Why do people keep talking about this as if it is some great evil? If the rich have created their wealth, and the poor are not being kept so artificialy, why does it matter what sort of gap there is?
Because it tends to lead to social unrest, violence, and the abrupt changing hands of said wealth, when the gap is too great, and it seems to the poor that they have no reasonable chance to become like the rich.
In short, in and of itself it may not be bad, but it may be a symptom of a society becoming unstable.
There was this little thing called the French revolution…
Well, that’s a pretty damn big IF you’ve got starting your second sentence.
Define wealth creation. What do you mean by “artificially”? Do you believe in certain fundamental rights such as food, shelter, etc.? Are you happy to let people die if they can’t sell their labor on the “free market”?
If you’re going to start a topic like this in Great Debates, it seems to me that you really need to make clearer your own position on some of the important issues, rather than just ask “What’s wrong with…?” If you give us an idea of why you think the way you do, maybe we can start a debate.
If I make millions of dollars for myself by getting a real career instead of working at ‘teen-aged’ jobs for life, well, that’s not my fault. If those poor people want to revolt to get my money rather than going out and earning it themselves, well, they can go to hell. If they honestly want a better life and are willing to work for it, I’d be much more inclined to help such a person out with charitable donations.
Frankly, I don’t see any problem whatsoever with there being huge gaps between the rich and poor. As long as the rich aren’t getting rich illegally, and the poor aren’t being kept poor illegally, then just what is the problem?
An interesting view of the role of the law in economics. Extending your logic, which essentially says that if it’s legal then it’s OK, the US Congress could pass a law making Enron-type scams legal, and you would have no problem with it? Because, as everyone knows, legislators NEVER make any unjust laws. :rolleyes:
Muad’Dib:
For a start, I recommend that you read this article by Paul Krugman. (See particularly the section entitled “The Price of Inequality” starting on p. 6.
Apparently another good book is “Wealth and Democracy” by Kevin Phillips.
There are several reasons why one might not want too big a wealth inequality:
(1) Practicality: It is correlated to crime, unrest, and polarization in society.
(2) Principles: It seems to some of us that everyone should share at least to some degree in the fruits of our society. I.e., the idea of people starving on the streets while others have way more money than they know what to do with is simply repugnant.
(3) Economic reality: The idea that the amount of money you end up with in a modern capitalist economy is anything but a very, very rough measure of the amount you “deserve” is pretty ludicrous. Society is highly interactive and those who benefit the most from society do so not only by hard work and smarts but also but working the rules of the game to their advantage, luck, inheritance, etc. They also tend to be the ones who have derived the most benefit from the various trappings of society. (One of many examples: the protection of private property matters more to those who have property to protect.) Furthermore, the various “rules” in a capitalist economy such as patents and how long they last, corporate law (and the very idea of limited-liability corporations) are arbitrary and tend to be biased towards the concentration of mass amounts of wealth. People argue that these laws also allow the creation of this wealth in the first place although I think these arguments are at least somewhat overstated and, furthermore, it is still seems like society as a whole should decide how we want to handle the tradeoff between total amount of wealth and its distribution. (I.e., I, for one, do not think that average amount of wealth is always more important than, say, median wealth or wealth of the bottom 10%.)
Now that is the truth. Social welfare programs are just the bribes we have to pay the impoverished to keep them from turning violent and overwhelming the rest of us with their numbers, which they certainly will do if they feel totally helpless to improve their plight. I suppose it’s better to throw a little money at them once and awhile then to face the guillotine…not that either option is ideal. Best would be simply to convince them that they can improve their plight without violence, that there are success stories and there is hope. But people always want the easy way out, and the easy way comes with the barrel of a gun.
Perhaps society’s organization is just inherently instable, and revolutions just a natural part of the cycle of any society. Bribes might hold them off for awhile, but we saw where appeasement got Neville Chamberlain.
Better than to simply convince them that that is true is to work to make a society where that is really true to the maximum extent possible!
