You ruthless, amoral types are a great inspiration. Perhaps you can tell us why it wouldn’t be in the interests of the poor to feed the sorry asses of the rich into woodchippers, and use the result for compost? The poor can’t do without them? They provide some benefit?
Your question reveals a lot about you.
Freedom is everyone doing the best they can with what they’ve got. Some are rich, some poor.
To you that’s the moral equivalent of the rich “feeding the poor into wood chippers”. Are these the same poor who are disproportionately obese because they stuff their fat faces with government provided food stamp “food” such as sugar soda and junk food? Those poor? The “people in poverty” who have an average of 1.5 cars per family, air conditioning, cable TV, free education…those poor?
200 years ago, being poor meant possibly starving to death. Now it means being fat, having only 1.5 cars, etc. etc. Oh the humanity!
But to answer your question, one of the few legitimate roles of government is to protect peoples’ safety. There’s no governmental role in mandating people make a “living wage”…there’s not even a definition of what one is.
Also, do the ‘poor’ need the rich? Well, given that the rich are usually the hardest working, most intelligent, most productive, most inventive members of society, I’d say they do. Who else is going to pay the taxes to educate the children of the poor? Some guy on the dole drinking away his welfare check? Is that who? How much taxes do they pay?
Who is going to create the medical miracles which have inadvertantly made health care so expensive? Some poor illiterate slob watching TV all day and sucking down coca cola and ding dongs? Is that where technological advances come from?
They provide jobs and other economic resources. If Mr. Money opens a new factory to produce even more widgets, because the widget demand is skyrocketing, he creates jobs, and thus economic opportunity.
So the rich go into woodchippers…so what happens on Monday morning when the poor show up for their jobs? The gates are closed, because all of the upper managment is gone. Even if they are open, nothing can run, because needed goods cannot be bought, because all of the money men in the credit industry are dead.
Can you really not see this? We’re all in this together people… :rolleyes:
So long as you pay your taxes without whining, we’re good. Here’s how it works: the poor outnumber the rich, so they can vote to raise taxes and spend revenue. Now, the rich can either live with less, or they can work like beavers to keep the same take home to maintain their lifestyle. We can continue to raise taxes until the rich actually stop increasing productivity and jobs are lost. It is just like the free market; you don’t stop raising prices just because the customer threatens to stop buying, he actually has to stop paying the higher price before prices will fall.
Likewise, government should raise taxes until businesses actually start cutting jobs. That level of taxes is quite a bit higher than what we have now, as the one thing the rich are afraid of is being poor, so they will work their tails off to avoid falling back down the financial ladder. Having found what the market will bear, we can back off a little. To tax too little is just as bad as charging too little for a product. Its the free market, and no good conservative is against that, are they?
The fact is, the rich work for us now.
The “rich people” from Kia are so useless that the poor residents in Westpoint Georgia are just pretending to be happy that a new auto plant is being brought to their city.
New York Times story: “One Town’s Rare Ray of Hope: New Auto Plant – Westpoint Georgia”
And the folks in Alabama were hoping the “rich” folks from Volkswagen would choose them for the plant; they lost to Tennessee. Story: Volkswagen Selects Tennessee for US Auto Plant
The residents and govt officials from Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee are not looking to recruit more poor people from Texas, Louisiana, or Mexico – they are looking to entice the “rich” folks from around the world to bring economic development to their area.
Of course, the memories of the poor folks in Georgia is short, so 20 years from now, they’ll forget the gratitude they had towards Kia and instead, sit back and complain that the rich Kia executives are useless. The Georgia residents will become smug and say they don’t need Kia and they should be fed to woodchippers.
Have you ever seen the advertising for economic development that governments around the world put in magazines such as The Economist?
I have an issue in my hand where Ontario Canada is running a full page ad trying to convince businessmen to bring economic development to their area. Sweden has similar ads. These govt officials in all these countries realize that “rich” people bring economic development to their country. Sweden knows that if they want to continue paying for their social programs, they will need to bring additional economic development. These countries are not recruiting poor people; they are recruiting “rich” people. They will bend over backwards and create tax breaks to entice the captains of industry because economic growth is not created by poor people.
If the poor can truly do without the rich folks, I’d like to see all those poor people protest their state & city legislatures and tell companies like VW, Kia, Intel, to fuck off. Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Singapore etc will gladly welcome them.
It also includes things like dieing of cancer cause people, like Mr. Scrooge Mcduck here, wants to stick to a defective healthcare system.
Interesting, guess you support social assistance and safety net programs then, unless you consider people risking dieing in the street for lack of healthcare to be “safe” for them.
Hey Mr. McDuck, ever heard of minimum wage laws? Food assistance, section 8? They don’t just give those away to just anyone. There’s guidelines for minimums for assistance. It’s almost like there’s a definition of what’s an acceptable bottom or something. Since the government does in fact take a role in defining these things you can see why your screed looks kinda silly?
You seen the economy lately? How about CEOs who run companies into the ground for short term profits? The rich who own health insurance companies that have policies of trying to cancel people’s policies if they develop expensive conditions.
No quite frankly left to their own devices the rich are quite selfishly destructive.
