I disagree with your conclusion. I agree that the problem isn’t that the extremely wealthy are rich. But it also isn’t that not everyone is rich. Some people work harder and / or are more talented. If those people earn more money as a result of providing more goods or services, or providing something of value that requires a specialized skill that most people don’t have, there’s nothing wrong with them earning more money. The problem arises because the wealthy aren’t the ones providing those goods or services of value. Instead they take a huge cut of the wealth generated by the people that are (AKA their employees).
This is fine in the abstract, but when we look at multiples where we have a given human being who is worth a hundred billion times more than another person, we have to question whether the math really works at that scale, or if there’s some sort of market distortion at work.
There’s nothing magical about a dollar. It has no intrinsic value. It’s just how society agrees on how to denominate claims on future economic production. If your pile of claims could feasibly sustain you for millions of years into the future, then that’s clearly broken. We can’t even imagine what the economy will look like a hundred years from now, or if the governments that regulate the value of money will even exist. As currencies go, the dollar has had a good run, but it’s probably fair to say it will be replaced by something else in a couple of hundred years, so it makes no sense to allow anyone to accumulate a thousand years’ worth of them when some people don’t even have enough to meet their needs for one day.
My disagreement is that the people who are accumulating a thousand years worth of dollars aren’t the ones doing so by working harder or providing a specialized or rare skill of value. Barring a few highly successful entertainers (and no, I don’t think the problem is people like Michael Jordan, Taylor Swift, or Lebron James), the wealthy didn’t get their by the fruits of their own labor.
ETA. Someone above mentioned the top 10 to top 25%. Those are the types of people that I’m referring to when I mention someone who works harder, is more talented, or has a specialized skill.
Take the city of Corpus Christi, where I live. Yes, we have problems with wealth inequality. But those problems aren’t due to the people earning in the low six figures by getting up at 4 AM to go work on refinery row every day to turn crude oil into gasoline, or the professors who teach at Del Mar college or Texas A&M Corpus Christi, the starting roster of the Corpus Christi Hooks (our AA baseball team), the medical professionals who would be providing treatment if you end up in a local ER, the pilots flying planes for United or Southwest out of Corpus Christi international airport, and so on. The fact that those people make more money than someone making minimum wage isn’t the problem.
No… you’re misunderstanding. What I was saying is that everyone’s indeed saying the same messaging- to the point of it being suspiciously uniform.
But when asked to explain it and propose solutions, you get a crazy, incoherent mishmash of vaguely socialist and populist garbage that varies depending on who you’re discussing with. Almost like they’ve been fed slogans and talking points that sound good and get them all riled up, but without the usual explanations behind the actual talking points.
And I mean that the specific messaging wasn’t really there, not that the situations that let it flourish weren’t there.
There’s your problem- currency isn’t any sort of futures contract, it’s an abstract measure of value that’s independent of any future economic value. People value gold jewelry, and it’s got little in the way of economic production value relative to all sorts of other stuff. Same with pretty much any sort of intangible financial instrument.
Do you have any theories? Some organized group pushing this particular messaging?
It seems to me that fundamentally money is a way of keeping score. We have dollars now because it’s easier to work with a single currency than a whole bunch of different company scrips, IOUs between individuals, and so on. The money itself has no value other than as a means of keeping score. Gold, ISTM, is different, in that (some, but obviously not all) people treat it as if it has inherent value.
What the question of wealth comes down to, then, is whether someone with a lot money earned it legitimately by providing something of value, or if the scorekeeper assigned it to someone despite the fact that they didn’t actually score / provide something of value.
Thank you for your support.
I am willing to scrap that 90% figure, but it is indisputable that since 1980 wealth inequality has skyrocketed
Here is another article.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonhardt-income-inequality.html
I mean, a lot of the accounts peddling this stuff DID go dark after Ukraine blew up that Russian data center…
Cite?
eta: I guess it’s a theory, that Russia’s attempts to sow division in the West mean that they’re pushing anti-oligarch messaging (seems strange for an oligarchy, but OK). But while I’ve seen the claim plenty that “far right spaces have seen traffic plummet” in the wake of the Yandex data center attacks, there’s no evidence that this is actually true.
