| JazzB1987 said: Don't you understand what an example is? Do you want me to mention every single amount of money that I think would be okay? Actually, they'd need to wait a lot longer... people who earn 10k a month do not earn enough to save 100% of their income. That's only 120k a year, right? I'm assuming your talking dollars, but even if we're talking pounds, I know for a fact that £120k does not give you the means to live the sort of life you think it does. You see I don't understand what you're advocating, here. Clearly you have some kind of issue with capitalism... but the first example you give is an example of how big Government leads to corruption? Or do you just think that some kind of socialism will work as long as the "right people" are in control (which always means people like you, or even you)... I'm sure no other progressive in the history of the world has ever thought this. The fact of the matter is, the "right people" do not exist, they are not a part of humanity. Not even you, my friend. Not even me. Again, this is statism, so you're referring to the actions of Government. I'm curious, though, why you think it's okay to "steal" the property of people today (through taxation), but the Dukes who accumulated their wealth through the stealing of property from ages past is evil? Which part is the evil part, here? The theft, or the accumulation of wealth? And the factory just fell out of the sky, right? Cast down from the mountain side, for the good of us all? Businesses take a lot of effort and capital to build. The people who worked those countless hours and invested the capital for their own purposes. If they did it to get rich, what's the problem? Would you have preferred that they didn't do this at all, and produced neither the jobs that the factory needed, nor the goods that the factory produced? How would people be any better off, then? Do you? Because the policies that your implictly supporting seem to support it.
That's not how it happened, at all. What happened was the industrial revolution. What you don't understand is that wages are pretty much parallel with productivity. Wages didn't start increasing until the technology developed which allowed workers to become more productive. Even in the modern era, the differences in the wages of the average American and the average Chinese are roughly the same as the average productivity for each worker. What I mean by this, is that say you're working in a factory making shoes, but you have no machines, and you're making them by hand... you are paid 10 cents a shoe. If you make a shoe an hour, you make 10 cents an hour. If, however, that factory bought a machine that, when combined with you labour, produced 40 shoes per hour, you'd make $4 an hour. You might not receive this $4 an hour directly into your pay packet... it could come to you through other means: improved working conditions, extra benefits (say: health insurance), fewer working hours, increased holiday pay, etc (the "mix" of these will often depend on Government policy... if the Government imposes high income taxes, for example, you will more likely see your increased productivity in the alternate ways... this is part of the reason why Americans of similar productivity earn more than their European counterparts, but often have fewer paid holidays, etc).
I actually agree with this. If you've earned the money, you can do what you see fit with it (this includes, btw, giving that money to your children when you die). However, if you've made this money through corruption, or cronyism (the same thing), then you do not "deserve" that wealth. My only problem with this is that your impicit policies would lead to MORE corruption and cronyism and FEWER people earning their money legitimately.
Well, this depends on how you define "really rich". If it's people on 10k a month, then, no they haven't got it for the wrong reasons. Most of them are legitimate small and medium business owners, most of them earned their money by providing others with goods that they wanted. On the other end of the scale, you have the Bill Gates and the Larry Pages of the world... these people have got their money because they have improved the quality of lives of millions, maybe billions, substantially. This is what that money represents. What you are seeing, though, is a growth in the number of multi-millionaires who got their wealth illegitimately. The guys with the friends in Congress (and the Congress, themselves)
Paying minimum wage doesn't make you corrupt. Corruption is the use of force for financial gain. Corruption does lead to rapid growth, yes. I agree here. We need to shrink / eliminate Government to end the corruption. I wouldn't necessarily agree that you would get "crushed", though. There's a large and growing market for "ethical" products. More people are interested in the sourcing of their goods. People are paying more attention to the activities of the businesses selling the products. "American made" holds some value in the eyes of consumers. Well, in both cases, we have massive Government distortion. Banks have very little risk (TBTF banks, especially) thanks to Government corruption. As for nurses, in many parts of the world, the wage of the nurse is set by the Government. Who knows, if we let the markets set the wage, she could be on more money? Government regulation and distortion in the healthcare market in the States could have also lead to distortions of wages in the healthcare market. Let's not forget that the nurses' take home pay would greatly improve if taxes were reduced or eliminated. But, you're forgetting something here: everybody who goes into the nursing game KNOWS that they're not going to get paid as much as a banker. Maybe they value the other aspects of nursing higher than money? If they valued money more, they would have trained and worked in a different industry. Nobody is forced into being a nurse (in a free society, anyway), and those who chose that path knew exactly what they were choosng before they went down it... money isn't the number one priority for nurses... it's just about the only priority for bankers. Jay Z supports Obamacare. Jay Z's a mega-rich guy, clearly he's going to lose out from this program, while poorer people benefit. This makes Jay Z a good guy, right? Except, what he's actually doing is supporting using political means to give to the poor TRILLIONS of dollars, whereas he would only ever be able to afford millions. If he's losing sleep at night because of all those 22 year olds not having health insurance, he benefits more from the new taxes than he loses financially. |
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