<p>“I simply can not believe that allowing a tiny minority to hoard wealth without limit is sustainable.”</p>
<p>“Acquiring wealth…It is NOT a zero sum game.”</p>
<p>It doesn’t have to be a zero sum game for a tiny minority to hoard wealth…</p>
<p>Overall wealth can be increasing while wealth decreases for a large segment of the population and increases for a tiny majority.</p>
<p>Eventually…it is not sustainable though. Mantori…is right.</p>
<p>I am indeed a Libertarian and proud of it, but like many card-carrying Democrats and Republicans, I don’t walk in lock-step with every line of the party platform. I don’t think being wealthy is evil, and I believe that a relatively small number of highly ambitious people have to have the freedom to drive innovation and wealth creation for the rest of us, but I do NOT believe that this justifies leaving some people with nothing. And anyway, throughout human history, few of the mega-rich and super-powerful ever got that way without the tools of fraud and coercion, which are decidedly non-libertarian.</p>
<p>Dstark
</p>
<p>Pursue your own happiness, and leave the tiny hoarding minority to pursue theirs. I am not speaking about the Madoffs of the world, the one-in-a-million thieves. People who have accumulated wealth have played the game well. Their success has nothing to do with other people’s failure. </p>
<p>The reason wealth it is not sustainable is that people have figured out they can vote themselves the fruits of other people’s ingenuity and labor. That is what can and does happen in a democracy (versus a republic), and it is why job-creating business people are increasingly risk-averse. Why should they put everything on the line and start a business, working twice the hours as everyone else, when it can all be arbitrarily taken away from them?</p>
<p>Mantori.suzuki
</p>
<p>Libertarianism is all about the Constitution. Nowhere in it are we guaranteed having even the bare necessities for survival. We are free to PURSUE happiness, but that is about it.</p>
<p>It is false that few of the American mega rich got there without fraud and coercion. Even if it were true (which it certainly is not), Libertarianism would call for a private, market solution.</p>
<p>I agree that it is unjustified to leave some people with nothing. It is inhumane. However, that should have nothing to do with national government, and it does not in the Libertarian model. It is an individual issue, and possibly a state issue. In Libertarianism, it is not a federal one.</p>
<p>Spider you are confusing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Quoting your girls again?</p>
<p>The US is a Democratic republic - not either, or.</p>
<p>Parent1986, which “girls” are you referring to? “Quoting your girls”…Passing that on from someone on your narrow list? I’m sorry you misunderstood my post. Maybe you thought you saw a quote from one document attributed to another? Are you confusing my post with another one you might have seen elsewhere?</p>
<p>BTW, gender discrimination is disgusting, and “quoting your girls” is offensive.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s from this:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Relevance to this thread?</p>
<p>Nowhere did I say that items in one document were to be found in another. Apparently you were made uncomfortable by the content of my post. Sorry if you disagree with the idea that we are free to pursue happiness but not guaranteed it. The truth that it is a bad thing to be able to vote yourself the fruit of other people’s labor is a painful one to confront. Still, you should attack ideas if you disagree with them, and not attack the poster. Reread posts 24 and 25 for an answer to your last question.</p>
<p>Parent1986 and ThisCouldBeHeaven-</p>
<p>BTW, I get the reference to the hackneyed tradition from certain parts of the media to run with it when a public figure actually does mistake a specific DOI phrase as coming from the Constitution. While the mistake may have actually happened, the lemming media coverage exists only to discredit the ideas of the person by discrediting them personally (basically calling them stupid). I also notice that this is a tactic used by those who gulp down that media coverage a little too much. In the instance of my post, the point was about what isn’t in the Constitution, leaving us with our natural rights (not our legal ones). Of course, you can run with it, if it helps the medicine go down more easily. I really think, though that when you disagree with a viewpoint, you should just explain a better way of looking at things. Much more effective than games.</p>
<p>While we are on the topic of games played in the media, can either of you define the difference between the words “corps” and “corpse” for me? Thanks.</p>
<p>Interesting. Just read this article in Atlantic Monthly earlier this week that discusses the effect increased productivity has had on our economy. Relative to college expenses, the author offers ideas as to why these productivity gains have not occurred in education, and thus expenses have grown much faster than the economy as a whole. </p>