Researchers from dTeam, a US-based group that tracks Moscow-linked influence operations, told BBC Verify there has not been “any traffic change from known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform”.
More:
“I’m sorry to burst everyone’s bubble, but as of now, there is no solid evidence that Russian bot farms have become inactive due to the Yandex data centre strikes,” agreed Vatnik Soup, another group that monitors Russian government-backed disinformation.
I originally heard it in a speech from Zelensky but I can dig up a cite.
And some stats:
All economic and financial systems are sort of useful abstract bullshit we create to “keep score” to help organize and incentivize people and allocate resources to do stuff. In theory a society could work without currency and everyone just sort of gets together to get stuff done as it’s needed. Sort of like Amish folk raising a barn or whatever. But modern society is too complex for that. Too many highly skilled people working on too many complex parts for anyone to keep track
I wonder if there’s a reason why Populist friendly Mother Jones snipped Vatnik Soup’s tweet to make the supposed negative claim in his post much stronger than it actually was? Here’s what Mother Jones clipped out:
Populism is a cancer.
In the comments to that post Mother Jones snipped the more favorable half of, he is pretty adamant that Russia does indeed have a big network feeding populist narratives. But I’m not surprised that this would not stop a rag like Mother Jones from quoting him anyways.
That part that Mother Jones clipped out doesn’t exactly support the claim either. I know there was a lot of anecdata, but nobody has produced any real data. Zelensky’s team has walked back the claim as well.
Everyone agrees that Russia is funding bot farms to sow division – that’s not new. There’s not evidence, however, that disinformation traffic has been diminished by the Yandex strikes.
But let’s set that aside – let’s say that the Yandex strikes DID work to reduce Russian bot traffic. Do you have any evidence that said bot traffic was fueling this particular narrative?
It’s not exactly a well kept secret:
The only one of those links that supports you is that Russia was boosting Bernie to try to help Republicans.
But Bernie has been beating this drum for like 60 years, so we can’t exactly blame his messaging on Russia.
Anyway, like I said, I guess it’s a theory. Which is what I asked for.
There you go @bump. It’s the Russians.
Sorry. Brain fart. You know what i meant!
I know America’s enemies want to foment dissent, but haven’t uniform slogans always popped up when there is discontentment? These act as rallying cries.
As far as the solutions, there are various solutions being looked into.
Eliminate the step up basis
A global wealth tax
Land value taxes
Progressive real estate taxes
That’s not correct. The only value a currency has is how it serves as a claim on future production. If I have $5 now, that means I can get a Big Mac later. If we create more such currency, there are more claims on that Big Mac, so the price goes up. There’s no comparison to gold, because gold does have industrial value as well as ornamental value.
Most critically, gold is finite and nobody’s obligated to trade with it. If one person happens to own 99% of the gold in the country, it’s no impact to anyone else unless they happen to be manufacturing with it. But if a few people get all the dollars, it’s a real problem because they own most of our economic output for the foreseeable future. The more they have, the more they act like unaccountable feudal lords, which is why we see the tech titans behaving more and more unaccountably. Elon Musk out there literally holding raffles for votes and making his own foreign policy in the form of kneecapping Starlink to help Russia for reasons we can only guess at.
I mean, sure billionaires are a problem, but it is an equally huge problem that not everybody is rich enough to share in the goods and services of value— like having enough food to eat and access to health care— given that society as a whole is rich enough to provide for everybody. I do not mean that it is a problem that not everybody is a billionaire.
Don’t trust anybody.
[And I have literally seen people under 30 meticulously planning their future career in, e.g., investment banking, rather than gearing up to volunteer for the World Food Programme]