Wealth & Income Inequality

Edgar Allan Pillow said:
Think that applies to everyone. The store around the corner will be as likely to do it as much as anyone else.
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Well yes, but the margins and stakes are going to be a lot bigger when it comes to a multinational company whose owner is the richest man in the world than the store around the corner. Hence governments should to some extent be involved to levy against the natural disadvantages that workers will experience under capitalism.
 
If wealth is not finite then wealth is infinite.

I think Edgar is making the argument presented to Bernie here:



Just move the 99%
 
The greater part of the economic benefit of an activity is actually captured by the consumers/users. It just doesn't manifest itself in quantifiable monetary terms.

Labor is the most remunerated factor of production. Most companies don't have the profit margins some here seem to believe, Amazon especially.

Those are my tidbits.
 
MTF said:
The greater part of the economic benefit of an activity is actually captured by the consumers/users. It just doesn't manifest itself in quantifiable monetary terms.

Labor is the most remunerated factor of production. Most companies don't have the profit margins some here seem to believe, Amazon especially.

Those are my tidbits.
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Open your eyes, sheep. We all are just getting exploited. Thats why we are having such shitty lives compared to the past. *angrily orders the next ebook volume of marx on amazon*.
 
I walked straight past Jeff Bezos in the 21st Century Art Museum in a small town in Japan called Kanazawa about a month ago, he was with his wife and 4 kids, very surreal moment to say the least!
 
Eboue said:
hMELDfO.jpg
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The same argument was also used with slavery in America

The Economist - “Can we forget [...] that Abolitionists have habitually been as ferociously persecuted and maltreated in the North and West as in the South? Can it be denied that the testiness and half-heartedness, not to say insincerity, of the Government at Washington, have for years supplied the chief impediment which has thwarted our efforts for the effectual suppression of the slave trade on the coast of Africa; while a vast proportion of the clippers actually engaged in that trade have been built with Northern capital, owned by Northern merchants and manned by Northern seamen?

Marx - This is, in fact, a masterly piece of logic. Anti-Slavery England cannot sympathize with the North breaking down the withering influence of slaveocracy, because she cannot forget that the North, while bound by that influence, supported the slave-trade, mobbed the Abolitionists, and had its Democratic institutions tainted by the slavedriver’s prejudices. She cannot sympathize with Mr. Lincoln’s Administration, because she had to find fault with Mr. Buchanan’s Administration. She must needs sullenly cavil at the present movement of the Northern resurrection, cheer up the Northern sympathizers with the slave-trade, branded in the Republican platform, and coquet with the Southern slaveocracy, setting up an empire of its own, because she cannot forget that the North of yesterday was not the North of to-day. The necessity of justifying its attitude by such pettifogging Old Bailey pleas proves more than anything else that the anti-Northern part of the English press is instigated by hidden motives, too mean and dastardly to be openly avowed.
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Edgar Allan Pillow said:
What other options are there?
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You know what?

@berbatrick wrote an outstanding post full of facts and nuance and somehow you managed to derail this thread into a completely meaningless and worthless train of thought about finite rubbish. Its an old Rush Limbaugh rhetorical trick that isn't worth dedicating any more posts about.

If you actually care about discussing wealth and inequality Edgar, then I implore you to go back and responds to the thoughtful and intelligent points Berba made.

https://www.redcafe.net/threads/wealth-income-inequality.440405/page-7#post-22861972
 
PedroMendez said:
Open your eyes, sheep. We all are just getting exploited. Thats why we are having such shitty lives compared to the past. *angrily orders the next ebook volume of marx on amazon*.
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I think most people can recognise that we've made a lot of social advancements and improvements worldwide while also recognising that there's a lot more to be done, and that complacency has the potential to lead to some major, major problems down the road in regards to climate change and wealth inequality etc.

The 'buying Marx on Amazon' argument's fairly silly and daft. Most sane leftists realise they engage with the capitalist world on a daily basis and buy from companies they ethically probably don't agree with on a lot of issues. They don't really have much of an alternative.
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
You know what?

@berbatrick wrote an outstanding post full of facts and nuance and somehow you managed to derail this thread into a completely meaningless and worthless train of thought about finite rubbish. Its an old Rush Limbaugh rhetorical trick that isn't worth dedicating any more posts about.

If you actually care about discussing wealth and inequality Edgar, then I implore you to go back and responds to the thoughtful and intelligent points Berba made.

https://www.redcafe.net/threads/wealth-income-inequality.440405/page-7#post-22861972
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Am I the only one who doesn't know who Rush Limbaugh is? Makes it all very difficult to follow.
 
Vidic_In_Moscow said:
Current Events in a nutshell
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seems pretty relevant at a time of massive and growing inequality where rich people subvert government and media in order to take an ever greater share of resources that they could never spend in three lifetimes whilst others live and die in poverty

fortunately you two are comfortable and the biggest issues you think about are cleaning your room and transgender hypotheticals
 
@oneniltothearsenal you referring to this?

