Just here to say "Thanks!", Like Treasury Sec. O'Neill Said

The BBQ Pit
61

Capitalism certainly allows people to be charitable, my point was that it doesn’t require them to be so. Millions of people, all looking out (primarily) for their own self interest, causes the system to work.

A decision to not have layoffs, or to provide excellent benefits could be just flat out good business. If it is merely out of the goodness of a CEOs heart that he makes these decisions, he could very well be hurting his company. Hurting the company for the benefit of employees is not a good idea in the long run, it makes your company less competitive, making all of these benefits temporary.

With respect to estilicon’s post, yes CEOs generate more economic value than a janitor, so they get paid more. I will illustrate with the phony job of polishing pennies. Every day I get a pile of pennies, rags, and polish, and spend 16hrs a day polishing. It’s not an easy job by any stretch, I work very hard at it, and am good at it too. However, this job provides exactly zero economic value, I’m not generating a product or service that anybody needs. No matter how hard I work, I cannot justify being paid anything for this job.

On the other side, is my work on weather control. I can ensure that crops get the exact amount of rain they need, I can prevent drought, make sure it is sunny at the beach, prevent hurricane damage, and wild fires. In addition to humanitarian efforts, I can provide enormous economic value to the world. When a company or region desires a certain weather pattern, (rain on crops, or sunshine for the Masters) I can justify being paid very, very handsomely for making that happen, since nobody else can do it.

There is a whole continuum of jobs between these extremes, CEO is towards the top, janitor towards the bottom.

62

Cheesesteak you answer simething that I already knew. You forgot to answer the other part of it. How can a janitor get a better job (in the economic sense)? He can’t and most probably his child won’t be able too. When capitalism solves that basic problem you can have that “I am succesfull” attitude. I don’t want examples of poor people raising by themselves (witouth winning the lottery), they are the exception to the rule. More frequently persons with rich daddies go to college, fill their pockets with money and then become presidents.

63

So you state dogmatically that janitors cannot improve themselves or their children’s lives economically, but you don’t want counterexamples because they are exceptions? Uh . . . OK. I guess you win, huh? :rolleyes:

How many examples of income mobility within and across generations will you accept before they aren’t “exceptions”?

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The “winners” in the capitalist game, by dint of virtue and prudence, gain more power to play the game successfully. It is not always easy to turn $100 into $110, but to turn $100 million into $110 million is damn near inevitable. This is the result of what your banker calls the Sublime Miracle of Compund Interest.

Thus, economic power tends to concentrate, rather than to distribute. It is precisely this effect that heavy taxation on the wealthy is designed to avoid.

And, of course, there are degrees of wealth, income mobility applies far more to the rich than to the poor. Recent studies would indicate that the poor are neither richer or poorer, or at least not by any dramatic degree.

The rich, however, have proceeded from very rich to obscenely rich to Baby-Jesus-Pukes-His-Little-Guts-Out rich.

What possible justification can there be for one single human being to command his own personal billion dollars? How is it possible to earn such a sum.

65

Cram it up your running dog ass, Ankh. I’m not the first person to ues rape as a metaphor for taking large amounts of money from people. Or for taking advantage of poor people. Yes they shopped at Wal Mart because their prices were lower. The people of my hometown who shop at Wal Mart aren’t rich. But now they work at Wal Mart and shop at Wal Mart and they don’t have any choice in the matter. It’s like the old coal mining towns with the company stores. Where’s your goddamned free market in that? Were people supposed to be able to tell the future when Wal Mart came to town?

Captialism only works like its supposed to when people have a choice. But it seems like the way it’s run now is to either deny people a choice or act like the Corleones!

I like capitalism. I think it has its place. But when it stops being beneficial, by innovating and making things better and cheaper, and starts harming people, by practically enslaving them and turning theives into tyrants, it’s got to be reigned in.

66

Yeah, that’s the system we have now. :rolleyes:

67

Cheesesteak don’t be an ass. I am not denying that economic mobility happens. You have to agree that is not very common.

Stadistics would be better. After all you tend to loose your objectivity when you talk about all the Carneguies in the world.

68

I am not Cheesesteak. Perhaps you should calm down enough to know the handle of the person you’re responding to before responding, huh? In any case, I don’t agree at all that it is “not very common.” Not only do poor people quite frequently become comfortably middle-class, but wealthy people become poor, too.

I’d be happy to provide statistics on U.S. income mobility by quintiles for the last 20-30 years, but I suspect that you’d dismiss them as misleading or inconclusive or somesuch.

69

I am not Cheesesteak. Perhaps you should calm down enough to know the handle of the person you’re responding to before responding, huh? In any case, I don’t agree at all that it is “not very common.” Not only do poor people quite frequently become comfortably middle-class, but wealthy people become poor, too.

I’d be happy to provide statistics on U.S. income mobility by quintiles for the last 20-30 years, but I suspect that you’d dismiss them as misleading or inconclusive or somesuch.

