Wealth Distribution

Gary, it's also about people retaining the fruits of their savings, investing (which, by definition, is deferring consumption), ideas, actions and labors, rather than having it confiscated by the political powers to distribute to others who didn't earn it to buy their reelection.

i always ask, how much do you need? i think most here are happy to have a modest home, decent car, health insurance, and some time to enjoy our lives. i don't understand what's behind the need to accumulate massive wealth. greed, power, i've got to prove myself to daddy? i just don't get it.

everyone gets only one vote

Talk specifics.

Gary, it's also about people retaining the fruits of their savings, investing (which, by definition, is deferring consumption), ideas, actions and labors, rather than having it confiscated by the political powers to distribute to others who didn't earn it to buy their reelection.

Reagan slashed taxes, slashed regulations, gave welfare to Corporations with the direct consequence of Wealth concentration

The Middle Class needs a lobbyist group to make sure that we are heard

the voice and the power to do anything they want

A large part of the reason that the very wealthy become, and stay that way, is because they manipulate the rules, so as to give themselves an advantage. They create very complex legal protections for certain income streams, that no one who doesn't access very high skill and costly legal talents. It doesn't make sense that "access is equal" when the smallest unit of participation is 10 million dollars.

Not sure this is true. That's a strong statement. Romney didn't get elected, so as a case in point, they don't get anything they want.

A sufficient part of the electorate got what that part of the electorate wanted within the confines of a two party system.

Wealth distribution was controlled by higher taxes on higher incomes and regulations

Wealth equality would be monumentally unfair

And Ken, I most certianly do not know, much less believe, that the most wealthy achieved their wealth by bending the rules. That, too, is an article of faith by the Enviers, with rather scant evidence to back it up.

And Ken, I most certianly do not know, much less believe, that the most wealthy achieved their wealth by bending the rules. That, too, is an article of faith by the Enviers, with rather scant evidence to back it up.

The universe isn't fair!

Let's hope the the indolent, insecure, and ignorant do not get there way with the ruinous redistribution they are being mass conditioned to desire. It would only lead to a stagnation of creativity, a decline in ambition, and the poor only getting poorer along with us all.

“We propose to destroy the capitalist and save the man. We want a system in which the worker shall get what he produces and the capitalist shall produce what he gets.”

At the same time that the rich started earning more, (CEO power, global corporatism, Wall St bailouts, deregulation and loopholes) they spent some of that on lobbying politicians to get even more loopholes, deregulation, and lower taxes. Now we have lower taxes on unearned income (Buffet was exactly right), "carried interest", pension defaults, FDIC bailouts, etc.

They all, at one time or another spouted socialist ideals while enacting policies that resulted in the death of millions of their citizens.

Property and Plunder

Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor; by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is the origin of property.

But it is also true that a man may live and satisfy his wants by seizing and consuming the products of the labor of others. This process is the origin of plunder.

Now since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain — and since labor is pain in itself — it follows that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. History shows this quite clearly. And under these conditions, neither religion nor morality can stop it.

When, then, does plunder stop? It stops when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor.

It is evident, then, that the proper purpose of law is to use the power of its collective force to stop this fatal tendency to plunder instead of to work. All the measures of the law should protect property and punish plunder.

But, generally, the law is made by one man or one class of men. And since law cannot operate without the sanction and support of a dominating force, this force must be entrusted to those who make the laws.

This fact, combined with the fatal tendency that exists in the heart of man to satisfy his wants with the least possible effort, explains the almost universal perversion of the law. Thus it is easy to understand how law, instead of checking injustice, becomes the invincible weapon of injustice. It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people, their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.

Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor; by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is the origin of property.

But it is also true that a man may live and satisfy his wants by seizing and consuming the products of the labor of others. This process is the origin of plunder.

Victims of Lawful Plunder

Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter — by peaceful or revolutionary means — into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.

