These arguments say that only 1% of people made wealth in the world and that the “interchangeable carbon blobs” did not make wealth.
This argument shows a jaw dropping level of ignorance of the basic laws of supply and DEMAND, the fundamental building blocks of all wealth. Plus it stands in total ignorance of the fact that all people are to some extent interchangeable.
The two arguments I just linked to are absurd on their face.
No, he did not, and that is just another one of your straw men. The workers are NOT useless, otherwise why would they be there? Interchangeable is not the same things as worthless, useless, or not contributing.
“1 in 100” means that very few people are able to come up with “the next big thing.” Those are the people driving us forward. The rest of us interchangeable carbon blobs support that process and get paid for our efforts.
If that helps you digest it then you’ve made progress. The most common misconception I see in this thread is forgetting the fact that the US has over 300million people, so there isn’t just 1 person working on his own, there are are 3million people coming up with great ideas, everyone else works for those people.
Le Jac, the rest of us don’t see this board as your personal blog. So when you have something to say, it’ll be helpful if you were to say it rather than assuming we’ve all been following your previous posts.
So the point of this thread is that you disagree with something msmith said in another thread?
Again, this misses the bigger picture. There are a lot of writers, perhaps we could all agree there are more than 100? Which means that there will be more than 1 truly great writer. As mentioned above, publishing houses receive thousands of works, most of which are garbage. A handful are good enough to publish, and of those only a couple of great.
There are a lot of “Stephan Kings” because there are a lot of writers.
The NBA represents the best of all basketball players, they are the 1 in 1000. Consider how many kids are currently playing at the high school, how many will make it pro?
But within the context of the NBA, most of those players are interchangeable. Not invaluable, a team still needs 12 guys for the roster. And out of the hundred or so players in the NBA only a few are truly great, those are the guys that take their team to the championship. They don’t get there alone, no one is suggesting they do. But without the truly great players, the team is simply good. The team doesn’t get to the championship without the truly great. That is the person generating wealth (or in this case great plays), the rest work in support of that.
If the tires on your car are so interchangeable, then how come you can’t drive without them, huh? Huh? HUH?!
Seriously, Jack, do you know what “interchangeable” means?
Oh, it doesn’t require that many readings, we have all heard the capitalist catechism more than once, it hasn’t changed. Perhaps the only thing truly galling about it is presenting a testimony of faith as though it were a recitation of fact, simple facts, really, that Sam is hard pressed to understand how anyone might disagree.
A few points of dissension, if you will. Or even if you won’t.
In the ideal. But what if the ideal is not followed, what if someone gets greedy? This only works if all participants have a common sense of value and “fair play”. Who has the more power to enforce their amoral grasping, the man with the money, legislators and lawyers to protect his interests, or the man who does not? Is it your experience that men who claw their way to the top are deeply moral people?
I am sure we are all pleased to hear of your success, Sam. However, as a data point, it lacks. But the value of grossly overpaid executives is derived solely from their decision making skills? Gosh, seems to me I have heard tell, quite recently, of such men making very, very bad decisions. Are they all now to be found by the side of freeway entrances, in threadbare three piece suits holding signs saying “Will Make Important Decisions for Food”? News to me.
And what of men who make decisions that are excellent for their corporate entity, but disastrous for the common good? What is to be done?
Gosh, Sam, I have spent a considerable portion of my life making society a more colorful place. I had no idea you placed so much value in my contribution. You’re welcome, by the way. But this “spreading the wealth around”? I always thought they pretty much kept it. Yes, indeed, such men as Branson exists, and I doff my cap. Are they the rule or the exception? What about such men as the Koch Brothers? I appreciate their donations to the opera, though I’ve never attended. Their efforts to bend my country’s political system to their own benefit, however… Chaps my hide, pardner.
Ah. Now here is the nub, the axis upon which your argument pivots. How does one “earn” a fifty million dollar per year salary? By dashing into burning buildings to save people? Educating our children? Protecting our northern border from lean and hungry barbarians, surging southward to seize our beer and our women? No, they make it by sitting in clean, air conditioned offices in nice suits and attending meetings. And making decisions, of course, decisions which are generally made in those meetings, decisions which are more collective than individual.
How, exactly, do they “earn” such absurd wealth? Well, of course, the Free Market says they do! But what if one does not share your faith in the divine justice of the Free Market? What is the basis for this faith, that surpasseth all understanding? Why should I place my faith, my future, and my children’s future in this arbitrary abstraction. rather than consigning them to the will of Og?