For example, the U.S. State Department’s information pages contains a section on income distribution and mobility which, although seriously deficient in the hard stats department, claims:

(Emphasis mine)

The Urban Institute’s study called “How Much Do Americans Move Up And Down The Economic Ladder?” supports those findings, with more statistics available. A second UI report, “Economic Mobility in the United States”, indicates that ten-year mobility rates have stayed pretty consistent in the U.S. over the postwar period, and that during those 10-year periods, 60% of individuals are in a different economic quintile at the end of the period than at the beginning. One-year and five-year mobility rates are around 27% and 44%, respectively.

That means that, each year, 27% of individuals in one tier find themselves in another by the end of that tier; 44% find themselves switching tiers at the end of five year. Does 44% sound like an “exception” to you? To me, it sounds more like a rule.

70

Lord, how I dread to tread into the swill of economic statistics! Keeping mind that people firmly believe that Ayn Rand has utterly clarified the essential principles. Others firmly believe that Karl Marx has done the same thing. Both groups of people are at liberty to walk about unescorted and without restraint. The wisdom of this policy is suspect, but…

Pldennison please clarify your point: does your evidence indicate that capitalism (such as we know it) is efficiently distributing income, or that it is not a major impediment to same?

Does your view deny any validity to a concept like “economic justice”? Can any human being, in your view, justify a personal fortune of a billion dollars? Assuming an inability to walk on water?

And what bearing might this have on the designated hitter rule?

(Hold it. Cancel that last.)

71

Why is it swill? Didn’t Phil answer the question with them?

Why does a person who legally earns or legally acquires a billion dollars have to answer to anyone on whether or not they should have it?

I’ve heard the “economic justice” term before. It’s typically, but not always, used by hard-line liberals who start calling for “maximum wage laws” and “immediate freezing and nationalization of bank accounts over $100,000” (heard at my local University). It’s a scary term.

One can call anything they want “economic justice” - that does not make it “just”.

72

More the second. I don’t think that any economic system is going to distribute income efficiently on its own, short of actually having all wealth go directly to some centralized entity, and then having every American line up to collect their equal-valued paycheck. Economic systems require government systems to make them work.

I think the system we have, by and large, is very good at allowing people to become more successful throughout their lives, and to exceed limitations that they might have been born into. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s pretty good. It could be better; I’m not going to argue with that.

As I said, you can have a capitalist system such as Germany’s, or you can have one like ours, or you can have one like Great Britian’s. Three very different systems, three very different outcomes. There is also the matter of what is considered “efficient” distribution, which I think leads into your other question:

I do not begrudge any human being any dollar that they came by legally and ethically (since what is legal is not always what is ethical). My concern isn’t how much the rich have – it’s how much the poor have, and how capable the poor are of getting more if they want it.

As long as there is any income differential at all between people, even in a society of only two people, there are going to be “rich” people and “poor” people. What should be of concern is making sure that poor people are not destitute, and don’t have to live like animals. And making sure that they have as much of an opportunity to improve their lot as anyone else does.

(And no, I don’t think that the U.S. system does its best to ensure that equality of opportunity. I may be a capitalist, but I ain’t a Panglossian. For one thing, I find it sickening that financial institutions still engage in de facto redlining and engage in usurious interest rates for minorities.)

73

No, but you’re one of the few I’ve ever seen to make the incredibly tactless comparison to “asking for it” because of the way they were dressed.

**

They weren’t any richer before WalMart moved in and they managed to shop at all the other local businesses. If they can now afford to buy more or better goods for the amount of money they spend, isn’t that a good thing, even in your world?

**

If they can only afford to shop at WalMart because WalMart doesn’t pay them enough to shop anywhere else, where the fuck were they shopping before WalMart rolled into town? When WalMart or any other SuperStore decides it’s going to open a MegaMart in a given town, I doubt that every other store already established in the town suddenly shuts its doors and throws all their employees out to line up at the WalMart employment office.

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight:

a) Walmart pays their employees such low wages that they can only shop at WalMart.

b) Because the WalMart employees only shop at WalMart, all the other businesses go under and then everyone who USED to work at those stores end up employed by WalMart.

c) Now that all the other stores are no longer doing business, everyone has to shop at WalMart.

There’s a disconnect between a and b. You seem to be assuming that the people who go to work for WalMart are the same people that are thrown into unemployment when all the other stores in the town shut down because of WalMart. As I pointed out above, the people who are already working in those stores when WalMart opens are unlikely to abandon their jobs and migrate to WallyWorld for lower wages, worse working conditions, etc. You claim that the people thrown out of work by WalMart now have no other choice than to work for WalMart. Except that it doesn’t all happen in one stage.

WalMart is not going to stay in business selling only to its own employees.

And yes, they should have been able to predict the future, this doesn’t require either a crystal ball or reading the auguries. If everyone shops at the MegaMart, the small local businesses are going to go out of business. How hard is that?

74

This all depends on your definition of “efficient”. Generally speaking, people earn income based on the relative value of the skills and effort they use to create products and services. There are lots of exceptions, of course, but this is the gist of it. I consider that efficient, personally, many other people will not. I cannot necessarily convince people that this is efficient anymore than they can convince me that it isn’t.