Woe to the nation when this latter purpose prevails among the mass victims of lawful plunder when they, in turn, seize the power to make laws! Until that happens, the few practice lawful plunder upon the many, a common practice where the right to participate in the making of law is limited to a few persons. But then, participation in the making of law becomes universal. And then, men seek to balance their conflicting interests by universal plunder. Instead of rooting out the injustices found in society, they make these injustices general. As soon as the plundered classes gain political power, they establish a system of reprisals against other classes. They do not abolish legal plunder. (This objective would demand more enlightenment than they possess.) Instead, they emulate their evil predecessors by participating in this legal plunder, even though it is against their own interests.

It is as if it were necessary, before a reign of justice appears, for everyone to suffer a cruel retribution — some for their evilness, and some for their lack of understanding.
The Results of Legal Plunder

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.

What are the consequences of such a perversion? It would require volumes to describe them all. Thus we must content ourselves with pointing out the most striking.

In the first place, it erases from everyone's conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them.

The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are "just" because law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it. Slavery, restrictions, and monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them but also among those who suffer from them.

see, socialists conceive of wealth (NOT money(money is only one manifestation of wealth used to ease commercial transactions)) as finite: there's a giant pile of riches from which some people take more than they deserve or need or use unethical means to take from the pile or keep others from getting their "fair share"

why, with the full course of history from which to learn, do you still believe the government is immune to corruption and that bureaucrats are more trustworthy with your money?

Of course full socialism would be would be terrible too. Govt inefficiency in everything and lack of motivation for people to work and innovate and retain the fruits of their labor.

Where is the incentive to work in capitalism, when the fruit of your labor is confiscated and given to the capitalist?

And exactly what does that mean?

Socialism is an economic system characterised by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy.[1] "Social ownership" may refer to cooperative enterprises, common ownership, state ownership, or citizen ownership of equity.[2] There are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them.[3]

Is Sweden a Socialist country?
Answer: No. Since about 1935 Sweden has had a capitalist economy governed by social democratic policies, including with high, redistributive income tax rates and general welfare benefits (even when under conservative governments). After 1935, a collective bargaining scheme was set up which gave both unions and businesses representation and a forum to mediate disputes. This form of class collaboration was intended to stave off socialist ideas of abolishing capitalism for a socialist economic system. The majority of industries in Sweden are privately-owned, with very few collectively-owned and publicly-owned firms.

Clever comic, but it leads to more questions than answers.

First, it doesn't answer my original question: How much money does [the worker] get?

Capital doesn't stimulate production. It is the result of production. The real problem is that the result of production (capital) is stolen from those who produce it.

Money cannot produce money, Assets cannot produce more assets. The only thing that can produce is labour.

It is tempting, and understandably so, for those people who have worked their rings off and look at the rewards for their own labour, to say to themselve "this is capital - the reward for my labour" and this is, of course, true. No socialist worth his salt is going to deny anyone the fruits of their own labour. The rewards justly belong to the producer of the wealth - which is precisely why these rewards can never justly belong to those whose only "input" into a process is capital.

This is the source of a lot of muddled thinking. It's the muddled idea that workers who do well for themselves, by their own effort are "middle class". They are not. They are simply successful and relatively well off workers. The middle class are those who seek to earn an income from investing capital, instead of working for a living. In a nutshell, they are bludgers who seek to tax production. Furthermore, unlike elected governments who at least have a mandate to tax (by free consent of the governed), the capitalists have never been given the free consent of the true creators of capital (the workers) to tax their labour.

The proof of this is self evident. If I add my pile of money to your pile of money, If I add my iron ore deposit to the stash of gold you have hidden in your chimney, without adding labour to the equation, the result is obvious - Diddly Squat.