You mean the taxes they pay with money earned, through in large part, their employees production? How far would the CEO of a large company get trying to run all the machines themselves? Suppose he did, how far would he get trying to sell his products to a diminished market? It’s almost like the rich need the working class too.
Actually they come from Science, a lot of scientific research is funded through the government, charities, and the like. Including Bio-Medical research.
Also the spittle flecked little Randian manifesto you posted ignores the problem of why healthcare is so expensive. Why is it Americans pay per capita twice as much as English while on average having worse health then the English?
I find it very telling of your prejudices that only examples of the poor you list are the objectionable kind. It’s almost like you’re so blinded by hatred you can’t possibly consider that the poor might have redeeming qualities, despite the character flaw of lacking insatiable greed. That is why I imagine Scrooge McDuck angrily hacking away at the keyboard in an flurry of rage when I read your posts. “The poor getting healthcare?! Not on my watch!”
Good heavens, no. Taxation is definitely not the free market. Taxes are coerced. I have no choice about whether or not to pay taxes - the government has guns and police to force me. If the local store tries to threaten me into buying their stuff at gunpoint, then that isn’t the free market either.
And since by definition the rich are not receiving the benefits of the higher taxation, it is not an exchange of value.
Taxes may be a necessary evil, but they are very far from the free market.
Great idea. Let’s kill the goose, and we can get all the golden eggs at once!
Regards,
Shodan
Hey luci, when you say “rich people,” who do you mean exactly?
I guess I should say that the gov’t SHOULDN’T provide a “living wage” of any kind. All it does is encourage more people to be lazy.
No, public safety (protection from murderers, etc.) is not the same as giving people “health care”.
Why is our system more expensive? More treatments, more tests, more cures, etc. It isn’t worse than other countries. We have more crime and more violence, and that adverseley affects life expectancy, but that’s not because of bad health care in general. But even if it is, where does it say in the constitution that the gov’t should provide health care? Why was that not seen for the first 200 years of the country?
I get health care through an employer. They can’t “cancel it” if I get sick. Most policies are non-can guaranteed renewable anyway, meaning that the company can’t cancel one person’s policy. It can only act on a class of policies.
Rich people work hard. The guy who owns the plumbing company works harder than the guy who is on welfare and steals radios for a living. The woman who spends 12 years in med school has worked harder than the girl who dropped out of high school to take care of her 2 illegitimate kids. If we all lived like the poor, then we’d all BE poor. Someone has to actually do the work in the country.
I think it’s excellent encouragement to work to tell people “no work, then no food”. Unfortunately it isn’t that way.
To show you how off you are in your comments, the “poorest” people in this country are the FATTEST. How is that possible? Poor self discipline? Laziness? No way! Say it isn’t so!
Shodan has already addressed your misunderstanding of the free market, but…
Why do you see this as us vs. them? What possible reason do you have to have rich people. I am unable to see this as anything but class envy, which does not lead to good problem solving.
Sorry to post this from four pages back, but I only just now saw it.
Likely no, but it would be working against the goal of keeping people poor. Especially if you were constantly thinking up new ways to give $1, since that would add up over time. Too, considering your longer point was that the giving of money was tied to creating a threat of it being taken away, that money must have significant value otherwise it wouldn’t be missed (well, it would be begrudged, but not feared). No, you’re still going to have to pick one argument, I think.
Because what would you do once you’ve run out of wealth to loot?
This is possibly the most frustrating debate I have ever read, with neither side getting it quite right.
We need the rich, and we need the working class. There are no machines without the rich, and no one to use the machines to create the wealth without the workers. I don’t think you can decide one is inherently more ‘useful’. We all make money off the work of others’. That’s the way this whole ‘society’ thing is supposed to work.
I am poor, with two kids, because of bad decisions I made in my early 20’s and crappy things that happened in my family. It was a combination of bad luck and idiocy that brought me here. And it will be a combination of luck and hard work that will drag me out. I’m starting school in October, but this would not be possible if my friend with the car was not willing to drive me back and forth everyday. I wouldn’t have any hope of paying the 20,000 dollar tuition if Claiborne Pell hadn’t innovated the Pell Grant. I wouldn’t have child-care if my relatives weren’t willing to split the child-care amongst themselves for free. Nobody is an island, and I bet the large majority of the people you see crowing that they crawled themselves out are conveniently forgetting that they didn’t do it alone. Someone decided they were worth it and invested in them, just like my friends, relatives, and government are willing to forgive my past mistakes and invest in me and my children. Our responsibility is/was making the best of what is invested in us. No matter how bad anyone’s circumstances, we should always hold others’ to that responsibility. No one is entitled to do nothing.
If poor people are staying poor, it’s because people are too busy denigrating them and their children (bri1600bv’s views are disturbingly common.) that we are not making attempts to invest in them. A poor child spends their lives watching people continually look down at their parents, and we are shocked when they grow up unwilling to accept our middle class values.
