I think septimus is making a distinction between what is optimal and what is politically feasible yet still, in his opinion, better than doing nothing. Which is reasonable even if there’s some disagreement over what is optimal and what is feasible and whether “do nothing” is the better option.
This is an interesting way of looking at it, and not the way I’d really looked at the concept of wealth before. Would you say that one measure of wealth is simply “How much do other people want what you have”? So Bezos is worth a lot because a lot of other people highly value what he has - a significant ownership in Amazon.
If there was a resurgence in Beanie Baby interest and Beanie Babies that were previously worth $15 were now worth $15,000 on the market, people who had hoarded Beanie Babies might suddenly become very wealthy - does that mean someone had to lose out in order for these Beanie Baby hoarders to become wealthy? Maybe it seems like that if someone is spending $15k on Beanie Babies, they must inherently be valuing everything else that they spend money on less - but that’s not necessarily true; they could be saving less money in order to spend on the Beanie Babies, or borrowing money to do so, while still valuing everything else they buy the same. And if they did value other things less because they value the Beanie Babies highly… how does one go about figuring out what they value less, and by how much, to find out who is “losing out” from the value of Beanie Babies skyrocketing? Seems like a pretty impossible exercise.
Some assets are easy to value: cash in the bank, publicly traded securities, your primary residence (to a lesser extent). Some are not: a closely-held private business interest, Beanie Babies. For the Beanies or for stocks, we ascribe the value of the few units that are being actively traded to entire lot. A few AMZN shares are trading 20% higher than yesterday? Then the entire market cap is 20% larger. A few people are buying and selling Princess Diana Bears for for $15k? Then we assume everyone’s is worth $15k when we’re adding up wealth. But of course if tomorrow, everyone tried to sell their AMZN shares or all of their PDBs at today’s price, they couldn’t. The prices for both would crash.
You know, you don’t really need sophomoric pedantry about how stock markets supposedly work to establish some baseline facts:
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The US has one of the highest income disparities among the major countries in the world, and it’s growing. Cite.
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Despite being the richest country in the world, containing a majority of the world’s richest inhabitants, the US also has people so poor that they can’t afford proper healthy nutrition for themselves or their kids. Cites previously provided.
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Despite being the richest country in the world, containing a majority of the world’s richest inhabitants, the US is the only developed country in the world that somehow despite a century of trying has completely failed to set up a universal health care system. (Is a cite really needed for this?) So most of the folks mentioned above who don’t have adequate nutrition also mostly don’t have adequate health care, either.
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Despite earning a putative salary of $80K-something a year, Jeff Bezos is actually and demonstrably awash in more money than any normal human could possibly know what to do with. This is in fact, not in theory, in the sense that he’s engaged in a very big way in the activity that economists like to refer to as “spending it”. :rolleyes: Cite.
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Most of the middle class continues to lose ground relative to economic growth, with the wealthiest segment of the population far better positioned to leverage and grow their wealth, thus further increasing income disparity. (Cite: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century).
Some people think this state of affairs is problematic and becoming increasingly so, and therefore unsustainable, and that it arises in the US from systemic issues driven by right-leaning ideology. That is all. No more, no less.
I can’t tell how this related to your specific yet unsupported claims regarding Amazon. It seems more like a launching point to bring up tangential topics. The Crux of what isn’t supported is this from post #118:
This is not accurate.
Regarding the alleged inaccuracy of my statement, please read this, from MarketWatch; here’s the link in the form of the main head and subhead, and there is much, much more out there from credible sources:
My last post was directly relevant in terms of this alleged “pie is getting bigger”, which indeed it is, but obviously in a way that is highly disproportionate and highly skewed to the wealthiest segment of the population. This has absolutely nothing to do with “hard work”, “innovation”, “job creation”, “personal responsibility”, or any of the other conservative buzzwords that seem to get dredged up to justify the plutocracy. It has to do with fundamental flaws in the extent of unregulated capitalism and the absence of socially necessary wealth distribution that allows a few individuals to have a net worth so obscenely huge that it’s greater than the GDP of nearly half the world’s countries.
The automation and efficiency of scale that Amazon brings would be great if barriers to entry in the domestic work force weren’t as high as they are. If you price someone out of the market who is only qualified to push a broom or monitor the self check out line at Target and what are they going to do?
I am a free-marketer too.
But right now, if the situation is that society is indirectly *subsidizing *extremely profitable businesses, and collecting virtually zero taxes from them, then something has gone very wrong. You don’t need to be a commie to want to close those loopholes.
Make America race to the bottom and compete with the developing world for jobs even they want to transition away from MARTTBACWTDWFJETWTTAF 2020!!
(I accidentally posted this first in another thread. I’ve deleted the name of an other-thread poster.)
Add A939RX0Q048SBEA (Real GDP per capita) to that graph and your conclusion may be less sanguine. Yes, median income is up 21.5% over the 33-year period, but per capita GDP is up 73% over the same period. Workers are getting a much smaller piece of the pie.