Even if the workers did freely consent to this theft of the fruits of their labour, it would not solve the central economic problem of capitalism - it doesn't work. This is why we have repeated boom-bust cycles, people lose their investments and the whole cycle repeats itself with a whole new bunch of suckers to invest their money and an inexplicably willing next generation of workers who acquiesce to this absurdity as a result of relentless propaganda exhorting them to be patriotic, not to be "unamerican", not to be goddammed "pinkos", "commies" and any other totally meaningless epithets that the right wing can come up with. " John Locke's tacit consent" ?? I don't think so. This is onerous persuasion. It's intellectual repression. It's the implicit threat of some undefined disenfranchisement of those who dare to refuse to conform - those who are "unamerican", god will curse you, you don't belong here, you are not part of the herd...................

I haven't had time, frankly, to read the whole thread, but I'd be willing to bet that it (in places, and from the usual suspects) follows the usual hackneyed formula of comparative morality, eg. because Joe Stalin was a monster, then it "logically follows" that socialism is fundamentally at fault. (This makes about as much sense as the Wright Brothers saying to themselves "Because powered flight hasn't been made to work successfully to date, we shouldn't try to build on the experience of others and see if we can't get an aeroplane to fly".

Today's Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped over yesterday's record high. It's a "golden age" for corporate profits, which are the largest share of the economy since 1950. But the portion that goes to employees is close to the lowest since 1966. Both liberal and conservative economists are worried because the gap between the rich and the poor is growing so fast. The gap is also alarming Democrats — and some Republicans.

...Your point of veiw on wealth distribution reminds me of the time when Dan Quayle , on the campaign trail , jumped out of his limo at a fast food restaurant that had a help wanted sign posted...Dan wanted to prove that there were jobs and used this as a sound bite opportunity...In my world i see the cost of living sky-rocketing and my wages buying less and less..I'm sure many of the posters here are in the same boat..? Sincerely...RJ

.I occasionally work weekends in addition to the 50 hrs. i work during the week while finding time to ski.

And Ken, I most certianly do not know, much less believe, that the most wealthy achieved their wealth by bending the rules. That, too, is an article of faith by the Enviers, with rather scant evidence to back it up.

How do "the rich" make that happen? And what prevents anybody else from doing the exact same thing, and sheltering their investments, too?

Well Mr. Hahn i suppose you have shared and equally redistributed the fruits of your labor and good luck and as a result are contented to be in the median, neither holding more than your neighbors nor wanting what they hold?

Quote You could take all the money in America, divide it up evenly so that every person has the exact same ammount, and within a year or two, the same people who were poor before would be poor again, and the same people who were wealthy before would be wealthy again.

I don't know who first discovered that truth, but my Mom used to remind me of it back when I was a young, long-haired liberal shithead.Here

Explain please. How do "the rich" make that happen? And what prevents anybody else from doing the exact same thing, and sheltering their investments, too?

You could take all the money in America, divide it up evenly so that every person has the exact same ammount, and within a year or two, the same people who were poor before would be poor again, and the same people who were wealthy before would be wealthy again.

I don't know who first discovered that truth, but my Mom used to remind me of it back when I was a young, long-haired liberal shithead.

Well Mr. Hahn i suppose you have shared and equally redistributed the fruits of your labor and good luck and as a result are contented to be in the median, neither holding more than your neighbors nor wanting what they hold? So, if this ideal is followed to its logical conclusion where is the incentive to create, to excel,to achieve a dream?

"Real esate...? Now there's a noble pursuit....Skimming the cream off the top and speculating to the high heavens."

You might consider the case of capital gains. Hugely biased towards the rich.

To save taxes on a million dollar property:

1. Buy a million dollar property.

2. When you sell, only be taxed on the profit at a very low rate.


There are those who say, well, it is passive income, based on investing the money.

HOWEVER, the same is EXACTLY true for interest income, which is taxed at FULL RATES.

Guess where the poor and middle class tend to make most of their passive income, and guess where the rich make most of theirs......the rich have their investments sheltered, the middle class and lower class do not.

THAT is what I'm talking about, in terms of stacking the deck.

I am opposed, however, to the idea, expressed by some, above, that those who won the "vaginal [really uterine?] lottery" somehow don't deserve, and therefor should lose, most of their wealth. If we take the lottery analogy to its Rawlsian conclusion, the only differences in income and wealth are due to winning or losing that lottery. After all, if you're smart, it's because you inherited intelligence. If you have the capacity to work hard or to defer gratification, it's because you inherited that capacity.