The market is not “free”, by its very nature it favors the haves over the have-nots. I don’t recall who said it, but the aphorism is that if you have a thousand dollars, making a hundred thousand is difficult, if you have a million, making a hundred thousand is almost inevitable.
Was it designed for justice? Or is it simply an accident of history. In most instances, such governmental and social designs are created by the powerful, who happen to be the rich, most often. Does your reading of history instruct you that the ambitious and driven are paragons of virtue and justice? Only rats win rat races, Sam.
Fleming, of penicillin. Salk, of polio vaccine, Einstein, the math guy, MLK. Did these men spend their reclining years rolling around in piles of Benjamins, snorting coke off the asses of supermodels? Would we have been better off had they not squandered their talents bringing us such enormous gifts? I think not.
I don’t quite know what to make of this, Sam. I think I will leave it with a discreet “says who?” Could we not put some restraints in place to prevent such a dreadful result? I mean “we” of course, not “they”, because “they” won’t, now will they?
By golly, our efforts have not been in vain! He gets it! Huzzah!
Certainly an interesting spin. But we’re not talking about the “people with all the money.” We’re talking about the people with the supply. These are the people that come with with The It Thing™, that the people with money will demand. See how that works?
Stephan King didn’t start out with billions, he started out with a skill that others were willing to pay for. He provided supply, that a lot of people demanded. He generated wealth but having something that a lot of people wanted to pay him for.
The books he writes sells for a higher value and in higher volume than most other works written. That means that all the people involved make more money as a result of the supply he creates. Remove him from the equation (as Le Jacquelope suggested) and yes, there will be another author, but not necessarily one that sells as many novels for as high a price. That means the book store makes less money, and the truck driver has less work.
I really have no idea what the point of this statement was other than to take a big dump.
Again, what are you trying to get at here? If the corporation is doing well it’s not by magic, they aren’t printing their own money. They are providing something that people are paying for. If it destroys the world in the process obviously the people giving them money don’t care. So whose fault is it?
To make $50million a year you need to be able to do something that others neither can or will do. There are no shortage of people lining up to be VOLUNTEER firefighters. There are no shortage of people willing and able to be teachers.
But how may people are capable of writing a series of books that people are willing to pay a lot for?
He didn’t say justice, he said just. There can be greed on the supply side, and greed on the demand side. Do you consider Stephan King to be greedy and undeserving? Is he ripping people off? Forcing them to buy something they don’t want? Is it wrong of him to profit from his works, or should he give it away for free for all the world to enjoy?
I’m a little surprised to see you abandoning capitalism, Sam.
Because Capitalism is based on the idea of struggle. Individuals compete against each other. Ford competes against GM. Coke competes against Pepsi. WalMart competes against Target. And management competes aginst labor.
Why should that be a surprise? Management and labor have different interests. So management pushes in one direction and labor pushes in another. They each look out for their own self-interest and spontaneously produce the common good, as if by the the action of an invisible hand.
Somebody ought to write a book about this.
Sure, there are people who think there’s another way. That everyone will work alongside each other for the common good with no sense of competition. They’ll work because they have the ability to work and because they want to produce the goods that people need.
Somebody could probably make a book out of that too.
It also needs to be pointed out that **Le Jac’s ** straw man “Only 1% generate any wealth” is not referring to the “the wealthiest 1% of Americans.”
Thus it’s not a class struggle between rich and poor because the “1 in 100” who generate wealth are not the same people as the richest 1%.
If you look through the top 400 richest Americans you’ll see the “1 in 100” from the previous generation. The guys that started Microsoft, Apple, Orical, Facebook, etc. And you’ll see the family members of the “1 in 100” from the generation before that; at least 5 of those 400 are the relatives of the guy that started Walmart.
The people currently with “all the wealth” are not the same as the people “creating the wealth.” Being part of the “1 in 100” is independent of wealth, it’s about having that certain something that other people want. Coming up with the Next Big Thing™. That’s how there can be new millionaires.
No, getting paid is EVIDENCE you’re creating wealth. People generally don’t get paid unless their efforts produce wealth.
You agree that other people multiply King’s ability to make money. So how are they not creating wealth?
I could just as easily argue that the person who created wealth was not Stephen King, but the owner of the publishing company, which after all simply employs King as a person to write the books they were planning on selling anyway. Had Doubleday not optioned Carrie they would doubtlessly have chosen another book by another author. Why are you ascribing the “wealth creation” to King and not the publishing house?
