None of this supports your claim that “wealth was built by 1 in 100”. Those who “provide some sort of vision or direction”, as you put it, would get nothing done without the so-called “working drones” you speak so condescendingly of.
Stop. Before you respond, answer the question… what could Bill Gates have achieved without the help of his “working drone” programming staff? Answer that before you claim to have a grasp on ANYTHING.
The truth is, all that wealth was built by all 100 people in that equation. There were those who directed the building of that wealth, and those who built the wealth. They depend on each other. Nowadays the former is discounting the importance of the latter.
Because the guy halfway around the world can only still has to be paid. If his labor becomes too expensive (due to the sudden change in currency exchange values) local labor is still needed. Take away the working drones, as you put them, and that work grinds to a halt.
Replace all workers with machines and your wealth totally disappears: because no one can afford to buy your stuff. Here’s another question you can’t answer: when you automate everything, who will be able to buy your stuff?*
Dude. This is basic economics. Why do you continue to not grasp it?
Plenty of important people and things get discounted easily. That’s why stuff goes wrong so often - a seemingly unimportant or oft-neglected thing goes boom and shit gets broke.
Like I said, take away the working drones. Now how does Bill Gates design and build Windows 8 AND get it to market? Automate everything. Now who has any money to buy anything? Can’t answer that, can you?
You have yet to support your claim that “wealth was built by 1 in 100”. That was an incredibly insane statement that you’re now stuck with trying to defend.
These are terrible examples you are providing. The guy designing software for Microsoft or running the marketing for a multi-billion dollar company are part of the 1% (or at least the top 5-10%). They aren’t part of the 99% pool of interchangable carbon blobs.
Boy, you sure can move the goalposts. Now it’s not just Bill Gates but his programmers who are also the elite 1 in 100… no wait, the goalposts have moved from the top 1 in 100 to the top 5-10 in 100.
1 in a hundred, 5 in a hundred, whatever number you come up with next, they still couldn’t generate much wealth without the lower-end software testers to get rid of bugs, or the marketers who made people aware of the product. Then there are the customers who are needed to buy Windows in order for it to make a profit.
Repeat:
Bill Gates cannot generate wealth without his programmers.
He cannot generate wealth without his software QA testers.
He cannot generate wealth without his marketing staff.
He certainly cannot generate wealth without the interchangeable carbon blobs - aka customers - who buy his product.
Wealth is NOT just produced by the top 1%, or the top 5%, or whatever % you want to move your goalposts to next. The generation of wealth depends on a food chain. Eliminate one part of the chain and it all falls apart. This is basic stuff, dude. You’re not getting the basics. It is easily demonstrated how your “top 1%” theory is wrong. Easily. Your argument has holes that a drunken sailor could maneuver an aircraft carrier through.
Oh and damn… “interchangeable carbon blobs”? That’s some arrogant, elitist thinking right there.
There is an argument to be made that increasing specialization and ability make some portions of the chain more valuable than others. On one extreme, the combination of drive-to-succeed and having a vision that will be wildly successful is incredibly rare–mostly what you get are entrepreneurs like my dad (lots of drive, fairly mundane vision that pays the bills). At the other extreme you have ditch diggers, haulers of objects, and the like–people with no special skills and no special training and no special aptitudes beyond a work ethic. While they’re not less valuable as human beings, there are a lot more of them (no less because just about anyone else can substitute in for them in a pinch). Somewhere in the middle are the skilled labor classes (where I rest my own head), who are only moderately replaceable/interchangeable.
One of the “benefits” of our increasingly automated economy is that the lowest level of completely interchangeable jobs is slowly but surely going away. What we don’t have is a plan to get those people moved up and take advantage of the large amount of slack that could be generating more wealth–and I’m certainly sure that it’s not from lack of desire on the part of the wealthy (who understand as well as you do that more workers working = more wealth generated, in general) so much as a lack of any workable vision. Which takes time, and cannot be predicted.
I wonder if msmith ever gets out often enough to realize how many voting working class citizens he alienates with rhetoric like that. Maybe what those “interchangeable carbon blobs” should do is stop consuming for one day and see how much wealth gets created?
Obviously the damage done to the economy when those “interchangeable carbon blobs” moderately curbed their spending in 2008, was not enough to drill into certain people’s minds the damage that these “interchangeable carbon blobs” can do to the ENTIRE WORLD’S wealth in one fell swoop. Maybe none of this makes any sense to someone who sees the working class as “interchangeable carbon blobs”.
