastrophe does indeed spur prosperity in many cases.
I suppose the trick is to figure out another way to get the economic engine running other than wars and disasters.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Based on the brief summary in my head, that's kind of what the plague did. It killed everybody, rich and poor alike. I think the result was a labor shortage which drove wages up and reduced the power of the elites to continue to enforce the old order.
Or at least semi-intelligent people?
They knew in their hearts he was kind of incompetent, but they also were so cynical about any establishment politician being able to effect meaningful change that the only way to achieve it was to empower an incompetent with the idea that it would break the system.
Of course, breaking the system has lots of unplanned side effects, too.
What the article is discussing is bringing the successful down to the level of the unsuccessful. Not finding solutions for why some people don't become successful. Things like free government money and housing reducing the incentive to make one's own way.
The establishment of equal wealth does not elevate the low skilled, unmotivated people. It reduces the efforts of the highly skilled, motivated people. Eventually, the highly skilled, motivated people will rise above once again.
Just as they always have done throughout history.
Instead of treating the successful with disdain, diminishing their accomplishments, and complaining about how they have everything, it's better to strive to be more successful. Or, instead of blaming others for your poor decisions, learn from them and move on.
It's one thing to give people a leg up when times are difficult and expect them to grow. It's another to make entire segments of a population dependent upon other people and and instill a sense of defeat in them.
The later is what many government assistance programs do and why they are drains on an economy instead of growing it. I've known a few people that were very happy to collect their unemployment checks until they were in danger of losing them. Interesting how a timeline of decreasing benefits can be an incentive to try and be successful.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
You don't need a war. Financial "catastrophe" also causes compression and a more equal society. We've be much more equal right now if our last 2 presidents hadn't taken up a policy of bailing out the monied elite with our public funds.
I see the logic of this: Start a war, get half of the poor people killed, and on average the whole population will now be twice as rich! Genius!
They ask, if a certain CEO makes 1000x the income of the average worker, is their work really 1000x as difficult, or 1000x as laborious? The answer is obviously no, but that's not the way our economy works.
There is an issue here. You completely dismiss the economic link between work efforts and rewards because that's not how it works. True enough. However, every time society as a whole (through the economy) rewards someone with disproportional amounts of money for their contributions, this is an inefficiency, and the real value represented in money is wasted.
Basically, the objetive of a well-functioning economy should be to maximize returns to society. Its easy to see that when society starts to make bad investments - allocating rewards completely incompatible with contributions - that is inefficient and everyone loses. Its even worse when the market forces rewarding CEOs and celebrities are entirely artificial, not based on actual scarcities, but on entrenched organizational and marketing systems. That is a total perversion of the economic system, systematically redirecting great amounts of money to add very little marginal value, for the general detriment of society.
And that is in addition to your considerations regarding the negative effects of wealth concentration, which are also spot on.
Sigh.
... whatever that may be in specific cases.
Every person needs to feel loved and needs to feel competent, preferably by doing useful work they can handle and is thankfully recieved by their community while being and feeling mentally and physically healthy. With food, shelter, security, fulfilment and good regular sex at the foundation. Aside from that, hardly anyone really cares how rich the next guys is vis-a-vis himself.
If I can have all that, I seriously couldn't care less if everyone else was a billionaire but me. And I suspect it's like that for most people.
Bottom line:
Equality != Quality of life inside a society.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
My income has quadrupled since I started, and I'm not too far from $125K today, with a year of school left to go.
One nice thing about WGU is that many of the classes end in industry certifications such as Cisco CNNA and Linux Professional Institute (LPI) Certifications. I have about eight professional certifications from WGU courses right now. In about two weeks I'll have my Cisco VNNA Security. Listing those certifications on LinkedIn absolutely does get recruiters calling.
Then when I have interviews, it's me, with fresh knowledge about the subject (and a respected certification) vs the guy who padded his resume claiming "networking knowledge" because he set up his Linksys. At my last interview, I was asked how a piece of data travels the network. When it became clear I knew everything end-to-end, when I could talk about the details of how a packet is processed inside the router, and how switches decide where to forward frames, the interview team was very impressed. They offered me a job at nearly twice the salary I had been making. A lot of that networking knowledge I learned at WGU.