Of course. Some things are worth more than others.
The amount of wealth King has created (and I hate to be picky, but the man’s name is Stephen, not Stephan) is roughly proportional to the amount of the take he’s getting from it (which is a lot, but not even close to half.)
The truck driver’s work is less valuable. He is still creating wealth, but he’s not creating as much. Less doesn’t equal none.
We’ve had capitalism for going on two centuries now and the laws and structures of society have actually evolved to better control powerful men, not to give them more leeway for greed. I know you’ve rail against that and claim it isn’t so based on the fiscal disaster of 2008 and Enron and all that, but in the past capitalism was a vastly, vastly more predatory enterprise than it is today. In the late 19th century economic depressions of the sort we had in 2008 happened routinely, every five to ten years, and if you didn’t like it you starved.
So the answer to your question is that the law takes care of that sort of thing, and over time has been doing a better job of it.
But go ahead and come up with a sarcastic, insincere reply.
Actually, I said I very much understand why other people disagree. It sucks when the things you want to do aren’t valued by others, and thus you can’t make a living doing them. Or if you aren’t smart enough or didn’t work hard enough or aren’t motivated enough to do the things that generate wealth in a capitalist country. More than one wag has called socialism “the politics of the disappointed.”
Of course, there are real victims of capitalism, and there are real market failures and real injustices. Those need to be addressed, and sometimes by government. And for social order to be maintained we also have to ensure that the people who are not equipped to compete are not left destitute - we need social programs and assistance for those people.
However, these are not the defining characteristics of capitalism, even though the left has a vested interest in portraying it so. In fact, the vast number of transactions between people in a capitalist system are done voluntarily for mutual benefit. If you walk out of a store with a new HDTV, I’m guessing that you’re happy AND the store owner is happy. So is the manufacturer, and the employees of the manufacturer. When a connection is made between producers and consumers, it’s good for everyone.
And again, although the left doesn’t like to admit it, the prime regulatory mechanism in a capitalist economy is the market, and it works extremely well by and large. The amount of information that flows in a capitalist economy and the complexity of all the supply chains of goods and services is amazing to behold if you’d just stop to appreciate it once in a while.
Don’t you find it amazing that, while no one forced your local grocer to stock your favorite cereal, he still does? And in enough quantity that you rarely find him out of stock, yet he also doesn’t wind up with warehouses full of uneaten cereal? A single grocery store is stocked with a vast array of goods that match pretty well the desires of the local population. These goods arrive at the store every day, on time, and in the right quantity, and of sufficiently high quality that people will pay for it voluntarily. This despite many of these products having to come from around the world, packaged and shipped in processes involving thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. Somehow, without a central planner all of this effort is organized, coordinated, and results in your box of Count Chocula waiting on the shelf for you, at a reasonable price, when you decide you need your sugary cereal fix.
That’s what capitalism does. It organizes and coordinates human activity, and it does so to a degree of efficiency that government cannot hope to match. And it does it by appealing to the individual interests of all the people involved, without the use of force or coercion. It binds communities and countries together, and ultimately binds the world together through international markets.
When you buy a TV and it has a beautiful display that satisfies you, no government agent did that for you. The TV manufacturer would rather have cut costs and provided a cheaper panel, but he didn’t. How come? Because the market dictated the requirements to him - the market being the collected revealed preferences of the consumers of the product he’s trying to make.
No government agency told Apple to make the iPad thin or to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to figure out how to make a pleasing, efficient user interface. Other companies have tried leveraging previous investment in operating systems and old hardware to make high-profit yet clunky tablet computers, and they utterly failed in the market. Apple won, and Steve Jobs makes millions of dollars because he made the decisions that gave people what they want. No government agency told him to do it.
While that can be true in the case of hidden defects or fraud (for which we need government protection), the beauty of capitalism is that it recognizes greed as a motivating factor. That TV manufacturer would sure like to sell you one with cheaper components, but he knows you won’t buy it. You’re greedy too - you’d rather pay $10 for your TV than $500. But no one will sell you one for that amount of money. So you’re both forced to compromise and come up with a value you can both accept. Collectively, all the consumers of TVs and all the producers make up a marketplace that takes on its own rules and punishes people who refuse to abide by them. That’s real regulation, and it happens in every industry, even if government isn’t involved.
