How communist of you. So, you can sit on your ass and do nothing and bill gates should have to support you? I think not.
Hey, that’s a great idea numbf…I mean ssj_man2k! I will expect a money order from you post-haste!
One thing, i don’t sit on my ass. I go to school, then go to work for 4 hours, then come home and do homework.
I’m not saying that anyone should just be allowed to sit on their ass, i’m just saying that rich people don’t need all the money they have, so they should share it.
And plus, there’s nothing wrong with communism, at least not with pure communism.
ssj_man2k, I have been sitting here staring at the screen…Stunned.
I can’t believe, in this day and age, anyone could have such an ignorant view of the world.
It would be like me saying that ethnic cleansing, female repression, and gay bashing is ok.
What a backwards view.
Unbelieveable.
SS, that is tangential ranting nonsense and it also happens to be detrimental to society in general.
Riches are the reward of hard work and risk, particularly in a society that places great value on entrepreneurship and free enterprise, as the US does. You seem to be under the impression that rich people get rich doing nothing. Some may indeed have it that way, but I assure you that getting rich takes a lot of work and a lot of investment (which of course is risk). I’m still working on it and I assure you it’s not a picnic, it’s actually much harder than a cozy little 9-5 salary job.
To say that it is rich people’s duty to work themselves into the ground becoming rich only to support a welfare culture is ridiculous and will require a lot more support than “rich people don’t need all the money they have”.
How do you expect to reward enterprise if you penalize most the ones who are successful at it? The only people getting rewarded by such a ludicrous system are welfare recipients (often multi-generational) and the bloated IRS. I question your thinking on all possible levels in this matter.
ssj_man2k exactly what is your life experience, study of the global social structure, etc. that lends you to make this statement in the first place?
Abe do you mean to say that if ssj_man2k inherited a million dollars tomorrow that would make him a harder worker and better risk taker than you?
For you it might, but you are a minority in that respect.
Well, people who inherit a million, or win the lottery are in the minority.
I see your Samuel Johnson and raise you an Oscar Wilde: “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.”
But does vicious = lowbrow?
Ostentation and public displays are what the rich consider lowbrow. I’ll bet if the fattest cat in the neighborhood put out signs, the rest would gladly follow. They wouldn’t fear being looked down on by people higher up the scale.
I’ll try and remember this the next time I see one of those AMG hummers taking up two lanes of traffic.
Ah, you speak of the nouveau riche, entrepeneuers or celebrities flaunting their wealth. They are also lowbrow.
If there is some sort of correlation between display of flag images and economic or social stratum (and I’m not convinced there is), I must imagine that in at least some cases it has precisely the same meaning and intent, if not the same sordid background, as the relentless use of graphic symbols by extreme right-wing groups. Lowbrow, in the sense that it is not deeply thought out, and represents a simplistic, ntionalistic viewpoint? Probably.
OTOH, can this use of symbols ever be a reliable indicator of patriotism? At every car dealership I pass, each vehicle on sale has an American flag flying from the radio antenna. Are we to assume that this represents anything other than a sales tool? Would we really base our purchasing decision on whether the car has a flag waving from its antenna?
Personally, I see not the slightest reason to believe that the mere display of flag imagery is some sort of measure of relative love for the USA. I lived and worked outside the country for ten years, but I came back having missed the place; I pay my honest share of my tax burden. I participate in various community activities. If I choose not to display a flag on my car, am I less patriotic than someone who does? Go ahead, claim that I am not if anyone wants, but state your reasons so I can rebut them.
Maybe i am ignorant, but it just annoys me to see rich people squandering their money on useless possessions when they could be feeding hungry people with that money.
ssj, who do you think makes all those “useless possessions”? Do you think they spring fully-formed from the ether? No, they have to be made, generally by non-rich individuals. When a rich person buys, let’s say a boat, they help support a lot of working-class boatbuilders. And when they invest their money, they help provide capital for businesses; that also creates jobs.