I have no problem making social programs for the poor dependent on education or work, so they become a leg up for people rather than just a handout. But to state that everyone should be able to do it without even a scrap of assistance from those of us in better circumstances is just too simplistic. It’s equally a government/market problem and a cultural problem. We have to change the way we look at the poor before we can attempt to change their situations. They need to be told that not only are they capable of moving up, but that it’s worth it. The numbers show that it is possible to move up, but that it’s not being accomplished at the rate we want it to. Possibly because people are too busy trying to fit the problem around their personal pet issues and experiences to really look at it honestly. One side of this debate dismisses the concerns of the poor, the other pities them. Neither will actually solve the problem.
Ahh you’re some rich snob who’s never worked a working poor job then I see. I know from experience, just because it’s low pay doesn’t mean it’s easy. Ever worked a factory job? Been a janitor? Nurses aids used to minimum wage around here, that’s hard work litterly cleaning up people’s crap.
Nor do people take jobs just because it’s the best economic job they can get. Some people take jobs because they, and it’s a strange concept to you, I know, value the goodworks the job does over their own wealth.
Explain this further. Why is protection from dieing from ill health different then protection from dieing from a murderer?
I wonder why that would be. It’s almost like we have more desperate people at the end of their rope or something. It couldn’t have anything to do with a lack of social safety net could it? At anyrate do you have a cite indicating crime is why the cost of health care is 2x per capita in the US, and why Americans have worse lifetimes?
Same place the Constitution talks about the federal highway system, the Internet and the goes into great detail about importance of IPv6. In other words the Constitution doesn’t document every little thing. It assigns powers and restrictions to the government, and to the people that. It’s also an evolving document.
Would you be so kind as to point out where it says the government can’t provide healthcare? Is it near the section that originally restricted voting to 21+ year old white male property owners?
What happens if you change jobs and have a health problem? Oops uncovered pre-existing condition. Also weren’t you ralying on entrepreneurship earlier? How do small business owners get health care through their employer? What happens if you and your health condition fall into an expensive “class of policies”?
Also you’ve apparently never heard of Rescission, where health insurance companies try to weasel out of providing healthcare for people who develop expensive conditions by looking for technicalities to cancel the contract.
See right here. It’s black and white with you. Your world view is so amazingly limited you can’t see anything else. Someone is either a welfare radio thief or a hardworking business owner. The hardworking near minimum wage janitor who keep’s the plumbing business clean and inviting to customers doesn’t count for anything to you. He’s invisible.
You ever had kids? You ever tried to work a working poor job with kids? You’re saying that women has it easy? I am the child of such of woman and you are full of shit.
So assembly line workers, janitors, food service, agricultural, and pretty much anyone who does the millions of hardworking but low paying jobs vital to keep you from starving death in a smelly filthy wasteland doesn’t count as work?
Ahh but it’s more than that. You want to tell people “sorry not rich die of cancer”. You want to tell 10% unemployed desperatly trying to keep their head above water “sorry AIG lied about credit ratings. no food for you”. As well as “although you you’re hardworking we’re shipping your job to china. no food for you.”
In short you’re policies only make sense from the dysfunctional and incomplete view that the poor are “lazy”. When there’s other causes of poor.
Ironic, cause:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-05-02-obesity-affluent_x.htm
Now if the poor have obesity problems because they’re lazy then their should be some socio-economic studies to back it up. From link:
So the rich are about as fat as the poor, and they have less physically demanding jobs. How could some do a physically active job and be lazy?
Just answering insane with insane. I get tired of reasoning with some of these people sometimes.
Apparently, rich people are those people who open factories, which I had always thought were owned by stockholders. If only they would report more often, stuff like Paris Hilton designing and erecting a new car factory, that would be cool. But this is what we’re offered for argument, somebody opens a new car factory, we should credit the rich folks.
You do realize what Fear It’s self described is the general corporate philosophy to labor right? Try to squeeze as much out of the working stiffs for as you can. Maximum labor for as little pay as possible. If it’s good for the working class why isn’t it good for the rich?
The particular stockholders who make the management decisions and set the direction of the company are rich.
Take a good look at the top outside shareholders of Google stock:
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/ownership/institutional.asp?ric=GOOG.O
The top institutional shareholder is Fidelity Management & Research with 14 million shares. The founders of Google both Larry Page and Sergi Brin each own 28 million shares which is double the amount of the largest outside shareholder.
When Google decides to build a datacenter in a city, it is Larry & Sergi (2 rich guys with their combined 56 million shares) stamping their approval on it. If Google decides to open another research facility outside of California… maybe in Boston or Germany or wherever, it is Larry & Sergi deciding it.
Ok, so we don’t credit the rich folks? Who do we credit then?! You insist the “stockholders”? Ok, which stockholders? All of them? Some of them? What’s the difference between a “majority stockholder” vs a “rich person” besides being a game of semantics?
And if the working stiffs don’t like it they can work somewhere else.
Why does anyone make more than the minimum wage if it’s so easy to keep the “poor” down?
If it’s so easy to make huge profits, then by definition more capital would flow into the business, creating more businesses and more labor demand, pushing the price of labor up.
The barrier to entry of switching jobs is far smaller than the barrier to entry of switching governments. False equivalence.
Yes, Paris Hilton is typical of the “rich”…someone who inherited money and never worked a day in their life. Brilliant.