No, you don’t.
You’re talking STRICTLY in terms of consumer goods, and of course that’s not the ONLY place that money matters, does it? The wealthy can buy much more advanced medical care than the poor. Universal health insurance … which I note, conservatives, Republicans and libertarians are fighting tooth and claw … might reduce that gap, but we don’t have that in America, do we? Our current system helps a lot, but still, the wealthy will always be able to buy into the most advanced treatments and care. And every indication is that we are verging one some REALLY big advances in medicine soon … who do you suppose will see the benefit of those FIRST … things that might extend life greatly, end debilitating illnesses … that’s where money REALLY comes in handy. Not in buying a bigger, better TV screen.
That’s not remotely what I said. I went out of my way to point out culture, access to information, access to entertainment, access to education…
Why do you think health care is immune to the law of diminishing returns? It applies there perhaps more than anywhere else.
The first dollar of health care gets you shots that prevent you from dying of common diseases. The first few hundred dollars of health care get you medically assisted childbirth, greatly cutting down on infant mortality. It also gets you eyeglasses and casts for broken arms basic dental care and other medical interventions that drastically improve the lives of everyone. The first few thousand dollars of health care get you access to decent first world medicine.
When I was a kid, orthodontics were strictly a middle class thing. I was lucky that my teeth were straight because there was no way in hell we could afford to get them fixed. In fact, lack of access to orthodontics left a permanent mark on the underclass - crooked teeth. Orthodontics are now available to a much wider swath of humanity than they used to be.
As you go up the cost ladder, you hit more and more diminishing returns. Once you’ve covered basic sanitation, childbirth care, basic immunization, dentistry and emergency surgery, you’ve covered the big killers and the big lifestyle enhancements. Once even the poor in society have access to all these things, the gap between them and billionaires is actually pretty small except in those rare cases where someone can afford dramatic and extensive medical treatments for a disease, and that such treatment makes a difference.
This should be easily testable: Is there a measurable difference in lifespans between the middle class and billionaires that can be attributable to better health care? There’s a HUGE difference between the health care available to the poorest in America and the health care that the 3rd world gets. The gap between someone making $1000/yr and $20,000 yr in terms of life improvement due to health care is undoubtedly greater than it is between the poor in America and its billionaires.
[/quote]
And every indication is that we are verging one some REALLY big advances in medicine soon … who do you suppose will see the benefit of those FIRST … things that might extend life greatly, end debilitating illnesses … that’s where money REALLY comes in handy. Not in buying a bigger, better TV screen.
[/QUOTE]
Has it occurred to you that these advances happen because there are rich people to pay for them? Every technological industry needs ‘early adopters’ to prove out products and fund R&D. And yes, they get the technology first, but as the R&D costs are amortized and the market expands, those treatments come down in price and become available to more and more people. And here’s something Piketty doesn’t count - the rich pay huge amounts of capital for cutting-edge treatments, then they trick down to the lower classes with the R&D amortized. That’s essentially a big social program or wealth transfer between the rich and the people below.
Get rid of the rich, and that market goes away. And we’ll never know what we lost because we can’t see the things not invented because there was no market for them.
And, they want to see those Third World workers get fired so that Americans can have those jobs back.
Oh, I’m sorry, they are concerned for their welfare and don’t want them to be exploited.
At least before the modern era, anyone who owned land was undoubtedly middle class. THe Soviets certainly regarded such people as middle class, and in need of liquidation. The middle class are usually the big losers of revolutions led by the poor, not the rich. The rich just “reform” and join the state apparatus, while moving their money offshore.
There was virtually no middle class in the times you are describing. Revolutions have not occurred when the middle class is a large portion of the population.
Good point. Historically, the middle class has been a very small percentage of the population: much larger than the upper class, but not much at all compared to the peasantry. The scary thing is, if you look at the numbers, America is heading toward back toward the historic model. We had the best economy in the world and it was DRIVEN by our large middle class with its newfound purchasing power. Now the One Percent are trying to destroy the middle class. BRILLIANT.
And if you look more carefully at the numbers, you’ll see that:
A) if they don’t include government transfers, they’re pretty meaningless
and
B) If the middle class is shrinking, it’s because it’s moving UP into the upper class. Specifically, households with two professional workers are often now in the upper class. An engineer married to a nurse or a mid-level bureaucrat can pull in $150,000-$200,000 per year in household income, easily.
Speaking of government transfers… This is perhaps the biggest flaw in Piketty’s book. As I understand it, his numbers for income and capital do not include taxation of capital or government transfers that supplement income from the poor. This seems patently ridiculous to me - without doing that, you could have a country where the poor receive 80% of their income from taxes on the wealthy and see big increases in the standard of living, but if that caused them to work less, by Piketty’s methods that would mean income inequality is increasing.