<p>[The</a> Greater Recession: America Suffers from a Crisis of Productivity - Derek Thompson - Business - The Atlantic](<a href=“The Greater Recession: America Suffers From a Crisis of Productivity - The Atlantic”>The Greater Recession: America Suffers From a Crisis of Productivity - The Atlantic)</p>
<p>Goru…great article…</p>
<p>I also like this article…</p>
<p>[Can</a> the Middle Class Be Saved? - Magazine - The Atlantic](<a href=“Can the Middle Class Be Saved? - The Atlantic”>Can the Middle Class Be Saved? - The Atlantic)
The rich have not become that way while living in a vacuum. Technological advance, freer trade, and wider markets—along with the policies that promote them—always benefit some people and harm others. Economic theory is quite clear that the winners gain more than the losers lose, and therefore the people who suffer as a result of these forces can be fully compensated for their losses—society as a whole still gains. This precept has guided U.S. government policy for 30 years. Yet in practice, the losers are seldom compensated, not fully and not for long. And while many of the gains from trade and technological progress are widely spread among consumers, the pressures on wages that result from these same forces have been felt very differently by different classes of Americans.</p>
<p>What’s more, some of the policies that have most benefited the rich have little to do with greater competition or economic efficiency. Fortunes on Wall Street have grown so large in part because of implicit government protection against catastrophic losses, combined with the steady elimination of government measures to limit excessive risk-taking, from the 1980s right on through the crash of 2008.</p>
<p>As America’s winners have been separated more starkly from its losers, the idea of compensating the latter out of the pockets of the former has met stiff resistance: that would run afoul of another economic theory, dulling the winners’ incentives and squashing their entrepreneurial spirit; some, we are reminded, might even leave the country. And so, in a neat and perhaps unconscious two-step, many elites have pushed policies that benefit them, by touting theoretical gains to society—then ruled out measures that would distribute those gains widely.</p>
<p>Even as we continue to strive to perfect the meritocracy, signs that things may be moving in the other direction are proliferating. The increasing segregation of Americans by education and income, and the widening cultural divide between families with college-educated parents and those without them, suggests that built-in advantages and disadvantages may be growing. And the concentration of wealth in relatively few hands opens the possibility that much of the next generation’s elite might achieve their status through inheritance, not hard or innovative work.</p>
<p>America remains a magnet for talent, for reasons that go beyond the tax code; and by international standards, none of the tax changes recommended here would create an excessive tax burden on high earners. If a few financiers choose to decamp for some small island-state in search of the smallest possible tax bill, we should wish them good luck."</p>
<p>"</p>
<p>dstark, there’s a lot of truth in many/most of the things you say. However there are problems with the solution - firstly redistribution schemes being proposed also take money from winners and send it to key political supporters rather than necessarily the biggest losers. And since invariably there are more rosy projections in the income and expenditures, at the end of the exercise, you end up in a bigger hole than you started in.</p>
<p>Back to the thread, the US has always had a better standard of living than most in the rest of the world, because those at the top were able to put together companies that created better/more innovative products than anyone else, and those opportunities were geographically available only here. This permitted the remaining 90% of society who were no better than their counterparts across the world to benefit because they were the ones who actually did the grunt work. </p>
<p>What I mean is the guy who physically made the tire in Ohio was no better educated or talented than his counterpart in Vietnam, but there were guys here with the know-how and capital to create the tire factory and train the average citizen, but none there. Since the worker-bee now made good money, he could afford to pay the policeman, the math teacher, and the grocer a wage multiple times more than his counterpart across the world for people with no different skills than their counterparts. </p>
<p>The two things that have shaken this are technology and multinationals. The former has reduced the need for numerous run-of-the-mill positions in factories and offices using few skilled ones.</p>