Wealth is the reward for success. As other posters have pointed out, while there are some trust-fund babies/lotto winners out there, most of the wealthy made their money themselves. To cite one example, Michael Dell started out building computers in his University of Texas dorm room. Because of his efforts, thousands of people now have jobs. Why do you begrudge him his big house and many cars? Why would Mr. Dell keep working if the government took the bulk his wealth for redistribution? Why would he have bothered to grow Dell Computer from a small PC manufacturing concern to the large company it is today if he wasn’t allowed to keep the fruits of that effort?
Here is the diference between rich people like Bill Gates, Mike Dell or any other entrepreneur and poor to middle class people like you will become: Poor people (and communists) live their lives expecting others to provide for them. They are the ones always saying “my boss isn’t paying me enough” or “the government should provide this and that” or “the rich should give poor people money”. They live their lives always looking for some ‘Robin Hood’ to take wealth away from those who create it and give it to the ‘poor’.
Entrepreneurs (both rich and poor) create their own opportunities. The Gates, Jobs, and Dells weren’t born rich, they created multi-billion dollar companies out of nothing. They donate more to charity than you will ever make in 10 lifetimes and the pay the wages of thousands of employees.
Remember that our society rewards the talented and ambitous. Rich people either created their own oportunities or are so talented that a company is wiing to pay them $100,000s of dollars. If you are just an average guy who goes to an average school and then works a couple of hours, well that’s the very least of what is expected from you. You’ll probably be comfortable but you won’t own a Fararri.
MSmith, every successful entrepreneur who has become rich has guessed the market for his good or service correctly, and gotten there through his own efforts.
There are many people who have risen to richness on the shoulders of others, including inheritors of wealth, persons with the skills to capitalize off the naivete of others (these are skills you feel should be rewarded?), etc.
I do not have a problem with a person having wealth, and disposing of it as he or she sees fit. SSJ, it may well be as you say, but by what authority would you suggest that the rich be deprived of what is now theirs for the benefit of the hungry, homeless, etc.? Because they “owe” it to them? By whose standard? What if they disagree? What if they give to charitable causes as they see fit already?
On the other hand, MSmith, the presumption that your (generic “you,” not you specifically) wealth is yours alone, and no one should touch it, presumes that you will never be in need of any sort of help other than what you can afford. Severe illness or natural disaster coming hard on the heels of an episode of extremely poor reading of the market could leave any of the “rich” in desperate need of help in short order. And, of course, any insurance taken out to forestall such a situation may be with a company which likewise misread the market and failed.
In short, there seems to be a social compact that we help our fellow man, voluntarily or through the government, to the extent we, individually or corporately, see appropriate, and are entitled to the same help in time of need.
This system creaks. But it works. And it preserves the maximum of freedom with a modicum of security. In this imperfect world, that is saying quite a lot.
My impression is they weren’t exactly born poor, either. They owe much to their environment. One of the purposes of wealth redistribution (I mean progressive taxation) is to provide similar education and social opportunities for those less fortunate. Logically, this will support entrepreneurship instead of hindering it.
I would also point out something else often overlooked in the idoltry of the computer tycoons – most of the key developments in the early computer industry came from government funding and research labs, and could be viewed as a kind of public resource. It’s the case with the very medium we’re using now. Yet some people try to hold up the industry as a model of capitalism in action. That’s a very incomplete picture, to say the least. The success of Gates et al. would not be possible without the support of US taxpayers.
While I’m not a “strict-equality-of-income”-type redistributionist, I do think it’s kind of funny to see the shock and horror with which some posters are treating ssj’s remarks—which are only a moderate overstatement of some of the principles upon which all mixed-economy societies, including our own, function—as equivalent to ethnic cleansing or gay bashing. Let’s take a closer look at some of these statements.
Abe: To say that it is rich people’s duty to work themselves into the ground becoming rich only to support a welfare culture is ridiculous and will require a lot more support than “rich people don’t need all the money they have”.
But nobody is actually saying either that rich people should work themselves into the ground, or that their income should “only” go to “support a welfare culture” for other people who aren’t willing to work themselves. Those are your own exaggerations.