Oh yeah…to add another point to my list (which I think is one of the main subjects of Phillips’ book…I’d know better if I read it):
(4) Politics and wealth: Economic power translates into political power (which translates into more economic power…which translates into more political power and so on). Thus the former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Brandeis once said that we can have democracy or wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.
Well, what about people that work 50-hour weeks at Wal-Mart and still end up on food stamps? There’s plenty of people that work, and work hard, and are one paycheck away from destitution (and that paycheck might have been last week’s.) There are more degrees of people out there than millionaires and welfare bums.
I personally think that the problem with a huge income gap isn’t necessarily its existance, but rather its immutability. It should be equally possible to be born poor and die rich as it is to be born rich and die poor. Some societies do better at this than others; I think ours is becoming more ossified, but still full of potential. Someone born poor in Kenya, though, is going to die poor in Kenya, so I’d have to say that globally we’ve got a long way to go.
Mhendo…
That’s a whole 'nother debate, buckaroo, and he never said anything like that. Please try to keep your words out of someone else’s mouth. The rolleyes was SUCH a nice touch… shows precisely where you’re coming from.
Here’s the scenario: A movie star. Gets twenty million dollars to be in a movie. Do you think that person “deserves” his or her wealth? Why or why not? Because the only way I can imagine a justification for taking away someone’s wealth would be if you assume that they don’t “deserve” it.
Mighty Maximino…
I agree that that’s a shitty situation. However, what can be done about it? In my opinion, it is just as unethical and immoral to take property or wealth away from someone just for the simple reason that someone else has no wealth. More so, in fact.
Again we get to the question of whether “earn” means “deserve” or simply “receive”. Also, we again see the opinion that taxation is tantamount to stealing.
IMO, it ultimately comes down to democracy. The lowermost level of poverty which the majority can bear to see on the streets every day is that which ends up being “welfare level”. Personally, I could not bear to see gangs of emaciated children fighting savage wars over boundaries on a rubbish tip while the 100ft walls of rich towns were patrolled by private armies. I believe that, within reason, nobody in an industrialised democracy should go without treatment for a treatable disease simply because they are poor. They should have adequate sanitation, housing and protection from fire and violence. Basically, I’m with the UN on Human Rights. IMO, tax is the price you pay for civilization.
As to whether becoming wealthy equates to creating wealth which was not otherwise there, I find that extremely dubious. Another current thread debates this.
Finally, if you think rich people deserve to be rich well, OK, I’ve not too much problem with that, within reason (and this debate is all about what constitutes “reasonable”). But conversely: does the child born into poverty * deserve * it?
Except that is what Wal-Mart is doing by paying low wages to their employees. Wal-Mart stockholders and management have done quite well by keeping their expenses extremely low - by keeping other peoples profits down. They manage both their vendors and their employees at the lowest possible cost. And Wal-Mart customers get their piece of the pie as well, by getting low prices. Their is no pie left over for the Wal-Mart employee.
I know the response, the Wal-Mart worker should just go out and get a higher paying job. Which is not that easy when you are working 50 hours and week and can’t switch your schedule easily to go interview. And even more difficult in a tougher economy. And the Wal-Mart vendor has a choice between slim margins and no profit at all.
And what about the people who work those so-called ‘teen-age’ jobs for their entire lives because they CAN’T handle anything more challenging? Should a person who was unlucky enough to be born with Down’s syndrome (to take one example) live below the poverty line for the rest of his/her life just because he/she got an unlucky role of the genetic dice? Think carefully about your answer; after all, the only thing that stands between YOU and such a fate is accident or disease. One hard whack on the head, and you, too, could be a group home candidate.
And most of the poor DO work - often two or three jobs. They’re still poor, despite working 80 hours a week. So perhaps there’s a bit more than simple laziness involved.
Is the problem the gap, or the situation of those at the bottom?
For instance, suppose a society where ten percent of the population is rich beyond the dreams of avarice, worth an average of, say, fifty million dollars apiece. The rest of the populace earns the functional equivalent of $30K per year per family - they don’t starve, but they aren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination. There is nobody in between.
Is there anything wrong with that society?
