Kasz216 said:
BMaker11 said:
I don't think economic equality is achievable, period, in a capitalistic society. The largest thing I took from my senior Econ class (don't make fun of it! I did go on to go to Purdue) was that in order for there to be rich people, there must be poor people.
I've heard conservative pundits say "see, they think that if I make $100, that's $100 they can't get. But in actuality, we want to increase the amount of money for everyone". But that can't ever happen. Money is finite. There has to be, and will be, a difference in income in people. Because consumers control prices. Even if we all made the same amount of money, if I want an item more than the next guy, I'll pay more, meaning the supplier will have more money than he "should". That simple concept will eventually make a gap in income.
Not to mention that the moment everyone starts making even remotely similar wages across the board, there will be screams of socialism, and people will fall back on "why would I go through years of training to become a doctor when I can just work at McDonald's?" |
Dude. If that was the biggest thing you took from your senior econ class... you took nothing from your senior econ class... because I gurantee you they didn't teach you that.
Nobody thinks that money and wealth is finite. Not even the most diehard Hayekians who want money tied to a gold standard.
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That was literally a sentence that came out of my teacher's mouth. I took other things from the class, like supply and demand vs quantity supplied and quantity demanded, multipliers, the Keynesian economic model, and more. Based on concepts of basic economics, I learned a lot. But that one statement had the most impact.
If nobody think that money and wealth is finite, then that means people think money and wealth is infinite, and that's just false. There's only so many resources, so much labor, so many goods, etc. in the world at any given time. Technically you could make money "infinite" if you just kept printing it, but then the money would lose all value