Sooo, let me get this right, you f*#k off, don't get your sh#t together and those of us working our tails off should give you our money?

This is a classic example of a non sequitur.

the capitalist collects the capital we produce

No. The government may collect some of the capital we produce, but workers produce capital only if they save some of it, just like anyone else.

Even though I believe that the "birth lottery" has very definite winners and losers, I don't think that, alone, accounts for differences in wealth

Think about that for a moment. Historians start with Cleopatra and the Pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country.

Here's the list:

01. John Rockefeller, 1839.
02. Andrew Carnegie, 1835.
28.Frederick Weyerhaeuser, 1834.
33. Jay Gould, 1836.
34. Marshall Field, 1834.
35. George Baker, 1840.
36. Hetty Green, 1834.
44. James G. Fair, 1831.
54. Henry H. Rogers, 1840.
57. J.P. Morgan, 1837.
58. Oliver Payne, 1839.
62. George Pullman, 1831.
64. Peter Widener, 1834.
65. Philip Armor, 1832.

What's going on here? The answer is obvious, if you think about it. In the 1860's and 1870's, the American economy went through perhaps the greatest transformation in its history. This was when the railways were built, and when Wall Street emerged. It was when industrial manufacturing started in earnest. It was when all the rules by which the traditional economy functioned were broken and remade. What that list says is that it really matters how old you were when that transformation happened.

If you were born in the late 1840's, you missed it. You were too young to take advantage of that moment. If you were born in the 1820's, you were too old: your mindset was shaped by the pre-Civil War paradigm. But there is a particular, narrow nine-year window that was just perfect for seeing the potential that the future held. All of the 14 men and women on that list had vision and talent. But they also were given an extraordinary opportunity. . .

This is actually rather stupid. Wealth equality would be monumentally unfair.

It's stupid to assume that there is no choice between monumentally warped wealth inequality or complete wealth equality. You'd have us have only one extreme or the other.

Learned some basics in my teens, dollar cost averaging, diversification, dividends yield.

At 21 I added a digit to my net worth, and even though I spent half my twenties living out of a Ford Pinto my wealth grew ever so slowly.
At 42, another digit added, and if things go as they are seeming to, at 63 I might have one more.

Wealth is easy (although execution can be hard)

1) live well within your means. Pay cash or DO WITHOUT! (the key to happiness actually).

2) a part of everything you earn is yours to keep





Currently my portfolio is peaking and my gun collection doing even better.

You can whine or you can make it happen.
The US is still the land of opportunity and might remain so for another decade or two, but others are passing us by

Gary, we obviously have different definitions of capital.

In classical and neoclassical economics, capital is one of the factors of production. The others are land, labour and, according to some proponents, organization, entrepreneurship, or management. Goods with the following features are capital:

It can be used in the production of other goods (this is what makes it a factor of production).
It was produced, in contrast to "land", which refers to naturally occurring resources such as geographical locations and minerals.
It is not used up immediately in the process of production unlike raw materials or intermediate goods.

There are more capitalists out there than one might think.

There is no single answer, but it certainly was not because the the system was "rigged" in the favor of these few.

AMARTYA SEN, Ph.D.

Nobel Laureate
Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Harvard University

Social Welfare Economics:
A Discussion of Health Care, Education, and Freedoms

FRIDAY, March 15 @ 12:00 noon

NRB Auditorium
(Room 132 Neuroscience Research Building)
UCLA

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his work on social welfare economics and social choice theory. Dr. Sen is one of the most economics and philosophical thinkers of our era. Among other topics, he is known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of real or perceived shortages of food. He helped to create the United NationsHuman Development Index. In 2012, he became the first non-U.S. citizen recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Dr. Sen's work focuses on the interconnection of social developments and freedoms with economic developments. We will discuss issues of health care,education, the US economy, and issues related to gender and minority inequalities.