In other words, is it immoral to have a huge gap in wealth between the rich and the poor, even if the “poor” are not particularly badly off?
This is a thought experiment, not an assertion that the US or any Western country is really in that situation.
I would be interested in the board’s thoughts.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s why we’ll never agree, because I think it’s much more ethical and moral. Having different basic premices, we’ll necessarily reach different conclusions.
If the conditions defined by the OP were a correct depiction of what happen in real life, I couldn’t argue against his position. If the wealth has been actually created by the wealthy person single-handedly and would have never existed without him, then it would be pointless to take it away from him, since then he would stop creating wealth and everybody including him would be poor. Though thinking twice even in this case, it would probably makes some sense since giving part of this money to other people would probably give them an opportunity to produce wealth too (by paying for an education, or opening a litle business, etc…).
But I just disagree with the premices. I don’t think that in our societies the rich person was the sole creator of the wealth, I also think that in most case, even if he played an important role in this creation, if he hadn’t done so, someone else would have, and finally I think that poor people are actually quite often kept poor artificially. Money gives you a big leverage, and a lot of influence. And people being people, this power and influence is going to be misused. For instance by lobbying in favor of laws which are advantageous for you. Or by engaging in a commercial war you’re going to win not because you’re the best but because being already rich, you can sustain losses for quite a long time. The playing field isn’t leveled.
As for people “deserving” or not their wealth (like in the movie star example) , that’s a totally subjective opinion, except in some rare cases. For instance if you inherit your money, you obviously do not “deserve” it. But does the hard-working movie star deserve more the money than the hard working floor-sweeper? Nope. It’s just that there are more people able to sweep floors than people able to to become movie star. And becoming a movie star isn’t only the result of having worked hard, either. If you’re ugly, you won’t become one. Are you more “deserving” because you’re attractive? If you’re not lucky, you’re not going to become a movie star. Are you more deserving because you were lucky? If you don’t have much scrupules, and don’t hesitate to push out of your way other aspiring movie stars, are you more deserving because you lack scrupules? If your uncle is a movie director and it allows you to become a movie star, are you more deserving that the person who don’t have an uncle working at Hollywood?
There’s a myth at work here, which is that people reach their position only due to their talent and hard work. Saying that someone deserves money and someone else doesn’t deserve it is totally subjective. I can think that teachers or even floor sweepers deserve money more than movie stars. That’s arbitrary. You can’t use “who deserves the money?” as a basis to distribute wealth.
Money is a good incentive to make people work hard, use their potential talent and create wealth, but for this carrot to have efficient results, everybody must have an equal chance to get the carrot. A huge gap between the poor and the rich, a very inequal distribution of wealth means that some are going to enter the race within a 40 pounds backpack on the shoulders, and some others will be given a starting position 100 feet ahead everybody else.
And finally, even if you created your wealth only due to your talents, gifts and hard work, and for some reason “deserved” it, as soon as you’re a member of a society, you’ve a duty to give back some of this wealth to the collectivity because without it (without the infrastructure it provides, without the education system you and the people working for you used, without the army and police which protect you, etc, etc…) you wouldn’t have been able to create this wealth. You’re essentially never the only creator of your wealth.
I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong in itself. It depends on :
1)How did the 10% managed to find themselves in this position? Had everybody the same chance to belong to this hypothetical upper class, or not? In the latter case (the upper class using his wealth/power to artificially retain it), then it’s wrong.
2)Is it the most efficient system? If there’s a way to make sure that 100% of people will get 500 000 $ apiece, I don’t know if it’s immoral, but it’s most certainly a bad system since it keeps the total wealth below the level it could reach.
To the people arguing that a tremendous gap between rich and poor is just jim-dandy: does your opinion change if this unbridgable chasm between abject poverty or more money than you’ll ever be able to spend is just above your own personal level or just below it?
It’s a good question, Shodan. I would argue that your hypothetical society is all right if and only if you hold prices constant. If $30k p/y is enough to live above some standard of poverty, then this kind of society certainly has its perks.
Is mobility possible?