No, I don’t assume that they are moral, nor do I require them to be. All I require is that I know all the details of what they offer and am free to choose to engage in business with them or not.
Political systems which attempt to operate from the ‘common goodness’ in man, or which expect people to subjugate their own desires to the larger group, are doomed to fail. Usually they fail by being co-opted by powerful interests. It’s much better to recognize that everyone is greedy and trying their best to improve their own lives, and to have a system in which that greed is directed into activities which benefit all. As if by an invisible hand, you might say.
Pretty much. Most executives land at the top because they have a track record of making money for the company or from their last company. I’ve seen many people rise to high levels in my organization. It works like this: An engineer or a business type will be given control of a team or office. The company will ask him to commit to deadlines or performance targets. Over time, that person’s bosses will know if the person is a high performer or not - able to meet goals, achieve milestones, innovate, work without direction, take direction well, inspire employees, etc.
The best of those people will move up to regional management, and their responsibilities expanded. In the meantime, the company invests in additional training in leadership for that person, gives out performance bonuses, and in general tries to find the person’s limitations. If that person excels at the next level, he or she will be given the opportunity to move higher.
Along the way, there are ‘career limiting’ decision points. One bad decision can derail a person’s trip up the ladder. Or perhaps the person runs into a barrier of their own limitations or willingness to take on additional responsibility. Some don’t want the long hours or the travel. Others don’t want the stress of being responsible for thousands of people’s careers. But a few do just fine, or are even empowered by it. They step out, take charge, take risks, and are rewarded or punished based on the result.
Eventually, someone lands at the top of the pyramid as new CEO. Jeff Immelt at GE was groomed for that position for years and years by Jack Welch. Welch retired when he felt Immelt was ready to take over. Before that, Immelt had led other GE businesses and made a name for himself as someone who brought big-time value to the company.
That’s usually the way it works in business. They are meritocracies. People rise to the level of their talent and ambition. That doesn’t make them better than you and me, and it doesn’t make them worse. They’re just people will skills. It also doesn’t make them infallible, and CEOs can and do make disastrous decisions for their companies. But the fact that they can make decisions of that scope is precisely why they are paid as much as they are.
By the time they’ve got to the level where they can make company-threatening decisions, they’ve been vetted multiple times and are chosen based on the company’s belief that they are the most likely person to make good decisions instead of bad ones. When a decision can be worth billions, such people are worth a lot of money. But they’re not infallible.
Government is even worse in this respect. Senators and Congressmen are vested with the power to make decisions that cost billions or trillions of dollars. But to get where they are simply requires political power. You’re much more likely to find someone who got where they are because of powerful friends and connections in government than in business. And because they’re playing with taxpayer money, they are divorced from the consequences of their decision-making.
You like to focus on the bad decisions of business, but when you look at government, the bad decision-making is obvious and massive in scale. The current entitlement shortfall is due to government accounting principles that would get a private pension manager thrown in jail. Governments let projects run billions of dollars over budget, or sign off on huge investments they don’t understand. They spend billions on Yucca Mountain, then vote to scrap it when it’s complete. They tell NASA to build spaceships, then cut their budget after approving the program and expect it to still happen. And so it goes.
Bad politicians have destroyed Metro Detroit. You want to talk about the excesses of CEOS or the consequences of their bad decision-making? Stop and think about Detroit, a city which now has a lower population than it did before Henry Ford opened the first Model-T plant. Destroyed by bad government.
Business is at least answerable to the market. Meg Whitman screwed up as CEO of eBay, and wound up being tossed out on her ear. Had she screwed up harder, eBay might even have failed. But regardless, she’s no longer in a position of power there. But had she won the election in California, she would be isolated from the consequences of bad decisions there for years, while controlling several orders of magnitude more wealth.
What’s Meg doing these days? John Scully screwed up Apple, and since then has found himself bumping around the periphery of the technology industry, sitting on boards of progressively smaller companies and not staying very long anywhere. He will never, ever be given the reins of a company like Apple or Pepsico. He’s fallen a long way.
Some failed CEOs find positions in large companies again - sometimes even CEO positions. It depends on the market’s perception of why they failed. Sometimes CEOs fail because the corporate culture works against them, or because they took a reasonable risk that just didn’t work out. Such CEOs may continue to find CEO positions - as they should. But the ones who screw up badly through arrogance or criminal activity or obvious personal flaws wind up ‘retired’. Usually they show up on the boards of charities or partners in investment firms or some other such ‘acceptable’ venture, but they’re out of the big leagues for good.