Of course this history lesson-question will never get an answer because it is so dangerous to the “interchangeable carbon blobs” crowd: what happened to wealth in 2008 when the “interchangeable carbon blobs” of America put moderate curbs on their spending? Did wealth go up then, or down? Hint: check the Dow Jones/NASDAQ numbers for that period.
Tell you what. Let any of the 1% test this notion by replacing their entire employed staff with the first batch of names in the phone booth (with a sweep of the local street-people population to collect a proportional number of those interchangeable carbon blobs), and if he continues to make the same profit under one year of this system I’ll concede your argument.
Ayn Rand followers think that by reading her turgid novels they will somehow acquire the qualities of her heroes. The real Ayn Rand heroes, like Bill Gates, do not bother with her books. They simply enjoy the benefits of their favorable DNA.
I noticed you switched from production to consumption.
Remember, we were talking about the 1 in 100 producing wealth, not consuming. Then answer is obviously less wealth is created when people stop consuming.
Wait a second, who do you think got hurt by that change in consumption? I was told the CEOs all got big fat bonus, but the “interchangeable carbon blobs” lost 16million jobs, their houses, their retirement savings.
Which is it?
The point of the 1 in 100 isn’t that Bill Gates could run Microsoft on his own. The point is that on his own Bill Gates would be fine. He is a genius that could still develop marketable products.
How many employees at Microsoft have the capability to START Microsoft. The answer is about 1 in 100. They will eventually leave and start their own shop, hiring 99 new employees.
Oh and BTW the US population is shrinking, which is why immigration is so high. Technically speaking you don’t really need new factory jobs.
Ah yes, the banking and investor class, which actually ranks above the “industrialist”/entrepreneur class. They don’t generate any kind of wealth - they make money moving it around and betting on wealth. Ironically they’re the ones the world can most easily live without.
(Which is why my side business is network engineering…)
This rhetoric has reached a new low, and I have no idea what it’s permitted.
For anyone else that isn’t a troll, the investor class provides the capital that allows everyone else to make wealth.
For example, those that live in a house got a mortgage to pay for it. The cash for that mortgage came from those with capital to invest. You get a house now and they get paid interest on their investment.
It should be no surprise that to many in the working class, the work ethic is the only ethic.
It shouldn’t be any surprise either that the managerial class will use that to their own advantage, inculcate and encourage it.
If you want to understand why some working people will vote and speak out against their own interests, you have to look at their work ethic, and understand why they place work above all other virtues - sometimes to a degree that seams almost heartless to people a notch or two up the economic or educational totem pole.
*No one much is doing this. *Probably because it would be legitimate to call it class war.
Communist propaganda, both in Communist countries, and in capitalist countries, has often portrayed capitalists as idle parasites living off of the labor of the workers. This confuses capitalism with economic systems that existed prior to the industrial revolution.
It is also not what Karl Marx thought about capitalists. In The Communist Manifesto he wrote:
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”
Nevertheless, since at least 1980 most economic growth has gone to the richest ten percent of the country. Since 2000 the rich have continued to get richer even though the standard of living for most Americans has declined.
A true conservative, that is to say one whose opinions are more profound than a hatred for taxes, gun control laws, and government, should find this disturbing. Conservatives should ask themselves what they are trying to conserve.
But then, why did you need to spew out a bunch of rhetoric? For example, how much has the American standard of living declined? The statement in and of itself is completely and entirely meaningless, and also lacks evidence.
Most, if not all, Americans saw unprecedented improvements in standard of living, that vastly out paced any other country on Earth. Now, my opinion on the matter is that this grow was heavily dependent on being the only industrialized country not bombed to shit during WWII.
So to tell me the standard of living for most Americans has declined says two things: (1) that Americans are still at the top for standard of living, and (2) it’s starting to match what the rest of the industrialized world is catching up to. The US standard of living has a long way to fall before it comes anywhere close to resembling that of the developing world.
And that isn’t meant as a “raw raw go USA!” Frankly I think Canadians are better off, but we can’t all be that lucky.
The fact that the rich get richer is still a good thing. The ability to get richer is an important part of a society if you want progress and growth. Imagine a casino that took half your winnings on the way out.
Right, so when a group of individuals are desperately trying to get back to a time when the US had high tariffs and protectionist policies, a group trying desperately to halt forward progress, it’s hard to continue using the terms “liberal and conservative.” We end up with a weird sort of *economic conservative *that’s scared of the future and wants to go back in time to when they felt warm and safe.