<p>With multinationals, there is no allegience to anyone but their officers and shareholders, so the few talented, moneyed and skilled were able to get the same job done cheaper elsewhere and pocket the rewards - the few winners. The scope of what lends itself to this model has gone from mundane physical products to an ever expanding universe of goods and services, and anyone who was in these fields here is the real loser. Those whose presence was needed for their jobs, like the ones who change foley catheters, were better protected, but even segments of these have been brought down (at the lower end primarily) by those jumping over the fence from down under and willing to do the same for less.</p>
<p>So we have several unpleasant choices such as:
<p>I’m not sure there’s any strategy that can be objectively said to be the correct one and will work. The challenge is really hard - we have to take the 90% of us who are no better skilled or talented than people abroad or do something that cannot be done better by a machine, and somehow ensure this group continues to command a 100 or 300% premium over his counterpart abroad in order to maintain the lifestyle we’ve enjoyed for the last several generations.</p>
<p>Looking historically, chances are we will take from the ones who are the most hapless or least vocal, and give to the ones who are the best connected or scream the most.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Au contraire, the number of supervisors continues to swell - if my experience and my wife’s experience, both in Fortune 100 companies, is any indication. Where I work, after a rather lengthy and harrowing ride and serious headcount reductions, management (real managers and project/program managers, i.e. non producers) are now a quarter of all employees. This is in a very high tech consumer electronics environment. </p>
<p>Most any layoff policy I have witnessed in the last 30 years has had the mantra “above all, preserve management jobs”. </p>
<p>Player Piano indeed.</p>
<p>“The challenge is really hard - we have to take the 90% of us who are no better skilled or talented than people abroad or do something that cannot be done better by a machine, and somehow ensure this group continues to command a 100 or 300% premium over his counterpart abroad in order to maintain the lifestyle we’ve enjoyed for the last several generations.”#31</p>
<p>I wonder how it is done in Germany, which has a booming manufacturing class, whose average worker pay is $48/hr, and a union worker in the US makes in the thirties.</p>
<p>Incidentally, what the US is undergoing right now is more or less what my birth country experienced a few decades ago. We stopped producing, outsourced everything, brought in guest workers to do any undesirable or hard work, moved away from specializing and the production trades to the ‘service’ economy, tourism, and hospitality. Let’s just say that it did not work very well. </p>
<p>The only difference is that back there, it was not the rich that did us in, but rather, all the ordinary people who voted themselves the benefits, pensions, early retirements, etc. And nobody there worried about the ‘concentration of wealth’ as there was not much wealth to begin with. Tax avoidance was quite the sport, and while illegal, there was little that could be done about it.</p>
<p>Here the only difference is that wealth is still around but is concentrated to the hands of the few, who also vote themselves all kinds of ways to avoid paying their share of taxes legally…</p>
<p>The end result is predictable in both cases - unemployment, stagflation, underemployment, and the like. Another interesting difference is how the masses take it. Here, we have perpetual (and not deserved) optimism and the idea that somehow we’ll all come out of it OK, best country on Earth, we went to the Moon, defeated the Martians, blah, blah. Back then the masses either shake their collective heads stoically, knowing well ahead the country is hosed, or take it to the streets to vent their frustrations, with similar results.</p>
<p>Both countries are very close to my favorite book of all times, “Player Piano”, with only minor differences between them to differentiate one from the other.</p>
<p>I have spent many weeks in Germany working there - one of the reasons I can think of is stability of the workforce. We have a subsidiary there and most of the people there have been around for ever. They’re excellent engineers, not better than us, but very good. But, they do not get the itch every few years to quit or move around or change careers. </p>
<p>Getting into college is not easy, and in fact, whether one is deemed prepared enough to even try for college is a question. If one is put into their vocational track in high school, they will get great apprenticeships and stick to what they do best for many years. Here, we have the luxury of changing majors every semester, changing jobs every year, or moving jobs for a few dollars a month more or because the weather is better. At the end, we created our own disposable workforce. </p>