Similar for other topics - the other guy *said* he knew Windows servers and Linux. I said I knew Windows servers and Linux *and* had certifications from Microsoft and LPI to back it up.
"only massive, violent shocks ... proved powerful enough to flatten disparities in income and wealth. They appeared in four different guises: mass-mobilization warfare, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics."
For the USA, I vote for "state collapse". Economist Laurence Kotlikoff estimates that when the unfunded future liabilities (minus future revenues) in SS & Medicare are accounted for, the USA national debt is close to $200 trillion. Obviously that can't be funded through taxation, even if all private wealth was confiscated. That means outright default or Zimbabwe style hyperinflation, either of which would almost surely mean mass warfare or violent revolution.
This is not paranoia, it's mathematics. Ignore the doom & gloom at your own peril.
Yes, thankfully, it will not — not in the US today. But that's what the communists/socialists would like to be happening. And to farther this goal, they'll claim, that in the current situation we do not have "equality" — without specifying, which of the two very different equalities they mean.
TFA, clearly, talks about Equality of Results — catastrophes wipe everything out, making everyone equally poor. When ArmoredDragon questioned, whether this is at all desirable, s.petry replied, that "equality is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence" — and therefore must be desirable. The most delicious part was him, who just substituted one term for another, accusing others of "false equivalence"!..
The equalities of Opportunity and Results are completely different — like black and white. Worse, while black and white are merely colors, the two equalities aren't a matter of taste — one is a must for a just egalitarian society, the other is highly oppressive.
And yet, various demagogues routinely use the trick of equivocation to confuse the audience by referring to the two interchangeably. It is this dishonest demagoguery, that my post was aimed to counter — the aim, which gives it value.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You have a choice and people around you have a choice. Right now you do not.
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's -- in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Article *never* does a good vs evil judgement. Never advocates anything.
Article simply states: "Inequality was only curbed by catastrophe. Even in the title, it calls all of those events *Catastrophes*!
The point of the Article is to say that constant, mild and progressive policies have seldom had any impact vs catastrophes. The article calls the chinese and soviet revolutions "bloody affairs" and "murderous mechanisms"
Makes you wonder why you're
Why would you hand pick only one school out of inequality when there are many other economists in other countries producing more investigations that we could take into consideration? Many of them have also investigated inequality as a cause and an effect of market failures, that is, failure by the market to maximize the value creation (ie: an inefficient economy).
Switzerland benefited quite a lot from the influx of foreign wealth, not produced by the swiss economy itself. During some of the catastrophes talked about in the article, a lot of the spoils were transferred to Switzerland, and it has a place in the world economy as the most famous tax haven were the beneficiaries of inequality elsewhere stored their wealth. Also, its economy is *far* from unregulated, not quite a libertarian utopia. You will be able to find many more countries with less industrial, environmental, labor and even financial regulations, why didn't you choose one of those instead?
So, your complaint is that someone with money who killed people was allowed to get away with it, while someone with less money would have been properly convicted?
Sounds like your main complaint is about the quality of lawyers who are being asked to handle cases for (relatively) low pay. Why aren't you addressing that? You should be asking for higher taxes specifically to pay for attracting more top legal talent to traditionally low-paying gigs. Right?
But nice attempt at deflection, there. How does the fact that OJ Simpson was making more money than the landscaping guy who watered his lawn for him mean that the landscaping guy was "losing his rights?" Specifically: which right has the landscaper lost, as someone else suddenly gets a big paycheck?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Sure catastrophe is great for establishing equality. It's also great for establishing dictatorship, or oligarchy.
Consider Japan. Japan is a major industrial power with no energy resources (other than renewables) of its own, so it got 30% of its energy from nuclear power, and it was on its way to making that 40%. Then there was the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe and now nuclear is essentially dead in Japan.
Is that good? Bad? Either way the indisputable thing is that Fukushima made a difference. Catastrophe is practically the only thing that makes people undertake drastic change; absent disaster people will simply tweak things until they seem to more or less work.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The irony here is that roman_mir grew up in the USSR and is the one arguing in support of capitalism, while I'm the American arguing in support of socialism.