DCU: *Wealth is the reward for success. As other posters have pointed out, while there are some trust-fund babies/lotto winners out there, most of the wealthy made their money themselves. *
It’s true that, according to these statistics from High Net Worth, about nine out of ten wealthy people in the millionaire-plus category got at least some of their wealth from entrepreneurial or professional activity (that is, only about 10% of rich people got their wealth from inheritance alone). However, on average, the “penta-millionaires” (those with between 5 and 30 million dollars) inherited 1% of their wealth. Now for someone with 10 million dollars, that means they inherited about a hundred thousand dollars.
In other words, while many rich people have indeed worked very hard to increase their assets, most of them started off with a pretty sizable chunk of change just on the luck of the draw. So wealth is not really “the reward for success” pure and simple; it’s much more likely to be the reward for pre-existing wealth plus some success (or some luck in the stock market, or some unscrupulousness, or some combination of some or all of the above).
*Why would Mr. Dell keep working if the government took the bulk his wealth for redistribution? *
Because he wants to; the same reason that plenty of people who will never make a thousandth of what Mr. Dell has keep working, even though they have enough money to support themselves without it. People like to work at interesting and challenging tasks; creative entrepreneurs in particular are often so work-addicted that it’s impossible to stop them. (Sometimes this is true even when their work, as in the case of crook financiers, is not only unproductive but actually harmful to the society; if we could think of a financial incentive that would actually discourage those folks from working, it would be a blessing!)
msmith: *Poor people (and communists) live their lives expecting others to provide for them. They are the ones always saying “my boss isn’t paying me enough” or “the government should provide this and that” or “the rich should give poor people money”. *
Rich people are just as prone to making such demands, as we see from their efforts to lobby for government bail-outs to threatened industries, or foreign policies that will stimulate their manufactures, or tax breaks that will increase their profits, or repeal of regulations so they can spend less on their workers. Trying to get other people to provide as much money for you as possible while giving them as little as possible of your effort or resources in exchange is what capitalism is all about, and wealthy capitalists are perfectly willing to do that in any way they can (including attempts to influence public opinion to believe that rich people are industriously independent while poor people are lazy whiners).
Honest to Pete, the level of knee-jerk reverence and deference that some people seem to feel for the mere attainment of financial success (“plutolatry”, I guess you could call it) would be considered overly fulsome in a medieval monk’s laudation of God Himself. If liberals tried to talk about government officials with one-tenth of the unrealistic optimism and hero-worship that conservatives slather over rich people, we wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face for two sentences together. After centuries of hard-won disillusionment, we all seem to have finally grasped the idea that the mere fact of being in political authority doesn’t make you automatically a good or benevolent or deserving person. Now can we please also get rid of the notion that the mere fact of having accumulated a lot of wealth automatically does so?
Rich people, as far as I’m concerned, have the same basic rights to their property (subject to restrictions of various kinds) as everybody else does, and I have no objection to their being rich. However, I’m able to recognize that they are not necessarily doing something that is valuable to the economy, or creating wealth or benefiting poorer people, or displaying extraordinary talents or acumen, or in any way more deserving of vast wealth than the average non-rich person.
The idea that current social conventions can lead sensible people actually to be shocked, stunned, or outraged by such mildly anti-plutocratic sentiments as “rich people ought to pay more” or “if you don’t share your wealth, you’re an asshole” (a sentiment essentially expressed much earlier, I might note, by Jesus Christ) or “there’s nothing wrong with pure communism” (a sentiment that does not necessarily imply any endorsement of Maoist or Soviet-style “Communist” totalitarianism) is bizarre in the extreme. It’s all very well to be well-disposed toward wealth, or to be or wish to be wealthy yourself. But if you are shocked and outraged by the mere fact that someone else can reasonably feel otherwise—now that’s plutolatry.
[Note added in preview: and what Ace_Face said.)
~~Yep, nothing wrong…only public onions grow small and
private onions grow big…