<p>The Germans are not miracle workers. They work LESS than us on the average (hours) but in my view seem to be more efficient - working for weeks on end in Germany I observed, for example, that there are no personal cellphones visible. Everyone has one, but they don’t take calls during the day unless the house burned down. They work 9 to 5, no weekend or evening hours, and seem to enjoy what they do. If they want weekends and evening hours to work, they bring in the relief pitchers (us :-))</p>
<p>
Interesting imbedded assumptions. Many wealthy people did nothing to accumulate their wealth other than being born into the right family. Even many of those who have built wealth started well ahead of others - e.g. Bill Gates. There’s always the possibility of a poor youth becoming rich, or of a scion of wealth losing it all - but now those odds are long and getting longer. A person born poor has a much higher probability of “failure” than one born rich, regardless of their personal merit. Most people are close to average in most respects, and for most of those people, their status at birth is likely to remain their status for life - except the poor and middle class will become poorer, and the wealthy will become wealthier.</p>
<p>The old platitudes about America - land of opportunity, rising tide lifts all boats, - etc., are becoming increasingly hollow. It’s time to face reality instead of shouting out stale slogans.</p>
<p>^^ thanks for the insight Turbo. I don’t have any personal knowledge of Germany, but while I was talking to someone a few weeks ago about something entirely different - the PIIGS economic crisis in the EU and Germany being the one being looked at to bail them out, I asked what their secret was. </p>
<p>His take on it was that they have a lot of smaller (non-multinational) manufacturing outfits that are very stable for generations and have done well, and do a tremendous amount of exports within EU because they are not so accommodating with China, as for example the US is. Within EU, Germans don’t have such a big handicap in terms of labor benefits and environmental rules, and they are far more productive workers than the rest of the local EU competition. Again, don’t know how accurate this is, but that was his opinion. </p>
<p>Analogy for the US would be if we keep the Chinese imports under control with regulations, and say Louisiana has a history of a lot of small well run factories. They can then do well because they “export” to the other states where the labor and business climates are worse for manufacturing, and not have to as a direct an impact from the subsidies, and lower labor and regulatory costs that a third world manufacturer enjoys.</p>
<p>
Society certainly does not “gain” from the policies you promote, dstark. Look at the economic mess we are in. Keynesian fiscal strategies have been proven to be hogwash, and anyone who fails to see it might as well also believe that the earth is flat. </p>
<p>
The mass wealth redistribution that has been going on has done nothing to help anyone at any end of the economic spectrum except for the uber rich, but people who got behind it were intentionally advocating policies that they THOUGHT would benefit themselves. The problem with focusing on getting some of other people’s money is that it eventually runs out. There are nowhere near enough “rich people” to take from to have any real effect. This is a distraction propagated by people intent upon inspiring class warfare. More often than not if you follow the money you can find that the people who fan the flames the most are directly benefitting. The loser is always the regular folks, who really just want a shot at American opportunity. Well, maybe that used to be the case until a lot of people became brainwashed that if they have less, it must mean that someone else has what should have been theirs. </p>
<p>
Of course. This is due to anti-business policies that destroy the American dream. </p>
<p>Government should be as small and unintrusive as possible in order to allow entrepreneurialism to thrive. Individuals must have confidence that if they take 100% of the risk, they will be protected from others taking the wealth they have bet everything they own to acquire. </p>
<p>The best way to ensure that a game is fair is to have as few rules as possible, and then don’t change them in the middle of it.</p>
<p>Dad<em>o</em>3,</p>
<p>The country is redistributing wealth upward…the country isn’t neutral.</p>
<p>When there are forces in the world that are making 90 percent of Americans poorer and 1 percent richer, it makes no sense for government programs to exacerbate this. Yet, that is what our government has been doing for many years. </p>
<p>Increasing jobs…corporations are not in the business of creating jobs…corporations are in the business of making money. The job creator stuff is bs. There haven’t been any jobs created from the private sector
for over 10 years. Yet, corporate profits are at record highs.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.businessinsider.com/is-this-recovery-or-1937-again-2011-9[/url]”>Is This Recovery or 1937 Again?;
<p>"The government can create jobs…including jobs in the private sector.