Bill Gates is only going to buy so many TVs, cars, and houses. Doubling his wealth is not going to change his spending habits.
It won't change his personal consumption habits, no. Instead he would spend the extra wealth on capital investments, which improve the efficiency of production and allow vast numbers of other people to buy more TVs, cars, and houses at lower prices.
Consumption is important, of course, but all economic progress comes from the part of our income which we don't immediately spend on short-lived consumer goods.
You're also conflating wealth with money. They aren't the same thing. Bill Gates has a lot of wealth, but most of it isn't in the form of money. Instead, he owns shares in various investments. Even if it were, people would simply switch to an alternate form of currency long before the symptoms you're attributing to "wealth concentration" became apparent.
There is one factor which could have the effect you're referring to, but it only occurs in non-free markets. It is not always the case that more capital investment equals lower prices; over-investment can create a situation where the prices necessary to cover the cost of the capital are above the optimal point on the supply & demand curve. Imagine, for example, that you can sell 10,000 of a certain widget per year at an optimal price point of $10 each, and that your cost per widget is $8 (for $20k profit). If you rent a machine for $50,000/year you can lower production costs (excluding the rent) to $5 each. Under normal circumstances this would be an uneconomical investment, since the rent would raise the overall cost to $10 per widget, eliminating your profit. (Raising the price is not an option since that would reduce both the quality sold and overall revenues.) However, if a regulation were introduced requiring the use of this machine it would change the parameters: now the optimal price point (for widgets produced with this machine) is perhaps 8,000 units at $18, and you only make $14,000 in profit while 2,000 potential customers do without widgets. The same argument can be applied if the machine instead comes with a tax-funded subsidy rather than a mandate. With the subsidy included, the real cost per widget is still $18, but the buyer only sees $10 at the point of sale and the remaining $8 is spread among all the taxpayers—reducing the money they have left over to spend on widgets and other goods. Any market intervention (regulation, tax, subsidy, monetary policy, etc.) which either rewards or punishes capital investment, and thus shifts the allocation of resources away from the optimal balance, reduces the efficiency of the market and the purchasing power of the average citizen.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
If you know of a way a government can pay for itself without collecting taxes or taking natural resources from the people (or simply descending into anarchy), I would love to hear your solution.
I've had an idea on that note mulling around in my head for a while.
People with enormous amounts of wealth get a steady stream of income without doing anything because they have that wealth invested places earning returns.
Some non-profit organizations are largely funded the same way: some rich person (or several rich people, or many many many smaller donors) donated money to a foundation that invested that money and uses the proceeds from that investment to fund the activities of the non-profit organization.
In principle, a government could be funded likewise. Have a massive foundation that owns an enormous chunk of the productive economy, but not in a controlling fashion -- not the government wholly owning and controlling companies or entire industries, rather, just having lots and lots of little pieces of lots of lots of companies through something like an index fund. The proceeds from that investment then fund the operations of the government.
How to get such a huge investment put together ex nihlo to fund a new government that way is a hard problem, but then starting a new government anywhere is a hard problem in the first place, and better governments are even harder to start from scratch. (Much easier for one powerful person to seize control with the help of other powerful people to whom he promises the spoils of conquest, than to organize and fund a democratic organization to seize the power of the state and somehow stay democratic and relatively free in the process). Usually, better governments are born out of the ruins of worse ones; liberal democracies take control of the existing wealthy and powerful state apparatus of a previous monarchy, say. So on that model, it may be possible to use the existing suboptimal method of raising government funding, taxation, to bootstrap a better one like described above. To start with, the corporate welfare budget could be replaced with a corporate investment budget instead: sure maybe we'll give your company money, but we want stock in exchange (that we'll promptly sell on the market so as to buy a more diversified spread of investments instead).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Uhh... Okay, now I've seen everything. But I really doubt that he is Russian considering that he repeats the exact same arguments of the extreme right "economists" and even with the exact really dumb mistakes committed by those who can not understand the real world.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Bill Gates is only going to buy so many TVs, cars, and houses. Doubling his wealth is not going to change his spending habits.
