I Totally Support the Occupy Movement...Follow

Yeah but in order for continued expansion of wealth to the 1% at current rates and to also continue to have enough pie for 99% to stay content in order to continue building the buy bigger and buying their little piece, the size of the pie will have to grown exponentially.

How big is your pie pan?

It'll have to grow in proportion. That may be exponential. It may not. But in any case, it's not "infinite". So saying that my position fails because there aren't infinite resources is fallacious, right?



How big is it now? Who cares? We're speaking in abstract terms here. Over a period of time, the relative wealth held by the rich versus everyone else has grown. But during that same time period, the standard of living of everyone else has grown. In analogous terms, each person has more pie than a similar person did back in the past. So who cares what the ratio of our slice is to the whole pie?


Why obsess on that? Isn't your own quality of life more important? Let me put it the other way around? What if we collapsed the economy entirely but gave everyone an equal share? So you get to live in an unheated shack, with rotten food, no clean water, and no hope, but everyone else is in the exact same boat, so it's fine? Clearly, relative economic outcome is *not* the best way to measure the economic success of a system. So how about we not use that so much?

I wonder if the top 1% would rather be told they can't be paid millions every year, instead of the possibility of getting taxed at rates lower, then they were in the 80's.

When you watch the CEO of the company you work for make more in one year, then you may make in your lifetime, it doesn't take long to get upset and think of speaking up. Add the fact that most of the middle class have seen their spending power drop over the last few years, to the point they can no longer dream of keeping up with the Jones, we have a power keg just waiting for someone to light a match.

Sure I could spend the little money I have on a new TV or fancy smart phone, but that doesn't justified the widening income gap.

Of course if the OWS protesters were smart, they would do what unemployed workers did back in the 30's and camp out on the Mall in DC. Right now they are only making workers trying to get to their jobs upset.

It was me who linked it - David Frum - here for people who missed it

I really strongly disliked the guy for a long time but this essay really redeemed him. He nailed a lot of the problems with the right wing ideology festering in the states right now
-- like this quote:



Edited, Nov 21st 2011 5:31pm by Olorinus

And some which do. I'll point them out to you.



So you acknowledge that your method of distinguishing between "good rich people" and "bad rich people is based on whether they "took" their wealth. And you wonder why I talk about giving/taking?

Um... I'd also question your assessment anyway. Somewhat by definition, in order for a banker to make money, he first has to give it (loan actually) to someone else. It just seems like you're being circular here. You're defining who is good or bad based on whether they gained their wealth by taking it, but you seem to decide whether an industry "takes" wealth based on whether you like them or not. Is there an objective measure going on here at all? Cause I don't see it.



Yes, of course. But not because they're entitled to it, but because it's their money. We can quibble over how they got that money, but the word "entitled" in this context suggests something you don't have, but should have. Which is the "giving" part of the "giving/taking" I spoke of earlier. You seem to want to define money a rich person has as being 'given' to them, but I disagree with that assessment. More on that later.



Again, I'd stop using the word "entitled" if I were you. It has a meaning that isn't exactly correct here. Your argument is correct though, under any economic system, a person "gains" money (or equivalent) based on the rules of the economic system itself. If our system says that people with big noses get twice as much as everyone else, then that's the system. I get it.



Ok. But here's where the giving/taking bit comes in. The free market is called a "free market" because it requires very little regulation to operate. The objective is to make it as close to what economics would be absent any rules at all, while still protecting property rights and preventing abusive behaviors. The core concept of "earning" money isn't part of the construct though. It's based on very real factors that apply whether there's a "system" in place or not.

If you are alone in the wilderness and you don't produce enough food, shelter, etc to survive then you will die. No system needs to be constructed to make this happen. If you produce lots of those things, you will survive, perhaps even thrive. A group of people is an extension of that one person. They must collectively produce enough for all of them to survive. Following this so far?

What the free market does is attempt to reward those who produce the most for the whole by applying as much of the rules of a solitary survival model as possible. The more you produce, the better your outcome is. The same should apply to a larger society. The thinking is that the more people who are producing more things, the better *everyone* is. But that only works if we allow those who produce the most to retain the most.

This is not as arbitrary as you're making it out to be. And I think it's a mistake to say that such a system is no more legitimate or "fair" than any other. This smacks of people who try to argue that rights/liberties/freedoms are also just arbitrary social constructs and can be whatever society's whim of the moment is. While it's true that we *can* make them whatever we want them to be, it's also true that some sets of those things follow a set of objective rules that derive from natural laws, while others do not. It's wrong to pretend that they're all equally valuable or useful.



So a communist revolution?