Most economists who aren’t political hacks know this.</p>
<p>The standard macroeconomic view is that in recessionary conditions, incremental government spending and tax cuts can stimulate the economy. If the government spends an additional million dollars to build a bridge, that spending directly adds to GDP. But that is only the beginning: the spending on materials and labor is income to suppliers, contractors, and workers, and some of this income will be spent on consumer goods and services, which then further increases GDP. This in turn becomes income for other workers, who similarly increase their spending, again adding to GDP. This process suggests a “fiscal multiplier,” typically associated with Keynesian macroeconomics, such that every one-dollar increase in government spending results in a greater-than-one-dollar increase in GDP. Especially when the economy is stuck at ZIRP, so that private borrowing and spending are particularly weak, the multiplier can be large…
Even before the new administration took office, its economic team had been considering a fiscal stimulus. Romer’s evaluation indicated that a $1.2 trillion package was needed. However, President-elect Obama’s political advisers insisted that this was not feasible, and the numbers were shaved. Once in office, President Obama proposed a $675–$775 billion package to stimulate the economy.32
Intervention here: When I hear statements that “the stimulus failed”, I think it important to recall that between the election and inaugural day, business economists revised downward their estimates of GDP<em>[2]. The proper metric is then to compare against the counterfactual as of the time of implementation, as described in</em>here,here<em>and</em>here.
…
Some policymakers and economists believed that any government intervention, even in so troubled an economy, was unjustified. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex.) complained that “the US government just won’t allow the correction the economy needs.” He invoked the recession of 1921, which was deep but short, in Paul’s view because the government permitted insolvent companies to fail. “No one remembers that one,” he averred. “They’ll remember this one, because it will last 15 years.”34<em>Paul’s view was reminiscent of the position of the “liquidationists” of the early 1930s, who were led by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Mellon’s advice to President Herbert Hoover was typical: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate … purge the rottenness out of the system.”35</em>The idea was almost moralistic: bad loans, bad debts, bad businesses, and bad deals had to be exorcised before the economy could right itself. Satisfying as such a scorched-earth policy might be (at least to those not caught in its path), few serious economists or policymakers ever considered it.36
Some theoretical objections to an active fiscal stimulus were based on the view that government spending would inevitably be wasteful, providing no real benefit to the population. Others emphasized the expectation that increased government spending would be counteracted by an offsetting reduction in private spending. The budget deficits that would result from tax cuts or more government spending would drive interest rates higher and reduce, or “crowd out,” private investment and spending. The economists who held these positions were generally hostile to traditional Keynesian views, especially because of the Keynesian inclination to assume that there were market failures that government could correct…
But among most economists, there was a general consensus on the desirability of some form of active fiscal policy. In a February 2009 Wall Street Journal poll of economists, 68 percent said that the proposed stimulus package was about the right size or too small. Only 31 percent said that it was too large. Most economists in the policy and business circles viewed a stimulus package as something that could soften the blows of a deep downturn and hasten the arrival of a recovery.38
Well, we know about how much interest rates have risen in response to the stimulus package<em>[3]</em>[4]. And with that decline in long term interest rates, we know how much interest-rate-induced crowding out of investment has occurred: nil. Instead, the drama we seem to be witnessing now is a replay of 1937*[Krugman], when policymakers overly worried about inflation and deficits withdrew stimulus too early. Whether we will (re-)learn that lesson is the question of the moment."</p>
<p>Kluge
The “assumptions” you speak of are just your own interpretation. I have no problem with someone being wealthy as a result of inheritance. Why do you? If a person through his cleverness, hard work, and willingness to risk all he has wins at the same game everyone plays, why should he not have as among his benefits the chance to freely pass on that wealth to his children or grandchildren? Take away that inspiration and again you have hurt the American dream. Why should a man in his 40’s – 70’s keep toiling away and risk the roof over his head and all he has invested if he loses the ability to pass the fruits of his sacrifices onto his offspring? I am OK with respecting that a wealthy persons parent or grandparent played the game well. </p>
<p>It is unethical to cast a greedy eye on other people’s wealth (even inherited). This isn’t feudal Europe. Please. I think it would be lacking in character if I blamed what I have or don’t have on anyone else but myself. There are exceptions, of course.</p>