Janitors who want better jobs become the head janitor, or the manager of janitoral services supervising the janitorial staff. They can also save their money, and learn new skills that are more valued by employers. If pushing a mop represents the limit of their abilities, I’m afraid you’re right, there is no better job.

A friend of mine, for instance, at one point in his life was a superintendant at a apartment building, not exactly a high brow job. Because of his smarts, hard work, and drive, he is now the facilities manager at a big office complex. No longer does he plunge stopped toilets change lights and fix leaky faucets, he now supervises a staff of maintenance people, and makes a damn decent living doing it. That’s called getting a better job.

My father, 30+ years ago was an auto body repairman. How did he improve his lot in life? He worked his ass off, overtime, side jobs, etc., saved his money and bought the auto body repair shop when his boss retired. He had no business experience, no management training, he just knew how to fix cars. He made damn sure his 4 kids all went to college, and 3 of us got graduate degrees.

If you want it, work for it, and have decent skills, you can get a better job.

75

I applaud your father and his truly talented kids. Sincerely. No meaness nere.

Was he black? Latino?

Anecdotal evidence, while sometimes valuable, is only anecdotal evidence.

76

And finally why do I don’t like capitalism. Evryone who spaks in its favour think that everyone´potentiall to become a Bill Gates, just work hard enough and the american dream will be yours. That is a lie, there aren’t enough resources for us all, the majority belongs to the gutter. The same things happen with countries. U.S.A has the 4% of the world population but represents the 21%, I’ve read in the news (unfortunately I don’t have a link) that to raise the living standard of every human being to the same standard as enjoyed by the succesfull we would need 4 planets earth. The system is injust from the beguinning.

77

And my grammar is just horrible.

78

Black? Latino? Heavens no, my dad is whiter than me, if that’s possible. Just pointing out the types of things people can do in order to increase their income. pldennison provided statistics about income mobility, I was giving some anecdotal evidence about how that mobility takes place, both within a single generation and from parents to children.

79

pld: That means that, each year, 27% of individuals in one tier find themselves in another by the end of that tier; 44% find themselves switching tiers at the end of five year. Does 44% sound like an “exception” to you? To me, it sounds more like a rule.

But what this ignores, Phil, is the fact that simply crossing from one side to the other of some arbitrary income boundary doesn’t necessarily indicate a significant change in income. The stats you provided, which measure economic mobility by the crude yardstick of just assigning everybody to one of five income quintiles, don’t tell us anything about how many of those economically “mobile” people are simply swinging back and forth over a particular quintile boundary without ever getting very far away from it.

The mobility indicated by the 6% of the highest quintile and 4% of the lowest quintile that went all the way to the other end of the scale over a 7-year period, on the other hand, really is significant mobility, but those percentages are pretty small. So I think all we can really say about these figures is that they indicate that somewhere between about 5% and about 45% of people in each quintile experience significant economic mobility over about a five-year period. Not very conclusive.

manhattan: *“And if so [i.e., if foregoing some short-term profit for the sake of non-market values should be considered part of good capitalism], then why do we as a society tolerate so much pure-profit-maximization bad capitalism that doesn’t abide by that sort of good citizenship?”

Today, Worldcom closed at $.16/share. Enron is bankrupt. Adelphia is bankrupt. All without a teensy bit of government intervention. *

?? I don’t understand what you mean by “without a teensy bit of government intervention”: Enron, for example, has been under investigation by the SEC since its huge third-quarter losses raised the red flags last fall. The other companies you mentioned are in legal trouble too. Regulation may not have sparked their initial collapse, but full exposure and prosecution of their wrongdoing does require government intervention.

In the second place, I think you’re stretching it a bit to imply that these cases prove that our society is properly intolerant of bad capitalism. Yes, a few companies that acted unscrupulously and illegally are now in very low water financially. But the workers and investors they cheated are still out big chunks of money. And plenty of other companies are doing just fine without offering their employees high wages or health benefits or subsidized stock options or community investment or any of the various other beneficial actions that you claim are part of good capitalism.

So if good capitalism really means dealing with your workers, investors, and neighbors in ways that are not only not flat-out illegal, but actually generous and non-exploitative, it seems to me that bad capitalism is still doing quite a thriving business in this society.

*I propose that it’s unfair to call [Wal-Mart] unethical on the whole even if all the allegations here are true. Our theoretical pharmacy (the one put out of business by WalMart earlier in the thread) must have done as bad or worse, or the employees would never have gone to WalMart to begin with […] *

!!! So the definition of “unethical” for business practices means “no more exploitative or illegal than the local competition”? Geez, if I slack off from my work or sneak change from the till every chance I get, as long as all the other employees are doing it too, is it unfair to call me “unethical” for it? Gosh, manhattan, that attitude’s not just “tolerant” of bad capitalism, it’s positively indulgent.

80

That’s a fair criticism, Kimstu, and one I hadn’t thought of. I guess more meaningful data would need to be provided with at least deciles, and probably percentiles. I’d be happy to search for it unless you know of a source offhand.