Another flaw in the book (or rather, in the conclusions drawn from the book) is that he looks at capital vs income, but his follows see this as directly analogous to being rich vs poor. But in a capitalist country, lots of people own capital. Middle class real estate ownership represents a significant amount of capital, as do the retirement savings of the middle class. So to the extent that gains in capital outperform gains in income, not all of these gains go to the ‘rich’ and affect income inequality.
And I can’t think of a faster way to destroy the world economy and further impoverish the poor than Piketty’s loopy notion of a global income tax of 80% on the wealthy. It’s called ‘capitalism’ for a reason - you need private capital for the economy to work. Taxing it all and putting it in the hands of governments is a recipe for economic devastation.
And historically, televisions are very scarce. Historically, access to horses was much better in the past.
Any discussions of current living standards that seek comparisons to the 19th century are automatically suspect, since the 19th century is simply a radically different world. Global wealth was a tiny fraction of what it is now. Of course the poor didn’t do as well then - neither did anyone else. Because, progress.
Can you provide some cites for that? How exactly is the one percent destroying the middle class?
It seems to me that the damage to the middle class and the sudden good fortunes of the moneyed class has a lot more to do with government policies of the sort that your side approves of as much as anyone else, than it does with the activities of the 1%. Zero interest rates hurt retirement savers, ‘quantitative easing’ has been a boon to the stock market, bailouts of the financial sector prevented a correction that would have cost the wealthy a lot of capital.
But when I look at the billionaires in society, I see a bright spot, not a sign of impending doom. Some of the most innovative, potentially life-changing advances are now being financed by billionaires with their own capital.
SpaceX is revolutionizing spaceflight. In your ideal world, SpaceX wouldn’t exist, because Elon Musk wouldn’t have the profits from PayPal to fund it. The same goes for Tesla motors. If you look at the current breed of new billionaires, pretty much all of them are using their money in philanthropic or entrepreneurial ways. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is a massive charity. Paul Allen funds a lot of cultural events and facilities. Warren Buffett has signed a pledge to give all his wealth to charity. Even those dreaded Koch brothers give hundreds of millions of dollars to charities like cancer clinics.
Silicon Valley is built on venture capital. A lot of our internet and cell phone infrastructure was financed through investments by those billionaires you hate. Some of the great advances in health care have come from companies financed through private capital. Where would the money have come from to build out a lot of this stuff if no one can accumulate capital in your socialist world? Do you honestly believe governments can do this kind of innovation and efficient investment better? If so, perhaps you could point to a heavily socialist country that maintained an efficient, dynamic economy full of innovation?
That brings up another flaw in Piketty’s model - he assumes that capital just accumulates. But it doesn’t - it gets invested in the economy and benefits many other people. He treats capital and income as separate things, but capital growth leads to higher investment, which leads to increased jobs and higher incomes. And if it’s not invested wisely, it dissipates in the form of salaries to employees of failed ventures and spent infrastructure that other people get to use.
Sam Stone, how long did it take you to get through 700 pages? I’ve just started and it is kind of a slog so I haven’t formed an opinion yet. I understand the point he’s trying to make, he explains that early on, but I haven’t gotten into the figures like you apparently have.
He hasn’t read the book. He’s just repeating stuff he’s read elsewhere about the book, and half of those people probably haven’t even read the thing.
See “Fair Trade”.
I’m sure few in this thread have; I’m still about 20th on the list for my library request. But enough has been published about it in the past few weeks to give us all a pretty clear understanding of the contents.
Woosh…
That was an excellent piece by Reich. I gained a lot of respect for him quite frankly after reading it.
That is quite laughable.
The most famous proponents of the American Revolution were inspired by the Father of Liberalism - John Locke. Jefferson and Madison wrote the key documents of revolution and considered themselves disciples of his. Thomas Paine’s famous writing was filled with liberal ideas. So is the Constitution with its Establishment Clause, rejection of monarchy, no debtors prison, no cruel and unusual punishment, and general consent of the governed among other anti-authoritarian ideas.
Perhaps you should start a GD thread on this topic - if you dare to.
That was an excellent and concise description. Well said. That’s why they were ‘Classical Liberals’, and not conservatives.
Which today makes them right-wing. As proven by liberals’ view of the Constitution as guaranteeing rights that aren’t even written down there, and seeing the rights that are written down as being negotiable.
Uh, no. Just no. Today’s conservatives LOVE cruel and unusual punishments, hell, they LOVE torture.Debtors’ prisons are making a return. Hell, conservatives love for-profit prisons, where people are jailed just so others can make money. And although no conservative (for now) is calling for a return to monarchy, they DO love the oligarchy.
And conservatives are NOTHING if not authoritarian. I know some conservatives like to pretend they are Marlboro Men out riding the range, but in fact they are a bunch of conformist stuffed shirts just waiting for someone to tell them what their talking points are so they can repeat them.