Actually, I can say with high confidence that his spending habits would change. If his income increased by 100%, the amount he gives to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would increase by more than 100%.
That's simply how philanthropy works. A group of poor people, as much as they might want to engage in philanthropy, simply doesn't have the means to. If their situation improves, such that their own basic needs are taken care of, they tend to become philanthropists who donate a small percentage of their income. If the group's situation improves further, such that their basic needs as well as their more frivolous wants are taken care of, they tend to become philanthropists who donate a large percentage of their income. (There are, of course, exceptions to every rule.)
I look forward to the day when the economy has grown to the point where the social safety net can be funded entirely by voluntary contributions, as opposed to tax revenue that is collected coercively, even while providing more robust services than it does today.
That idea is not farfetched. Americans gave $373.25 billion to charity in 2015. I.e., about 16% of wealth redistribution was voluntary, while the other 84% was coercive. (Ok, the second statistic was from 2012; sorry I don't have something more current.) A few more decades of robust growth in Americans' incomes -- which would result in even more robust growth in their charitable contributions -- would bring us into a much better situation, where it is no longer necessary to redistribute any assets coercively. Imagine how much political rancor would dry up in that situation.
It's true that Boards of Directors often approve very large compensation packages for CEOs. They don't do this for lulz, or because they like to squander the company's resources. They do it because of a sincere belief that it's worth it; that the overall health of the company will be optimized by providing the kind of compensation it takes to attract a top-quality CEO.
Critical thinking should be applied to everything, including those who would second-guess Boards of Directors. What makes them qualified to do so? Have they ever even served on a Board of Directors? They often claim that CEO pay structure is not based on actual scarcities. Actually, top-quality CEOs are quite scarce. It's not a job I could do.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Money is created by the government. It must spend (or give) it out before it can collect it back in tax.
Follow that logic and you will have discovered Modern Monetary Theory.
Libertarianism is an important and necessary philosophical counterpoint to overwhelming collective power. However, governments are classically defined as local monopolies on the use of force, so "non-coercive government" is actually an oxymoron.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
That's still collecting tax.
True, but once you understand what it is actually for you can can do it more sensibly, and in most cases less.
In a later comment he said he went to school in the USSR (his answer to my question of what school he went to).
I chalked it up to a severe reaction against his experience of socialism gone horribly wrong, leading to a full retreat into the opposite end of the spectrum (communism is evil, therefore the opposite of communism must also be the opposite of evil).
I think this article is quite good because it points out both the difficulty in addressing income inequality as well as reminding people that the 1950s - 1970s was a historical anomaly for the Western world created by unusual circumstances.
What I read also reminded me of what I've seen and heard about Korea during the 1940s and 1950s. Prior to the 20th century, Korea had a highly entrenched class system made up of landed aristocracy. That system was literally dismantled and blown up by the combination exploitation under Japanese occupation, the civil war, and Communist takeover in the north. When you got to the 1950s, you had an unusually flat society in South Korea with many former landed elites scraping by after their wealth was destroyed. Yet as the country rebuilt, wealth became reconcentrated in the hands of a new group of industrialists who were able to ride the economic growth. Now, its heavily re-entrenched in Korea, albeit with new elites.
You saw a similar sort of flattening and re-stratification among Korean immigrants to the United States as well. During the post-war wave, people from both traditional educated gentry and the poorest of the poor fled the country and lived together in an initially relatively narrow wealth band. Yet as people rose to success, whether through business savvy or education, the immigrant community has begun to diverge again between new money business elites and white collar professionals on one end and poor small business owners and laborers on the other. While you still see some mobility between the two, its clear that the children of the former have a lot of advantages over the children of the latter, and I believe in another generation or two, you'll see that stratification harden.
I don't define achievement as the exertion of power over others.
The Patriots won. It was an achievement. I may not like it; but I'm not oppressed because of that.