That depends on who’s defining the ‘common good’. Corporations still have to operate within the framework of the legal system. No one has said corporations should have free range to do whatever they please. I’ve made the case plenty of times for effective government to make sure that corporations are held accountable for their actions just like everyone else.
Much appreciated. And for my part, I’ve helped your cardiovascular system by keeping your blood pressure up.
Oh, the Koch brothers are a really bad example for you.
Here’s a list of just some of their charitable donations:
And yes, they have donated around $100 million to various think-tanks and foundations, mostly libertarian. I don’t have a problem with that. Do you have a problem with George Soros? He’s more politically active than the Koch brothers and probably spends more money on politics than they do. I think that’s fine too.
You have a completely biased and uneducated understanding of how corporations are run.
They earn their money because they help organize the activities of thousands of people and in so doing make them more efficient. They provide vision, they pick lower level leaders who have the qualities they need to implement their vision, and they oversee operations.
I’ve seen the workload management has at level way below the CEO, and I have a real appreciation for the people who do it. My own boss is constantly traveling, or in meetings with team leaders, or interviewing applicants, or managing projects. He probably works 80 hours a week. He’s on the road with customers or at higher level business meetings probably 25 weeks per year. When a customer worth a $100 million sale is having trouble with our product, he’s on a plane the next day to deal with it, in hostile circumstances.
He’s got to pull all that off while keeping the customers happy, keeping his employees happy, keeping the office running smoothly, and bringing projects to completion on time and on budget. To do that, he has to have many skills: For example, I’m always surprised at how accurate his judgment of the people under him is. When I’ve had cause to work with him in helping to set up a team, he always knows exactly who’s got the right set up abilities and who doesn’t. Often better than me, and I work closer with those very people.
Trust me - the guy is worth every penny he makes. And I’ve worked with enough such people to know that they’re all generally very good at what they do. And I’ve seen quite a few rise up to that level and fail, and wind up back in the engineering ranks or moved laterally to a management job with less responsibility where they will remain until they leave the company or ask to be transferred back down to a different position.
Do you know where I don’t see that kind of meritocracy? In universities. In labor unions. In the government. Those systems tend to reward the people with ‘pull’. The ones who can schmooze the best, or have the right connections, or who have a talent for knowing what to kiss, and when. If you’ve spent your working life in government or in academia or in labor unions, I can understand why you have such a distorted view of what it takes to get ahead.
Of course it’s easier to make more money when you have more. It’s also easier to lose more money. It’s also true that more money brings more influence and power. That doesn’t make the system unfree or unjust. So long as everyone has an opportunity to rise up the ranks, it’s fine. And there is plenty of social mobility in America. The majority of people born into the bottom quintile of income do not remain there, and a significant portion of them make it into the upper middle class or the rich.
And so long as there is competition and choice, it does not matter that the people making products are wealthy - they still have to compete for the mass market on the terms of the mass market. Bill Gates may have billions of dollars, but he was still running Microsoft he wouldn’t have the power to compel even the poorest people to buy Windows Phone 7 instead of an iPhone.
It wasn’t ‘designed’ at all. The free market is the natural expression of the interaction of free people. Free markets spring up wherever people wish to interact with each other on a commercial basis. Free markets existed in the Soviet Union - they were just called black markets. They helped keep the rickety communist system from collapsing.
That’s the other aspect of free markets liberals don’t seem to get - they create spontaneous order. They are self-directing and self-regulating. You can’t get past the image of robber barons running the show - to you, the difference between markets and governments is that, while both are controlled by powerful forces at the top, at least in government the controllers are theoretically the representatives of the people instead of greedy capitalists.
But capitalism isn’t controlled by anyone. It is the recognition that if you leave people free to direct their own affairs, they will contract with each other for mutual benefit, and out of the sum total of those transactions order will emerge. A highly efficient order at that. One so complex that no government could hope to emulate it to anywhere near the same degree of efficiency.
For that spontaneous order to work, there are certainly preconditions. You need a civil society. You need to ensure that people are free to choose without coercion (including fraud, monopoly power, etc). Government therefore has a role in setting up the playing field and making sure that everyone abides by the rules.
You’ve just described the best reason for limiting the power of government. Power corrupts. Governments are given sanction to use force. That is a dangerous combination.
