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It's easy to talk about inequality from a macro perspective, but imagine this... Imagine Bill Gates is sitting next to a McDonalds employee. Bill is millions o

It's easy to talk about inequality from a macro perspective, but imagine this... Imagine Bill Gates is sitting next to a McDonalds employee. Bill is millions of times wealthier than this guy. He could afford to hire 100,000 minimum wage employees for life. By all accounts Bill is lucky. He's smart and works hard too, but he's basically lucky. And increasingly, society suggests that we deserve some slice of his luck, because we have less. But why? Our government guarantees your right to private property. Once you own something, it's yours. When we choose to believe in a threshold at which the rules of private property cease, we erode Bill's incentive to participate in the market. If that doesn't feel like a big deal now, wait until the disincentive slides down to your level of income. I'm not saying that civic society shouldn't do anything for marginalized people. Education can have a meaningful effect on their wages and technology is going to shake the markets and people need help to smooth their individual outcomes, but to say that they deserve Bill's money simply because he's rich is a nasty nasty attitude. We need to seek an environment that allows everyone to grow through profitable employment, not artificially rebalance the top-end.

benched 13y ago
This (rather Randian) model of things is so contrived. Focus on the individual, their achievements, and personal wealth as untouchable property are half-truths, mythology, and contrivances. The economy is a collective thing. It's a network of people with money, goods, and services flowing between them. Serious wealth is and has always been primarily about one's positioning in the system, and only indirectly about their abilities or value delivered. Yes, presumably ability and achievement often have some influence on that positioning, but it's that mechanical fact of sitting in the thick part of the flow that matters when it comes to making a lot of money. (E.g. I get paid the same pretty much no matter what I do, while my blue-collar friends have to log hours and really work. Yeah, eventually I could potentially lose my job if I really do nothing, but in reality I can get away with doing very little - direct deposit still happens, because that's the system. I am so positioned with respect to the company's payroll system.) I don't see the problem with making changes at the systemic level to how the flow works (taxes, basic income), as well as making it easier for people to move around (which you addressed, re: education. e.g. returning college to affordability would be truly great).
- iambateman 13y ago
  At 100% tax, no one takes any risks. Big players contribute to the economy as a whole through capital investment and get a return on their investment's growth. To the extent that we tax them into a corner, we reduce their incentive to make capital investment. In the long term, we do not increase opportunity by reducing capital investment.
- ahomescu1 13y ago
  > This (rather Randian) model of things is so contrived. Focus on the individual, their achievements, and personal wealth as untouchable property are half-truths, mythology, and contrivances. > The economy is a collective thing. The economy is a collective of individuals, all of which must put in effort into making things work; people generally don't put in effort unless rewarded. For real-world examples of societies that put the collective above the individual, take a look at communist countries. Most of them failed, whereas the individualistic West still stands (I say this coming from Eastern Europe and seeing how much damage collectivism can do).
pdonis 13y ago
He could afford to hire 100,000 minimum wage employees for life. But he doesn't, does he? In other words, Bill Gates is not using his wealth very efficiently; it would be more efficiently used if it were spread around. It's not his fault, exactly: no single person can be expected to make efficient use of $30 billion, or whatever his current net worth is. But the fact remains that it seems likely that there is some maximum level of wealth that a single person can make reasonably efficient use of, simply because a single person doesn't scale. If that's true, then that's an argument for altering the rules of private property if a single person accumulates wealth above that level. As for incentives, I find it very difficult to believe that if, for example, we set a threshold net worth of $100 million and said that anything above that gets taxed away (of course it would be more complicated than that in practice, but let's keep it simple for this discussion), Bill Gates wouldn't have started Microsoft because, oh, well, he's only going to get $100 million from it.

benched 13y ago

This (rather Randian) model of things is so contrived. Focus on the individual, their achievements, and personal wealth as untouchable property are half-truths, mythology, and contrivances. The economy is a collective thing. It's a network of people with money, goods, and services flowing between them. Serious wealth is and has always been primarily about one's positioning in the system, and only indirectly about their abilities or value delivered. Yes, presumably ability and achievement often have some influence on that positioning, but it's that mechanical fact of sitting in the thick part of the flow that matters when it comes to making a lot of money. (E.g. I get paid the same pretty much no matter what I do, while my blue-collar friends have to log hours and really work. Yeah, eventually I could potentially lose my job if I really do nothing, but in reality I can get away with doing very little - direct deposit still happens, because that's the system. I am so positioned with respect to the company's payroll system.) I don't see the problem with making changes at the systemic level to how the flow works (taxes, basic income), as well as making it easier for people to move around (which you addressed, re: education. e.g. returning college to affordability would be truly great).

iambateman 13y ago
At 100% tax, no one takes any risks. Big players contribute to the economy as a whole through capital investment and get a return on their investment's growth. To the extent that we tax them into a corner, we reduce their incentive to make capital investment. In the long term, we do not increase opportunity by reducing capital investment.
ahomescu1 13y ago
> This (rather Randian) model of things is so contrived. Focus on the individual, their achievements, and personal wealth as untouchable property are half-truths, mythology, and contrivances. > The economy is a collective thing. The economy is a collective of individuals, all of which must put in effort into making things work; people generally don't put in effort unless rewarded. For real-world examples of societies that put the collective above the individual, take a look at communist countries. Most of them failed, whereas the individualistic West still stands (I say this coming from Eastern Europe and seeing how much damage collectivism can do).

pdonis 13y ago

He could afford to hire 100,000 minimum wage employees for life. But he doesn't, does he? In other words, Bill Gates is not using his wealth very efficiently; it would be more efficiently used if it were spread around. It's not his fault, exactly: no single person can be expected to make efficient use of $30 billion, or whatever his current net worth is. But the fact remains that it seems likely that there is some maximum level of wealth that a single person can make reasonably efficient use of, simply because a single person doesn't scale. If that's true, then that's an argument for altering the rules of private property if a single person accumulates wealth above that level. As for incentives, I find it very difficult to believe that if, for example, we set a threshold net worth of $100 million and said that anything above that gets taxed away (of course it would be more complicated than that in practice, but let's keep it simple for this discussion), Bill Gates wouldn't have started Microsoft because, oh, well, he's only going to get $100 million from it.