Perhaps that's a bad example because they had to exert power over a tiny percentage of the population in order to win. How about a math test? It's not explicitly a competition--getting 100% is an achievement, even if the other students don't know you got it. Many others will not get a perfect score. You did better than them--and it's funny that I have to point this out: there's nothing wrong with that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
taxation is your payment for services rendered by your government. Army, police force, road maintenance, infrastructure. Your taxes pay for all that shit. And if you really want to bitch about welfare, you can consider that the "service" of keeping beggars off the streets and out of your sight/way.
And before you start saying its not a true transaction because you didn't choose what to "buy" well sorry but you did -- via your elected representatives. You can argue that the price is too high or whatever, or that your representatives are choosing to "buy" the wrong services or whatever, but calling it theft is rather disingenuous at best.
Before I start: look at my post history and note the kind of radical socialist that I am, and that I'm not some right wing nut who just doesn't want to pay the "gub'mit" to take care of people less well off than me. This is a purely philosophical matter, not about practical politics.
That established, what's disingenuous is to claim that taxes are not theft. There are good arguments to be made that they are necessary and that we should accept them or even have more of them, but to argue that they are not theft is just to hide from an uncomfortable truth.
Taxes are not a payment for services. You might get services from the government, and they might not be able to provide them without taxing you, but that doesn't make it a payment for services. When a monarch demands gold from his peasants just to enrich himself and doesn't give the peasants anything in return, that's still taxation, and the peasantry don't get to say "hey you didn't give me anything in return for that" because that's not how taxes work.
If the only consequence for not paying is that you don't get something in return, that is a payment for services. If you want the services you have to pay and if you don't pay you don't get the services, but that's it; you're free to not pay if you don't mind not getting the services. That's not a tax.
If you only have to pay if you do something deemed bad, breaking a law, then that is a fine, which is neither payment for services nor taxation. If you can avoid paying it just by not doing something illegal, then the payment is not taxation.
If you have to pay it no matter what you do, or whether or not you want what's being offered in return, or whether or not anything is being offered in return at all, that is a tax. Yes, even if the you are asked your opinion (via elections) on what you would like and how much you'd like to pay, even if that opinion is honestly factored into the decision on those matters, if it's not your free choice to decline the services and not pay, then it's not just a simple payment for services.
A payment for services is something like "I will sell you ice cream of any of these flavors for $5", and you choose whether you want to pay that and what flavor of ice cream you want. "Give me $5 or else" is just theft. "I'm going to buy you ice cream, give me $5 for it or else" is just weird theft, a forced transaction. "I'm going to buy you ice cream, give me $5 for it or else; also what flavor do you want?" is even weirder theft, but it's still theft. Even if you actually wanted ice cream and would have paid $5 for it; not being given the choice is the important distinction.
When the government says "Give me $X or else", we call that taxation, and you'll note it's formally identical to theft. If they say "I'm going to provide you with Y, give me $X for it or else", that's still theft. Yes, even if they say "I'm going to provide you with Y, give me $X for it or else; also how would you like that Y?" Yes, even if you want Y, and would be willing to pay $X for it. The fact that you don't get a choice in the matter makes it still theft.
That said, and as I started with, we can then go on to argue about whether certain acts of theft are acceptable given the alternatives, especially when those alternatives will usually tur
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
So, how does the fact that your neighbor's start up business really takes off and he starts to make a lot of money result in the government taking away your rights? Be specific, instead of trying to change the subject (again).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
taxation is your payment for services rendered by your government. Army, police force, road maintenance, infrastructure. Your taxes pay for all that shit. And if you really want to bitch about welfare, you can consider that the "service" of keeping beggars off the streets and out of your sight/way.
And before you start saying its not a true transaction because you didn't choose what to "buy" well sorry but you did -- via your elected representatives. You can argue that the price is too high or whatever, or that your representatives are choosing to "buy" the wrong services or whatever, but calling it theft is rather disingenuous at best.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this bit is ridiculous. You're essentially saying it's impossible for (democratic) governments to commit theft, because everything a government does is morally validated by the fact that it was democratically elected. Sorry, but just because a lot of people agree with something, doesn't mean it's a moral action. Historical examples abound.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
People at this income level get paid what they can negotiate.
