You do realize he’s the richest person in the US right? When you talk about income/wealth inequality he’s the pointy end of the stick. If he moved to Norway tomorrow, their GINI would probably shift pretty dramatically. Did their quality of life suddenly get worse? Are their poor more likely to drag rich people out into the street? The richest guy in Norway only has $13billion USD*, which would 25th in the US.
What I want to know is how your life would improve if he wasn’t so rich, a question you are working hard to avoid.
I’ve already pointed out that if Gates lost his money because Windows 9 flopped then somebody else must have been selling us a better product for our computers.
And others have pointed out that if Gates lost twelve billion dollars then somebody else must have gained twelve billion.
There’s also supply and demand and price theory which says that even if Gates money somehow disappeared without anyone else getting it, we’d still be better off because that amount of money being removed from the economy would make the remaining money more valuable.
But apparently these aren’t the answers you wanted to hear when you asked the question.
Please read the thread. You ignoring what has been said and simply restating your OP isn’t productive.
Hurting a rich person doesn’t do anything at all to address the systemic problem that *causes *income inequality. If Gates became a pauper it would do nothing to address the problem that concentrates the wealth in the hands of a few.
Okay, so what injustice caused Bill Gates to get so rich? He founded a company that developed products that range from competitive to dominant in a highly profitable market, and his industry doesn’t require much in the way of labor.
So which part of that has to be addressed? The profitability of the market he competes in? The fact that he doesn’t need much labor, relative to a company like GM?
And assuming he earned all that money fairly, what is the justification for taking it away then?
That it’s fairer and good for society*. And he most certainly didn’t earn that money “fairly” anyway, the vast majority of the people responsible for making that money get far less.
And no, right wing arguments that “fairness and goodness don’t matter” don’t work, because they lead right into a counterargument of "alright then, let’s do it because we can".
He started the company, and although his employees got less, they got an awful lot. That man has created a lot of millionaires and many of them have in turn gone and created their own companies that employed people at high salaries.
The “structure of our society” is a rather vague complaint. I tried to break it down into what exactly about our society is the problem: profitability of some industries or low demand for labor in some industries? It certainly can’t be said that his industry lacks competition. In that world, even dominant companies can be quickly left behind, even if they have a virtual monopoly.
So you have a free market, a fair market, and a lot of people get very, very rich in that market. I fail to see that there is a problem that needs to be solved surrounding that market.
Probably the part where Microsoft told computer manufacturers that they could include pre-loaded Microsoft products on the computers they sold - but only if they didn’t allow competing companies to pre-load their products.
As everyone has pointed out, your scenario would make a lot of people poorer also. Care to address that? Plus, on the whole people don’t think of Gates as an evil rich guy. So, people are talking about redistributing wealth, not destroying it.
And, IIRC, Bill’s Dad came out against the Bush tax cuts.
As for me, I’m doing fine. If they started redistributing money, I wouldn’t get any of it.
It’s freer than most. Sure, there’s always some regulations and always some anti-competitive practices. But the market Bill Gates is in has far more competition than say, the US auto industry, which benefits not only from high regulatory barriers meant to keep out competition, but also trade barriers. Since software can’t be kept within national boundaries the way physical goods can, you’d be hard pressed to find a more truly free market.
Microsoft Windows currently runs on 92% of the desktop computers in this country. Would you describe that as a situation in which the free market can operate? I’m talking an actual real world free market and not just the theoretical possibility of a free market.
For comparison, General Motors (the top auto company) sells 18% of the cars in this country. Ford sells about 16%, Toyota 13%, Chrysler 11%, and Honda 10%. Their combined total is about 68% - far below the 92% that Microsoft has of its market by itself.
So which industry do you claim has more real world competition?
The injustice, or rather the flaw in our society is the one that allows all GDP gains to go to a few percent at the top.
Anyone designing a society would see that if all gains go to a few percent that’s an embarrassing failure. 21st century conservatism has so twisted the concepts it’s based on that it just paints this as a good thing.
Fixing the problems in our society has nothing to do with taking away money from an individual. Presumably there are things we could enact that would make the improvements in our economy benefit more of the citizens of the country.
Exactly. And the only thing that’s ever worked is a free market economy with a safety net. Which is what we have. The goal, and this is true of Sweden as much as it is of the US, is to let people achieve as much as they can, while insuring that those who are left behind still survive.
That’s a ridiculously oversimplified portrayal of the problems. Successive Greek governments were corrupt and incompetent. They lied their way into the Eurozone and silenced every whistleblower (which is probably the biggest cause of their current woes). They did indeed spend like drunken sailors but they also failed to collect the taxes they were due, allowing widespread fraud and tax avoidance to continue. The Greeks brought this on themselves but it wasn’t just “spending too much” and certainly not in a way that is comparable to the US.
The UK economy has actually suffered from overreaching austerity measures, having recently narrowly avoided a “triple dip” recession while the richest folk got a tax cut. Not exactly a good example for your point either.
I will profess myself baffled at Hollande’s “shoot all the millionaires” approach. Pre-Hollande, France wasn’t significantly worse than the rest of Europe and better than many.
If the only thing that has ever worked is a “free market economy” then the definition of the words are so loose as to be utterly worthless.
Income inequality is bad because it is a failure of the economy of the state to ensure that the gains to the economy are available to all Americans, not just the ones that were born rich.
The solutions are varied, and I’m not an economist, but I assume that you could legislate controls into our economy that would see much better increases over much more of the population.
To spell it out clearly: You are supposed to be pissed off as an American if the vast majority of the wealth increases goes to a handful of people. That many don’t feel that way, is evidence of the huge societal damage that 21st century conservatism is doing.
The only way to insure the widest distribution of wealth possible is a free market. Sure, the definition is loose, but in general if businesses are free to do what they want except for some reasonable regulation restricting their activities, that’s a free market. An unfree market is one in which the government outlaws competition or owns large industries.
This idea that we can redistribute wealth is nonsense. Wealth is produced, it doesn’t just exist to be divided. Those who rail against inequality are essentially railing against wealth production, and sure enough, they do a pretty good job of tamping it down.
He is giving away his wealth - he’ll be wealthy for his lifetime, and his kids won’t starve, but he isn’t setting them up to wealthy five generations from now.
Unlike a lot of wealthy people, he made a huge investment in himself, his company and innovated - he CREATED wealth from very little and he took thousands of people along with him. Microsoft millionaires are not uncommon. And Microsoft still employs people and adds money to the economy.
That is quite different than a raiding CEO who makes $10M+ a year to drive a company into the dirt.
That’s a good point, and we should fix our system to prevent that kind of thing. That’s just manipulating the system to make a quick buck.
But that’s not the cause of massive inequality either. If anything, it probably helps with inequality because it gives talentless hacks a way to become millionaires whereas otherwise they’d be on food stamps.
BTW, if we’re worried about our GINI index standing compared to other countries, there’s an easy way to fix it: stop importing poor people. Our much more liberal immigration policies contribute to inequality.
Paul Krugman has said that you can either have a generous welfare state or a liberal immigration policy. You can’t have both.