I scanned the thread and mostly saw liberal responses.
The left thinks wealth comes from workers, and the resulting wealth is distributed according to the economic system under which they labor. If you go back to the early stages of capitalism you see that the state fenced off the commons and dispossessed the peasantry in order to funnel them into wage labor. Go back earlier and you see mercantilism and the theft of gold and silver from the Americas. Further still and you see slave societies. Coercion via state violence is important to all of these systems, as well as enforcing the concepts of private property and money.
If you’re really curious for lefty opinions on the origin of wealth you might look up:
Primitive accumulation of capital
Accumulation by dispossession
Debt: The First 5000 Years by Graeber
Marxist theories of imperialism, an often recommended source being Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Lenin
Anarchist is as left as you can go, unless you’re an ancap, but you don’t sound like one of those.
Your ire towards communism was a little odd, since anarchism is the organizing principle of communism - no state, no money - hence anarcho-communism. The major disagreement anarchists have with Marxist-Leninists is whether the state should be abolished immediately or taken over and used to smash capitalism and reactionary movements.
Not really. If the Left wants more money going to the middle class, say, that does not mean they want to control what the middle class spends it on. Similarly, if the Right wants more money to go to the rich, they don’t say what the rich should spend it on.
I may be over simplifying but with most things, if you want to build, create or grow something, you do so from the bottom up, not the top down. I believe an economy needs a sound foundation and the middle class represented that in this country for decades.
Don’t know, I was offering Wilson up as the dividing line just to make the statement more reasonable. I think one thing is for sure, we could use a resurrected Bull-Moose party. Ditch both current parties and start over.
That’s sort of a distinction without a difference. The Left thinks the middle class spends money on the right things, and that the rich don’t spend money on the right things, or in the right way. Therefore the Left wants to transfer income from the rich to the middle class, and the poor. Or, more usually, to have the government spend the money, because the Left has less faith that anyone will spend their own money on the right things.
Witness Obamacare, which mandated that people spend money on health insurance even if they didn’t want to, as well as transferring money from the middle class (and Medicare) so as to spend it on what the government considered where the right things.
While that may be the way you feel, that’s not an accurate representation of the argument. The argument from liberal folks is that if you have a billion dollars of wealth to spread around, the impact of spreading that money around the lower and middle classes will be more economically productive than spreading it around the wealthiest people.
That’s because spreading that wealth around to mid-to-lower income people means that the money will likely be used almost exclusively for consumption, which more reliably leads to economic growth; while spreading around the wealthy leads to less consumption, as a larger portion of it is likely to go into areas that do less well in terms of spurring growth, like maybe sitting in Paul Manafort’s offshore accounts.
Someone on the dope said it rather succinctly (not sure what thread).
“Growth requires more customers, not more capital.”
More customers is what spurs business to create more widgets, hire more people and expand. Give business more capital (tax breaks) without more customers only helps the top of the company. It doesn’t prompt them to expand or raise wages if demand doesn’t go up. Why would it?
Funneling money to the top 1% only gets them more money.
unless it was my misstatement that investment is spending.
It’s succinct, but not accurate. Capital investment is driven by the expectation of a return on investment. Investors invest because they believe there are more customers. That expectation might be right, or it might be wrong. That’s called “risk”. ROI is what you get when you guess right.
All the customers in the world don’t allow you to expand if you don’t have the money to expand to meet the demand.
Think about what you said here for a minute. No, really…I’ll wait.
What happened to all the money the customers gave this high-demand business? What is preventing the company from using the glut of cash coming in from “all the customers in the world” to expand? Why is it so much more preferable for expansion being the result of venture capital or tax subsidies instead of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and expanding as a reward for success caused by lots of satisfied customers?
Another flaw with conservative economic theory is that it generally creates bad investment opportunities. Conservatives love tax cuts, which are popular, but they hate government spending cuts, which are not. So they fund the government by borrowing.
So a lot of money that the rich keep via tax cuts won’t be invested in new businesses or new technologies. It will just be loaned to the government so it can cover for the revenue lost to those tax cuts.
This is it. It doesn’t matter what anyone on either side thinks the basis of economic growth is, they each think they are better at running the government to achieve it. Which also highlights that neither side cares whether they are actually going to grow the economy, they just want to be in charge.
For the record, economic growth comes from the efficient exploitation of resources. The definition of ‘efficient’ is the only area open to argument.
If you have more customers than you can meet for the demand for your product, and can’t expand, then that company has a very very poor business model.
Customers = demand. Demand drives up prices. Additional profits from demand allow for expansion and competition for a better product at lower prices. Which provides more customers and demand.
I don’t think this is correct either. “Consumption is better than investment” is a value judgment, just a different one.
You can certainly invest your own money, or the business’s money. You can also issue stock, find other investors, etc., if you don’t want to wait to save up the money to expand.
It isn’t - investment is investment.
Do you really believe that every business owner can expand using only the revenues from the existing business?
No. The middle, and lower, classes will spend money period. On consumption. The upper classes have enough money already for consumption, and so will not spend more.
BTW in periods where there is very little money available for investment, like around 1980, giving more money to the rich isn’t a bad strategy. But today we’re awash in money (one of the reasons the market is up) and so this doesn’t help the economy.
The mandate, as you should well know, is to prevent those who have need of insurance to get it and those with less expected need to avoid it until they need it. It makes the insured pool bigger, which is more efficient. This might be unfair -= except that the young people who may not need insurance today will need it tomorrow. They will then get screwed and wonder why.
This is age related, not income related. And pretty irrelevant.
Please offer a cite for the lack of money for investments in today’s economy. You are right - investments are not made unless the predicted ROI is big enough. If companies with a large hoard of cash are not building factories and hiring people as fast as we would like them to shows the ROI is not there. And that the people who run these companies are not stupid.
Like I said, a distinction without a difference. The Left thinks the right thing is to spend the money, not invest it. So they want to take the money away from the rich and either spend it, or give it to the middle and lower classes to spend.
That’s what I said - Obamacare imposed a legal mandate to spend money on health insurance. Because Obama believed that this was the right way for people to spend their money.
I have not made that claim, so I guess I will decline to do so.
No, of course not. If the bank thinks there will be customers, they will risk their money. If not, they won’t. That’s rather different from saying that businesses never need to borrow to expand, but can just use the money from existing revenue.
[ol]
[li]This has nothing to do with the topic.[/li][li]See above.[/li][li]See number 3.[/li][/ol]Regards,
Shodan