Actually, I think that's pretty much true at all levels. I'm in the middle and I get what I can negotiate too. I just don't have the negotiating leverage that Tom Brady has. I have more to offer than my in-college daughters (for now at least) so I earn quite a bit more than them.
If there is less wealth for most people...
You're assuming that if Bill Gates earns more, someone else must be earning less. There's no reason to believe that's generally true. It's entirely possible that the rising tide in fact raised most boats, it just raised Bill's boat more than yours or mine. I think that's exactly what is going on: virtually everyone is actually earning more, some are just earning a lot more while others are only earning a little more. Given that prices for many things are dropping, pretty much everyone has a better standard of living than 10, 20, 30 years ago.
(Yes, I know this is not true in all cases, just in general.)
One could argue that if all things were held constant and Bill earned less, everyone else would get a raise. I suppose. I don't find that a compelling argument for two reasons. First, it's very hard to hold everything constant and make that change. For example, people want to be rewarded for the work and risk of starting companies. Reduce that reward and at the margin, some people will decide it's just barely not worth it (thus reducing the entire economic pie). Second, if you do the math, the rich just don't earn enough to give everyone a huge raise. I don't have the numbers handy but if you reduced the CEO of Walmart's salary and bonus to zero, every employee gets a raise of something like a few pennies per hour. Whoop de do.
but trades are all well and good for physically strong men. She's got a raft of health issues (which will also preclude military, else I'd send her to the Navy). Even if she didn't she's never going to be a welder or a plumber. She's not physically strong enough.
She works her god damned ass off. Harder than me. A lot harder.
And why the fuck shouldn't everybody win? Why the hell does society have to be dog eat dog. Better question, who gains from it? It sure as hell isn't me and it sure as hell isn't anyone with a real job.
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It's telling that you believe such clear nonsense.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Perhaps the whole wealth inequality debate could be applied to entire countries: Would the US be better off if people in the Congo made 10% of someone in SV rather than 1/10%?
(As an aside, you can but it can be misleading to do so. Countries don't earn income, people do. Any change will likely be good for some people and bad for others. Looking at the aggregate will hide that. Countries don't trade either. The US doesn't trade with China, US citizens trade with Chinese citizens. Anyway...)
On one hand, the cost of producing whatever the US imports from the Congo would go up a significant amount but on the other hand, people in the Congo could also afford to purchase more American products. I don't know enough about US/Congo trade to judge which would be more beneficial to America (though its pretty obvious which would be better for the Congolese.)
Here's the thing. You can't just arbitrarily increase the Congolese income relative to the US holding everything else constant. The relative income of US and Congolese workers is by and large determined by the productivity of each. Why does a Congolese farmer earn 0.1% of a SV engineer? Because for all his effort, the barely above subsistence farmer produces very little of value compared to the engineer.
(You can go off on a whole other tangent about why this is and whether this is fair. I mean, seriously, feeding your family is less valuable than producing the yet another Snapchat filter? Set aside the moral judgement for now, the numbers indicate humanity as a whole finds the engineer's output more valuable.)
To raise Congolese incomes relative to the US, you'd have to raise their productivity or decrease ours (I live in the US). Raising Congolese productivity would be a Good Thing for us as a whole. Certain people in the US might have to find different jobs but on a whole, Humanity would be better off. Decreasing US productivity would be bad for similar reasons.
This. Common stock has no value. After nearly thirty years of working for tech companies, I haven't made a penny iff of stock options.
I'm sorry to hear that. Even at big, established companies, options are a gamble. Fortunately, it's pennies from heaven when it pays off.
You want to know how I actually turned paper profits into real ones? I bought a house and was forced to cash some options. I was just going to let them ride as long as I could. Fortunately, my wife wanted a house upgrade, we cashed in some, and the stock crashed soon thereafter. That should have taught me a lesson ("Take the money and run!") but I still struggle with selling at a small profit. For me, greed often wins out over fear.
In my wise old age (no giggles, please), I'm not crying that FASB made stock options obsolete. RSUs and ESPPs have worked out much better than options for me.
In other words, all you have is a glib non-answer. Let me guess, prosperous people are evil because ... prosperity is bad unless it's being taken from them and given to someone else, in which case it's an important resource to be mined.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Time to purge.
