How did they get there? Luck, magic, royal blood, two tail feathers of a griffin?
So should they have run at a loss? Apple saw it could make more money releasing the iPad 2, should they have decided not to?
Is that what they’re supposed to do? Increase your tax base?
That’s right, it decreased costs and increased profits. Which is what the person in charge is supposed to do. Have you ever been asked to increase costs and decrease profits?
As it should, they decreased costs and increased profits, isn’t that their job? The bonus was probably tied to those to factors.
Why should it be?
Don’t kid yourself, those on the bottom don’t give a shit either until it actually affects them. Stealworkers love steal tariffs, no matter how many jobs it costs in other industries. Never underestimate the shortsightedness of the human race.
The problem with a lot of the ideas that people are supporting on the right is that they are largely zero sum game ideas…
One state cutting taxes so you can poach an employer from a neighboring state is largely a zero sum game idea, that is not where growth comes from.
One country offering lower corporate taxes and getting a bunch of companies to move from London to Dublin is a zero sum game idea.
Lowering taxes on the rich so that they don’t move to the Carribean is just plain stupid. The percentage of people who would continue to have high income if they left the country is very small and these folks are earning mostly investment income which can largely be sourced offshore.
The are the sons of Fred Koch who co-founded Kosh Industries, currently the second largest privately held company in the US, if they went public they’d be ranked about 16th.
Koch was the son of an immigrant, like so many of the richest Americans. As an engineer from MIT he developed a more efficient thermal cracking process for turning crude oil into gasoline. This process led to bigger yields and helped smaller, independent oil companies compete (from wiki).
That’s a pretty big fucking idea if you ask me. Of the hundreds of people working in the oil industry at the time, Koch was the one who increased yields.
That’s where wealth is created. The business was passed to two of his sons who continue to keep it successful.
So to recap, Fred Koch is the 1 in 100 that generated significant wealth. The Koch brothers (his sons) are not. See how that works?
Its clear there is some but I doubt it is very much. Case in point. American idol auditions literally tens of thousands of hopefuls every year and in all its years of looking for that unfound gem, we have a small handful of significant musicians that are almuni of American Idol (Carrie underwood being the best example).
Its more than just the agent’s connections and access, the agent acts as a filter and an editor. They look for talent and then help polish some of the rough gems they find.
I think the result of these different points of view is that if you think the 1 in 100 generates all the wealth, you are perfectly happy to see virtually all the wealth concentrated in that 1 percent. If you think that the wealth generation process is significantly more diffuse, you would be disturbed by that sort of concentration. Jackalope’s point is that even if there are people with rare talents that come up with a lot of ideas, both from an equitable perspective and from an economic perspective, it makes sense to avoid concentrating all the wealth in those people with those rare talents, otherwise our entire economy will eventually become largely selling stuff to those people with rare talents because we will be rewarding little else.
No one except Le Jac and his strawmen thinks that. The point here is that 1 in 100 create an idea/process/invention that will make money. The other 99 will earn an income as part of that.
What concentration? The person that comes up with the idea gets paid for it, it’s out our system has worked for the past 100 or so years.
Tell me something, picture Dilbert working at his company and he comes up with a great idea. They reward him the standard $500 for getting a patent, and then proceed to make billions off his idea while he continues to make his salary. Do you see that has fair?
Again, what is “concentrating?” Do you mean Stephen King shouldn’t get rich off his book, that instead the wealth should be spread equally through the chain?
Should the guy working the concession stand make as much as the basketball players? Should all the basketball players earn the same? What is it you are actually trying to say?
If I come up with a widget that sells for $100, am I obligated to pay you half to make it for me?
Yes. If you are on an island with a hundred people and you are the only one building a hut, gathering coconuts and whatnot and the other 99 wander around not doing anything, will you really miss them if they disappear?
Complete fantasy scenario. In reality that’s not what ever happens. In reality you can’t possibly both build the hut and collect the food. That’s not what you find in society, either.
Your arguments are based on blind and completely unfounded arrogance.
You need a big government to do that, because there are big enemies. I think a guy who would’ve considered 99% of the world to be merely carbon blobs is Cecil Rhodes:
First, he comes up with an excuse to denigrate an entire population. From there, he set about taking everything away from them:
The guy does at least have reason to claim to be that 1 out of 100, by the kinds of capitalist terms I’m seeing here:
But without some over-arching agent of justice- a role only a just government can provide- what is to prevent the ascendancy of such characters again and again, and again. And again?
It is good for business, I will certainly grant you that. Look what he did:
But let’s not conflate “good for business” with “good”
The guy made a fortune, but at what cost?
His action started a war. Not that he much cared. Shit, most of the people dying were merely blobs of carbon!
What he’s pushing is the concept of elitism: to quote Ludwig von Mises’ letter to Ayn Rand: “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you.” It has no basis in neoclassical economics, which posits that workers are paid their marginal product. It’s a silly idea besides: as Sam Stone has pointed out, if workers weren’t producing wealth, nobody would pay them anything. It’s empirically dubious: a great portion of innovation involves learning by doing: it’s not Archimedes jumping out of a bathtub, it’s lots of people struggling to design and master best practices.
msmith: You’re being creamed here. Cutting edge manufacturing plants hire college graduates. Technological innovation in the US at least has tended to repress wages at the lower end: those whose main asset is a strong back haven’t done well since the 1960s. I trust there’s some way of pushing your POV on this, but so far it’s simply incoherent.
Godwin’s Law states that as an online argument grows longer and more heated, it becomes increasingly likely that somebody will bring up Adolf Hitler or the Nazis.
The idea of “useless eaters” existed long before Hitler; it’s the whole cornerstone of social Darwinism. There’s no difference between Msmith’s comments and the idea of “useless eaters”.
If only 1% of people generate wealth (according to his deluded arguments) the other 99% are useless. They generate no wealth. It’s the logical end to his argument.