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fordy on 02 August 2011
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Viper1 said:
fordy said:
Viper1 said:

How did society make the parents rich?  Did society decide those people were going to be rich and make it that way for them?   Or did those parents use ingenuity (as you noted earlier) to achieve their wealth?  Did their ingenuity also perhaps provide that society with a very well valued product or service?  How do you separate the diligent wealthy from the exploitative wealthy?

Let's look at it from an employment perspective.  Those wealthy parents may have employed other workers enabling them to live a decent life.  Is that not payment enough?   Is it not a gift to society the enabling of work itself?   Keep in mind that I say work, not exploitation.  You must separate the two.  I sincerely hope you do not consider all those who are wealthy to have gained it solely through exploitation?  

Society are the consumers. Yes the wealth was collected through ingenuity, and as a reward, they live the rest of their life enjoying it. Does that mean their children deserve the same? Depends. What was their ingenuity? If they display ingenuity, what are they worrying about. That should be enough confidence that they could follow in their parent's footsteps. If they're particularly lazy and believe the world owes them, why should they get it? Society has most likely done more to get the parents where they were.

Work itself is what generates wealth, not enabling the work. If the work wasn't there, people would use the incentive of being paid hansomely for ingenuity to work towards it. 

Let's focus on the bold for a moment.  If their children do not deserve it, who does?   And why does one deserve something when someone else doesn't?   Further, if you take the inheritence and property away, then doesn't that make the child now poor and just as derserving of their share as anyone else?   Lastely, how do you auction off a mansion, a yacht, a business?   Esepecially if no one else is wealthy enough to afford it?   And say a poor family buys a mansion at auction and then sells it off immdiately for several million.  How did that balance things?   That was a tranfer of wealth from rich, to poor, to rich in very short time.

I want to bring something else in now.  Moral hazard.   You saw that the rich create work and then enjoy the fruits of the labor of their employees.  This is a moral hazard that breeds laziness and contempt to you.  But if people are given a balance of wealth, does that not also breed laziness?   Why strive to work hard if A) the government will take care of you anyway or B) your hard work gives very little to show for it?

As I mentioned before, it would not be a full distribution across society more an incentive for people to strive to become entrepreneurs. Ingenuity is stagnant at the moment because the good ideas are being shot down by the semi-good ideas with a lot of money behind them. The current wealthy don't want the best of ingenuity. They want small increments of technology that will promise a higher return, and then introduce the better technology at a later date to slug people again.

I didn't say it was getting evenly distributed. I said the comunity gets the earnings. From them on, what they decide to do with it is another argument altogether. I'd like to see it put up as incentive for ingenuity, promote competition of technologies and let the consumer decide.