Ryan budget’s tax cuts would benefit the very wealthy, nonpartisan group says

The tax plan embedded in the House Republican budget would cut taxes by $5.7 trillion over the next decade, with the benefits flowing disproportionately to very wealthy households, according to a new analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

Taxpayers earning more than $1 million a year would benefit the most from the GOP tax plan, the analysis shows, reaping an average $400,000 tax break that would send their after-tax income soaring by nearly 20 percent.

Those earning more than $1 million a year would gain the most from the GOP plan, Tax Policy Center says.

Meanwhile, taxpayers earning between $40,000 and $50,000 a year — closer to the national average — would see their taxes cut by about $666 on average, increasing their after-tax income by less than 2 percent.

Capital is an input, not an output.

Capital does not exist until someone makes the decision to risk wealth in an attempt to create more wealth.

Money cannot produce money, Assets cannot produce more assets. The only thing that can produce is labour.

Off-hand, I can't think of any important good or service in our modern economy that would be realistically available without capital.

We can gripe that some people don't "deserve" the wealth they have, but the fact remains that without wealth, there is no capital, and there is no modern economy.

Without someone accumulating enough money to make all these expenditures, and someone willing to take the economic risk of success or failure, there will be no enterprise. In my economic terminology, that expenditure needed to produce a product or service for sale constitutes capital.

But there is another fallacy in your argument; namely that anybody could shoot up all my ammo in a day or two.

The stuff on my climbing rack is the result of resources and labor but, by my definition, it's not capital.

Not all wealth is capital.

More importantly, there is no testable hypothesis showing a causal relationship between a higher nominal maximum marginal rate and GDP growth. It is simply a nonsense correlation

Marx was locked in his 1850's conception that labor was just sweat and not brains.

War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly pops up on iron after a storm.

IF this is true it is very damning evidence that the rich 1% are cheating, controlling the economy, and stealing from the middle class.

will happen in Italy, Spain, and Europe.

Has the standard of living for the average American changed for the better or worse in the past 100 years?

I've written over and over on this theme, but its true: people sense something is terribly wrong, particularly with America. But their aim is totally off, so they are shooting at their own foot instead of the target. They blame businesses, capitalism, and the free market rather than cronyism, vast government overreach, wasteful spending, and a culture of getting everything without doing the work to get it.
When you're raised to think you are a special gleaming diamond, a unique wonderful snowflake that gets a graduation ceremony for going from the 5th to 6th grade, and a prize for simply playing in a game instead of winning, the idea of having to work hard to accomplish something is alien. Its outside your entire world's reference, you have nothing to compare it to.
Raised in a bubble of protection to keep them from skinning a knee, told they are golden star dust from birth, and praised for doing only what they ought, young people grow into middle aged people without a clue how life works or what it takes to make it.
So you have people on the streets angry that they're expected to pay back a loan, angry that they have to pay for a house, angry that they can't live on that McDonald's fry cook job, and calling for the government to fix it all.

his inequality which is getting progressively worse, does not pose to you any limit: if the trend continues, ALL the wealth, and ALL the effective income will go to the 1%, as an extreme.

Surely you don't accept that as being good, because you and me, my friend, will not be addressed as "Lord".

So what is the limit that you think is healthy? There must be some.

Otherwise, we move to a royalty-servant system.

That's exactly what economic theory would predict, since the supply of labor rose faster than the supply of capital.

We have people with Masters degrees and Doctorates unable to find work.

I submit for discussion that this grand human experiment we call capitalism has very perhaps reached its maximum ability to provide "full" employment (5%) in America, that we have entered a new economic reality for the foreseeable future

The causes, the reasons for this new chronic and unsolvable mass unemployment issue cannot be solved by government, nor can it be solved by the private sector, it just is what it is.

So it kinda cracks me up when someone suggests I've been sold a bill of goods believing in capitalism.

Your very post is overwhelming proof that capitalism exists on a large scale, and that it is working.