But markets are not an ‘accident of history’. They’ve existed since people began to live together socially. Sadly, the often have to exist in the shadows or at a scale small enough to escape the notice of the tyrants controlling the people, but they’re always there.
History has repeatedly shown that when you give more control to the people and give them more freedom to engage in voluntary transactions, you get better outcomes.
What does that have to do with anything? All that means is that some people provide great benefit to us without seeking financial reward or in a non-financial setting so what? They’re free to do so. On the other hand, others have provided just as much benefit to society, and got stinking rich in the process. The Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, Bill Hewlett and William Packard, Fred Smith of FedEx, Jeff Bezos… Billionaires all, and they got their money by providing great things to many people, making humanity richer. And that’s the case with most wealthy businessmen. They get where they are by providing things that people want. The really rich ones got that way by providing what a LOT of people want.
Government is fundamentally difficult to restrain, because it retains sole use of the right to use force. As you look back through the history of mankind, has it been governments or business responsible for the most oppression and despotism?
We need government. But we need it to be no bigger than absolutely necessary, and we have to avoid allowing it to constantly expand its scope under the promise of bringing us all more goodies. Eventually the leviathan grows out of control and collapses under its own weight, or it becomes tyrannical.
Much has been said about the failures of businesses in the last three years, but have you noticed how many governments have been failing? Failing to do their regulatory job because they were captured by those who they were regulating. Failing in their basic fiduciary duty to be good stewards of the people’s money. Failing to keep the peace, and failing to achieve the grand visions promised to the people.
The EU is coming apart. Many U.S. states are nearing bankruptcy. The U.S. government is running itself into the ground while gridlock prevents it from doing anything about it. And those are the good governments. The bad ones in Syria and North Korea and Iran and the Congo and elsewhere are busy oppressing or killing their citizens in large numbers.
Oh, I always got it. Just don’t kid yourelf that you’re on the side of the angels, fighting for the oppressed against the oppressor. More accurately, you’re advocating taking through political force what you could not get other people to offer voluntarily. Because you lack economic power, you organize with others who do not have economic power, and you try to influence the political process to take for you the property of those who have more than you do.
I fully understand the desire for disenfranchised groups to use government power to take by force what they think they have a right to. But don’t flatter yourself that what you’re doing is moral - especially not in the modern incarnation of liberalism, which is less about helping the absolutely poor and destitute, and more about fighting to give more power to already-powerful special interest groups and institutions. There is nothing particularly moral about advocating the use of force to give a government worker who already makes above the national average income a raise, using money taxed from people who make less.
In the words of Zorba, “Am I not a man? And is a man not stupid? I’m a man, so I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe.” Further effort is extraneous.
Probably? A bit thin, don’t you think?
And you are the fount of knowledge and information? And the proof of this is that you are right and I disagree?
Well, when you put it like that, certainly seems difficult. More difficult than teaching a slow child? More difficult than running into a burning building? More difficult living with the prospect of getting shot? Really?
Good for him. Why should I care?
(I am going to overlook your panegyric to your bosses splendid qualities, makes me a mite queasy. Data point, anecdote, etc.)
It is? Says who? The capitalist system in America and the world was not founded upon free people, free people is a relatively recent notion, and one that has yet to gain sufficient popularity. We’re working on that, and its taking a lot longer than we could ever have imagined.
More readings from the capitalist faith. Why? What mechanism is in place such that businesses are inherently more efficient than governments? Both are conducted by people, yes? With (presumably) the same sets of strengths and weaknesses, why is one human endeavor (business) inherently more efficient than another (government)? Where is this dogma written, and why should I believe it?
But, according to you, government is a miserable failure at all it touches, and not to be trusted.
Well, yes, certain kinds of power corrupts. But not money?
Wanna bet?
Sadly, no. There is not sufficient history of control by and for the people for any such conclusions to be drawn.
And loud, shiny crap, and New Coke and Joe Camel. You can get rich supplying what people want, but you get a lot richer convincing people to want what you got.
That’s like asking if more trouble in the world was created by the rich, or by the powerful.
Libertarian catechism. Duly noted. No more valid than “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
Well, really, Sam, who’s kidding who, here? You give us bald, sweeping declarations of your faith, then claim it is based on an encyclopedic knowledge, hence, your faith trumps mine because you know more. You are welcome to that opinion, of course. I see no real foundation for that, but such is the nature of faith, yes? And you are welcome to yours.