You know what the biggest problem with a communist revolution is? Actually convincing people that they're being exploited to such a degree that they must rise up. This is hard to do when most of the population has never known real hunger, or want, nor been denied basics, and in fact most of whom live lives which would be considered ridiculously luxurious in historical context.

But good luck on that! I don't think it's going to happen. You will, however, potentially get people to give one group of politicians power instead of another and if you think that there's more to this than that, you are horribly naive.



Ok. But which is it? Either you're chucking out the whole "system" based on simply allowing people to retain whatever the market will bear for their labor in favor of some other supposedly more equitable alternative, or you're not. But you cant or wont say exactly what that alternative is, and when I point out that problems with it, you insist that your not proposing anything that extreme.


But it has to be one way or the other. Either it's a minor change, in which case the "rules" of the system I've been talking about are still in place, and the assessments in terms of "giving/taking" are valid to make *or* you're chucking the whole thing out, in which case it's legitimate for me to question what that other system would be, how it would encourage people to produce, who would be in charge of deciding what a "fair" distribution of wealth should be, and dozens of other questions which seem to always be left unanswered. You can't have it both ways.



I think that's a false comparison though. Do you think people will be less likely to be afraid that their next pay check wont cover their rent if the rich aren't as rich relative to them? Unless you assume that by making the rich less rich, you'll make everyone else a bit more rich? But that's the zero sum game issue I spoke of earlier. I don't agree that things work that way. In fact, I don't think you agree things work that way. Heck, I could provide a clear example showing that it doesn't if you want. It's not even hard math. Even if we assumed that we could just take X dollars from "the rich" and give that money to everyone else to help them out, and it wouldn't affect any other economic factors at all (patently false), it would not change the likelihood that the same percentage of the population will end out in the same overdrawn, paycheck to paycheck, always worrying about money situation.


And that assumes that doing that wont reduce the number of paychecks available in the first place (which it would).


I keep coming back to the same problem. It's easy to point out problems with something. It's a hell of a lot harder to propose an alternative and show that it would be better and would introduce fewer problems itself. But if you can't do that, then complaining about the current system is just that: Complaining. It's completely useless in terms of actually solving anything. The fallacy here is that of assuming that anyone starves because someone has 30B in the bank *and* that if you somehow eliminated that $30B in that person's bank it would help the alleged starvation going on. This is often assumed to be true, but very few people even attempt to argue it. Usually because the argument breaks down very quickly. It's easier to just pretend it must be true and rail about rich people having lots of money while poor people don't.


Sorry. I'm going to ask you to explain why you think that's a problem and what you think we should do differently to prevent this problem from occurring. Because while you may insist that my free market system is arbitrary, within that system the same rules that allow that guy to have $30B in his bank account, allow you and me to have $100, or $1000, or $10,000, or to own a car, or a home, or anything at all. If we take away his property rights, aren't we taking away ours as well?

Edited, Nov 21st 2011 6:21pm by gbaji

If he saved 200k/yr with no penalties to the company, then they didn't need those workers. Making the company more efficient is worth a bonus, perhaps not to that relative level.

What generally happens in this case is that the workers who don't get laid off have more work to do and don't any more money for doing it. The companies subtly remind people that 'they are lucky to have a job in this economy' and manage to get away with it.

...and why is this so important to you?'

I know you know the story of the tragedy of the commons. The resources that corporations are using up - air, water, land, minerals, mountains, people etc etc, start out belonging to all of us equally.

The relative wealth of the rich only grows because they're using a disproportionate share of the resources. So, even if we could imagine a self-cleaning world with limitless resources, the fact still remains that the corporations are being greedy and taking more of the pie than they need. That's inefficient....and besides, it's pretty clear, our resources are not unlimited.






Edited, Nov 22nd 2011 3:42pm by Elinda

Something about this seems kind of odd. While not the full reason it is a fact that rich people generally cut payroll in order to make money, or prevent bleeding money. So yes some of the poor in this country are a result of Rich people taking others livelihoods. Instead of taking a 30K hit a year for employing someone they just dump them to save a buck.

This isn't just from an economic downturn, I see robots replace people all the time in my line of work. Robots are cheap, and more reliably consistent, they do nothing but make money. For every job a robot has, a rich person has taken food from someones mouth.

I'm with the Sasquatch on this one. The logic applied by a lot of you guys here is totally bizarre.

Should I turn in my Dem card?

Oh I dunno cutting people from jobs means they have no (or limited) money. A rich dude will cut 10 guys on the floor before he takes a cut in pay.

(its not so much taking from the poor as it is helping to create poor in the first place.)


Edited, Nov 22nd 2011 2:12pm by rdmcandie

Ugly's a total Republican. Trufax.