Happy people make bad consumers.
"...mass-mobilization warfare, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake, and by the time these crises had passed, the gap between rich and poor had shrunk." ...by the time the catastrophe was over, the wealth was gone. So naturally the gap had shrunk.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The prices of many of these things don't seem to go down. I guess things like cars and TVs get better, but price wise they don't go down much. Inflation is generally positive, so things go up in price. Economists seem to think deflation is a bad thing...
We need both, but I'm not sure how to determine the right balance. Also how much does investing in things like securities really help increase productivity. Sure the company owns some of these shares and they can borrow against it, but a lot of that money is just based on market perceptions between investors. I don't see that increasing productivity.
Do you have evidence of people successfully switching to an alternate form of currency because of wealth concentration?
Chris Mesterharm
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Behind every great fortune there is crime;
1% owns 60% wealth http://qz.com/843902/1-of-indi...
Casteism
Unfortunately all the rhetoric and examples in the world don't make taxation be theft (any more than my example makes taxation be actually equivalent to getting an oil change.)
When a monarch demands gold from his peasants just to enrich himself and doesn't give the peasants anything in return, that's still taxation, and the peasantry don't get to say "hey you didn't give me anything in return for that" because that's not how taxes work.
Depends entirely on your definition of "anything in return." Even brutal monarchs need to fund military and whatnot (again you can argue whether your taxes are paying for things you personally think are important.)
That said (and I admit its stretching definition a bit since its hard to justify the king's new gold-plated carriage as being useful to the people,) there is also a major difference between a greedy monarch and a democratically elected representative -- the peasantry don't have any say in choosing their monarch, nor can they "fire" him short of regicide if they think he's doing a shit job of representing them, whereas an elected representative can be voted out (sometimes not soon enough, but I'll try to stay on topic!)
you'll note it's formally identical to theft
No it isn't, mostly because that "or else" clause has enormously different connotations when its the IRS asking for your taxes vs a mugger asking for your wallet.
Here, from dictionary.com's entry for "theft:"
the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another
Emphasis mine. And pretty important. Taxation isn't considered "wrongful" (well, outside of libertarian rhetoric) and therefore by definition, isn't theft regardless of anything else -- even when a greedy monarch uses the money for entirely self-serving purposes.
Of course it helps that the government (monarch or otherwise) who collects the taxes also defines "wrongful." That's part of why the US was founded with strong checks and balances against too much concentration of power -- they knew how England operated and didn't really like the prospect. Hell excessive taxation was no small part of why the US broke ties with the mother country in the first place.
No, I'm saying that its impossible for any government to commit theft -- at least not if they decide to call it a tax.
People living in a democracy have the advantage because they've got (some) control over their government and thus some control over what the government is allowed to call a tax.
That's why the slogan for the American Revolution was "no taxation without representation" rather than "no thieving kings!" They were some smart people back then and they realized that using incorrect definitions of scary words isn't a strong argument for change. It just makes them sound like fear mongerers which might rouse the rabble but doesn't really accomplish much in serious discourse.
Depends entirely on your definition of "anything in return." Even brutal monarchs need to fund military and whatnot (again you can argue whether your taxes are paying for things you personally think are important.)
A mugger uses my cash to pay for something too. If he pays for something I happen to like -- say, bullets with which to kill someone I don't like, or more analogous still, someone from a rival gang in another turf -- does that make it not theft?
That said (and I admit its stretching definition a bit since its hard to justify the king's new gold-plated carriage as being useful to the people,) there is also a major difference between a greedy monarch and a democratically elected representative -- the peasantry don't have any say in choosing their monarch, nor can they "fire" him short of regicide if they think he's doing a shit job of representing them, whereas an elected representative can be voted out (sometimes not soon enough, but I'll try to stay on topic!)
So if the gang start asking the locals who should be in charge of the gang, that makes mugging the locals not theft?
No it isn't, mostly because that "or else" clause has enormously different connotations when its the IRS asking for your taxes vs a mugger asking for your wallet.