Not wealth, closer to subsistence living. Imagine a hundred farmers toiling in their fields trying to survive. Technically they are creating wealth, but just barely enough to feed their family, and hardly enough to grow the GDP. Now imagine one of them has the wherewithal to cross breeds a few different grasses, then plant them in neat rows making sure they have enough water. He yields 80 bushels of what we consider corn, providing enough for his family to eat, and then considerable extra to sell to other people. He then teaches other farmers how to do the same thing, for a fee of future crops, and now lots of people are yielding more corn. Wealth created.
That’s not actually an argument AGAINST what we’re talking about. Like I said, there are thousands of authors, and thousands of publishers.
Of those two groups, there will be a handful to truly great authors, and truly productive publishers. The great authors will be great somewhat independently of the publishing house. The great publishers will be productive even with mediocre stories.
When the great authors line up with the great publishers, both make way more money. Together they’ll find the 1 in 100 ad agencies, and the 1 in 100 book stores, and all four will generate wealth.
And what you’ll see is that there are lots of failed/crappy authors, publishers, ad agencies, and bookstores. If Stephen King had an exclusive deal with Borders he’d have lost a lot of money. If he teamed up with Amazon (the 1 in 100 internet book stores) he’d have made more money.
Michael Jordan was the 1 in 1000 of great basketball players, who lined up with Phil Jackson a 1 in 1000 of the great coaches, and both were part of the NBA which is 1 in 100 leagues.
I’m not.
That is correct, less does not equal none, which is the big straw man floating over the OP. But tell me, do you know of a lot of rich truck drivers?
Who are these people trying to take money by force?
You are not paying attention. There is a wealth transfer in the US to be sure but it is from the poor and middle class to the rich (bolding mine below).
Watch Part 2 & Part 3 of Jon Stewart interviewing Jim Kramer to see how the people inside the system game markets to their benefit.
How many Wall Street traders walked away with substantial bonuses even while the economy was imploding and their companies on the verge of failure? How many people on Main Street lost everything?
Government should be there to keep the playing field level for all. Instead it is distinctly and provably tilted in favor of the wealthy.
We have seen the result of a laissez faire government that let companies do their own thing. The results were horrid up to and including having uppity employees shot and killed (shot by the government no less on the company’s behalf).
This is such a load of horse shit, and repeated far too often. If you have a real point to make, that is in relation to the OP, fell free to share with the class.
Repeating these tired old diatribes and non-sequiturs is unnecessary. What do you think you’ve shown with your rhetoric and hyperbole?
Can you tell us how many people on Main Street lost everything? What the hell does that even mean?
No one is forced to buy into the stock market, they do so of their own free will after signing a very detailed explanation of the potential for loss. No one is forced to get a mortgage.
If the stock market is such a horrible thing, and failed so badly in 2008, why are people dumping money back into it? Why is it back up to 2007 levels?
Now, can you tell us how many Wall Street traders walked away with substantial bonuses even while the economy was imploding and their companies on the verge of failure?
Do you know the answer? Do you know how many Wall Street traders there are? How many of them didn’t get bonuses? How many lost their jobs?
What is it that you actually know other than how to cut and paste bullshit rhetoric?
Where you actually shocked by the Jim Cramer interview? It was the same stuff he wrote about in 2002 Confessions of a Street Addict.
Since you reject the morality argument, Sam, let’s try something else.
You are focusing on the wrong thing. It’s been the people with the money that have screwed us over. In the past that was the government, but now the government is us! You are trying to blame the government for what the corporations did. They weakened the government. You can’t blame the government for lack of oversight in one breath, and then in the next claim they need to be even more restricted. The lack of oversight exists because it is in corporation’s best interests to convince people that such lack is better.
The whole entire point of democracy is to balance the power of the rich with that of everyone else… So what if a despot gets in charge? We vote him out. We designed our system to let us do that. We cannot do that to a corporation. We have to wait on the free market, which is notoriously slow to remove people in actual power.
Yes, in theory, the government could be just as bad as the corporations. But it currently isn’t. The privately owned banks in America screwed up the entire global economy, and, without government, every country would be in worse shape. If the balance was right, we should have been able to stop (or at least significantly reduce) this before we spread the problem to everyone else.
No, even if you reject morality, we as a society need a stronger government and weaker corporations.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that democracy is about the redistribution of power. Formerly, it tooke power from the rich despots in control of the government. Now it’s from the rich people that have sprung up because they’ve been protected from these other rich people. It’s all about making people as equal as possible.