‘So what?’, you say? ‘Their income is up, let them [del]eat cake[/del] talk on Androids if they can’t afford iPhones.’? But this ignores at least three points.
(a) Your data series is for household income. More households are now two-worker compared with 1984, perhaps.
(b) American life has become more stressful. Spouse needs to work, labor unions have been destroyed, expenses like smartphones are increasingly necessary; savings like home-cooked meals are harder to achieve.
(c) It’s human nature that one’s sense of economic well-being is gauged relative to one’s neighbors or fellow citizens.
So: Contrary to that misleading graph of median household income, there is massive on-going transfer of wealth and income from average Americans to the very rich. That is a fact.
On another matter, some Dopers are pointing to the "paper" nature of huge fortunes as a Gotcha. Yes, that paper may complicate the matter, but Bezos really is super-rich (:smack:) and some of that paper can be and has been traded (via middlemen) for Lamborghinis. Do those Dopers think the Lamborghinis are made out of paper?
I’ve been a very consistent advocate of higher taxes in these threads 
… along with advocating my own version of “UBI.” If you’re pretending to agree with me here, are YOU an advocate of higher taxes? (No, I didn’t think so. There’s a separate forum here for strawman nonsense.)
[quote="Delayed_Reflex, post:182, topic:828614"]
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If there was a resurgence in Beanie Baby interest ... how does one go about figuring out what they value less, and by how much, to find out who is "losing out" from the value of Beanie Babies skyrocketing? Seems like a pretty impossible exercise.
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Again, all the detours into possible asset valuation bubbles are just hijacks that obfuscate OP's question. Sky really is blue; rich people really are rich. There really is a real economy with a finite pie. That guy driving the Lamborghini really is a Wall Street trader; he isn't you. Hope this helps.To say that instituting laws is not violent is perhaps the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard around these parts.
Police carry guns and roam the earth, violently capture nonviolent people and put them in cages. That happens. This is nothing less than the initiation of violence.
Was the fugitive slave law violent?
Perhaps you should have more time to think about this.
Bankruptcy is a legalize abrogation of contract. So yes, the state is an aid to companies that declare bankruptcy. What about firms and stakeholders that are victims of debtors claiming bankruptcy? How are they aided by bankruptcy laws?
No the state is not necessary for incorporation. It has monopolized that function and mutilated it. Nothing a good old-fashioned contract couldn’t handle.
Tax avoidance is “antisocial in the extreme”?
I think of murder, robbery, rape, and extortion as extremely antisocial.
I don’t think of waitresses not reporting tips, undocumented hair-braiding businesses, and transporting cigarettes across state lines as antisocial at all. In fact, avoiding taxes is pro-society and pro-human.
I imagine that some people are upset when Uncle Sam can’t make as many baby-killing bombs or build more prisons.
So you think UBI and higher taxes will result in a more equal distribution of Lamborghinis or will they just not be manufactured, quelling your envy?
The key to wealth is to get people to work for you. Preferably at low rates. The lower their pay, the quicker you accumulate wealth. Bezos may be rich, but his employees certainly are not.
Puddleglum, The economy may be doing better, but has the percentage of people in poverty dropped?
This part is true.
This part isn’t.
In particular, the acknowledged fact that the pie is getting bigger has a great deal to do with innovation and job creation. With unemployment at near-historic lows, it is difficult to sustain an argument that Amazon and other innovative companies have achieved nothing except to enrich their owners.
There is no unregulated capitalism in the USA, and you have not demonstrated the social necessity of more wealth *re-*distribution than we already have.
Why do we need that? Because people are starving in the US? No they’re not. Because people are working 80 hours a week and still falling behind? No they’re not. Because Bezos is doing me some injury by having more money than I do? No he isn’t. Because if we just take a tiny bit more away from him, we could buy free food and health care for everybody? No we couldn’t.
I believe it was Jordan Peterson who said that neo-Marxists don’t love the poor so much as they hate the rich. “They’ve got it, I want it” is a poor basis for social policy.
So Bezos makes more money than Kuwait. So what? Does that mean that government policy should treat Bezos the way Saddam Hussein treated Kuwait?
Regards,
Shodan
What you think I want is irrelevant. How you characterize it is.
Anyways, I have advocated consideration for ubi, higher taxes, as long as they are coupled with no minimum wage and proper immigration enforcement before. I don’t believe in promoting strategically counterproductive productive policy in order to win the votes of the ignorant.
And your so-called finite pie actually can grow exponentially if people are working.
How is poverty defined?
Yes, the poverty rate is near the 35 year low which was at the height of the internet bubble. This obscures the actual amount of progress because of Simpson’s paradox. The last time poverty rates were consistently this low was in the 1970s when immigrants as a percentage of the population were at all time lows. This is important because immigrants and their children are twice as likely to be in poverty as the native born. Immigrants are 2-3 times the percentage of population as back then but poverty rates overall are now just as good as then.