They both end with "or else we'll shoot you", the IRS just prefaces it with "...or else pay even more money or else go to jail..." before they get to the "...or else we'll shoot you part". But you're still presented with a choice: pay up, pay up more, get abducted and locked up, or if you refuse any of those, get shot. All laws are ultimately backed by "...or else we'll shoot you." (Which doesn't make them unjust; some things are worth shooting people over, just like sometimes stealing is excusable).
Taxation isn't considered "wrongful" (well, outside of libertarian rhetoric) and therefore by definition, isn't theft regardless of anything else -- even when a greedy monarch uses the money for entirely self-serving purposes.
If the only distinction you make between "taxation" and "theft" is that one is considered wrong and the other isn't, you're basically conceding my entire point. It's the same act, just considered acceptable when one party does it (and given a special name then), and not when any other does.
When the mafia shakes down businesses for "protection" money and is so powerful that they basically control the entire goings-on of a neighborhood, they have effectively become a government, and the money they demand from people has become a tax. If the mafia gradually turns nice and starts polling people to decide on who to put in charge of what neighborhood and even doing genuinely good things for the neighborhood, it never changes the fact that they're still the mafia shaking people down for money. It's certainly better if they do it in a nice way like that, but the underlying reality is still the same.
Of course it helps that the government (monarch or otherwise) who collects the taxes also defines "wrongful." That's part of why the US was founded with strong checks and balances against too much concentration of power -- they knew how England operated and didn't really like the prospect. Hell excessive taxation was no small part of why the US broke ties with the mother country in the first place.
So if a gang robs a crowd and most of the crowd are like "nah man it's cool, we know these guys, they ask us who they want running our hoods, and like kill the foreign gangs and sometimes do cool murals and shit" then that makes it not theft? Even of the people in the crowd who are not cool with it?
And again, reemphasizing my original point: I am not arguing here for the immediate abolition of all taxes and let the pieces fall where they may, or even really for any practical change in who is taxed what to pay for what. I have pragmatic opinions on those m
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
And just to clarify the reasoning behind that big caveat about how this is not an argument in practice against taxation:
- States are just gangs, and taxation is just theft
- Gangs tend to spring up spontaneously in any power vacuum
- Most of them don't know any other way to fund their activity besides theft, though there might in fact be better ways
- Some gangs are better than others (for the people in their turf), and the kind that spontaneously arise are usually the worst; established gangs sometimes in time develop better rapport with their subjects and actually think about the long-term well-being of the turf so as to best maintain their power over time.
- Therefore, it's pragmatically better to accept a decently good gang in power than to let the worst of the worst bad gangs spring up in their absence, and to work toward making the gang in power better (hopefully someday to the limit that it stops being a gang entirely and transforms into an beneficial organization playing by the same rules as everyone else in the turf), rather than just destroying it.
- Meanwhile, since most gangs don't know of any other way to fund their activity besides theft, and we've got to accept the existence of some gang and thus some theft, it's best (as in least bad) if we can get them to steal mostly from those who can more easily afford it, as well as to spend it on activities that not only help out the people in their turf, but help out those most in need more than the rest.
So yes, because states are gangs and taxation is theft, until we can figure out a way to have stateless governance funded by something other than taxes, progressive taxation in a democratic state is the best practical option.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Some quotes that sum up your inverted priorities and empathy, starting with the daily terror French peasants lived in before the revolution:
For the bourgeois living in their bubbles, the tragedy of the French and Russian revolutions isn't that 90% of the people were crushed for hundreds of years under the boot heel of aristocracy, it's that the rich and upper class got the shit end of the stick for once, instead of the poor. Because, as MLK laid out, your priority is order, justice can go to the back of the bus.
It's the same sense of priorities that may make you tut tut when you read about cops literally beating people to death in the street for no goddamn reason and getting away with it, but are outraged when a protestor breaks a window or makes you ten minutes late on your morning commute. One more quote to sum it up:
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK
No, I'm saying that its impossible for any government to commit theft -- at least not if they decide to call it a tax.
Sort of like how extortion isn't extortion as long it's called protection money? Theft describes the nature of the act, not the nature of the perpetrator, and glossing over it with nicer-sounding words make it any better.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face