The fundamental flaw in the argument is treating Capitalism as form or govt (instead of Democracy) rather than a socioeconomic modal. Fine line, but distinctly separate.

berbatrick said:
The main problems with capitalism in the Western world are
1. It has trouble dealing with long-term changes like global warming, where there is no market incentive for the current generation of rich people to divest away from fossil fuels (since the costs will be borne by the children and grandchildren of poor people, not the current population of rich people). This is quite serious. In general, environmental issues and pollution are tough to deal with without regulation.

2. Perfect competition, etc doesn't hold in general - many fields tend to become oligopolies. Examples are everything to do with technology. Which is fine in one way (facebook and Windows aren't bad products for users) - but has the effect of massively concentrating wealth.

3. Related to both 1 and 2 - the commodification of everything (like healthcare including pharma, and education) creates perverse incentives where generating the most profit is at odds with societal needs. And you can find smaller examples of this everywhere, from antibiotic overuse in animal agriculture, to Nestle bottling water for massive profits next to people getting poisoned by lead water.
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1. You have influential people in a capitalist form of govt who support green policy and environmental concerns....as many as those who deny them. It would not be fair to make an argument stating capitalism is the cause we do not tackle global warming. A communist China having as much pollution and factories is as much to blame as any other capitalist country.

2. True, but then as you say oligopolies are both good and bad depending on the end product they offer to benefit of customers. It's not fair to blame to companies for becoming big when we continue to support that same growth by supporting them via product purchase.

3. A company's primary purpose is profit (irrespective of whether it is located in a capitalistic or a communist country). I'd put the primary ownership to take care of societal needs on the government rather than companies. The same country which gave America a environmentally friendly Obama has now given us a Trump who is hostile to this cause. This attitude of the nation towards this has little to no relevance to the economic model, capitalism or communism.

berbatrick said:
But the capitalist class has great power over the state itself. Examples? New environmental regulations, and a factory may leave - this reduces jobs, makes the govt unpopular. Same if a govt wants to stop selling arms to a genocidal regime- that costs jobs at home too. Similarly with raising taxes. Less drastically - any reform which might cut into profits - run an ad campaign against that; after all the capitalists are by definition the most able to spend on things like this.
So, you have a strong state, needed to enforce both the property-based hierarchy that capitalism needs and builds, and you need the same state to regulate and diminish the heart of capitalism (the profit motive), and also this state is constrained by and beholden to capitalist interests. Then of course there are more direct ways like campaign donations and private ownership of the media in a capitalist democracy.
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Isn't it the duty of the state to balance long term strategic solutions with immediate tactical needs. It's not state becoming unpopular if a factory leaves...but people actually suffer if they become jobless, homeless and fall below poverty line. Ignoring all this and just blaming the state for 'popularity' just does not make sense.

America for example has been under Capitalism for quite some time now...but the individual policy changes and outlook is starkly different between Obama vs Trump. The points mentioned in Berba's post are more on agenda of people running the govt and has little relevance to Capitalism. You can easily find the same problems under Communism.
 
Eboue said:
seems pretty relevant at a time of massive and growing inequality where rich people subvert government and media in order to take an ever greater share of resources that they could never spend in three lifetimes whilst others live and die in poverty

fortunately you two are comfortable and the biggest issues you think about are cleaning your room and transgender hypotheticals
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Let's say you sent the government round to Bezos Mansion and took away all his gold and pearls that he earned and gave it all to 'the people'. How long do you think it would take for all that wealth to find its way back to the top again? Then what? Since when was it established that we are in some crazy unprecedented time of growing inequality, or is it just a nice romantic way of showing how bitter you are. Last time I checked global poverty and starvation has been declining at crazy rates in the last few decades.
 
Silva said:
he is as rich as he is because he exploits the people who actually do the work that makes money
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This is stupid. Money is made on the idea behind the project not the actual construction of the project. Jeff Bezos is earning money because he had the vision to create something like amazon before everyone else. If I make something like Facebook today I wouldn’t become as rich as Zuckerberg. It’s all about the first idea.
 
Silva said:
the pie is around 280 trillion at the moment and rich people get bigger and bigger slices while the poor get smaller and smaller slices, redistribute the pie
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Looking at wealth 'shares' by percentage is deceptive because while that might not change very quickly, the total amount can and does change. So you might find that 280 trillion you quoted might increase 380 trillion in five years, but the % 'shares' haven't really changed. Say the lowest percentile has 10% of the total in the first instance, they are better off in the second instance even if their share hasn't increased relative to the higher percentiles.

So the question is, would you rather have a more 'equitable' distribution of a smaller amount of wealth, or an unequal distribution of a larger amount of wealth.
 
prath92 said:
This is stupid. Money is made on the idea behind the project not the actual construction of the project. Jeff Bezos is earning money because he had the vision to create something like amazon before everyone else. If I make something like Facebook today I wouldn’t become as rich as Zuckerberg. It’s all about the first idea.
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there were online shops before amazon and social media sites before facebook you div
 
Cheesy said:
I think most people can recognise that we've made a lot of social advancements and improvements worldwide while also recognising that there's a lot more to be done, and that complacency has the potential to lead to some major, major problems down the road in regards to climate change and wealth inequality etc.

The 'buying Marx on Amazon' argument's fairly silly and daft. Most sane leftists realise they engage with the capitalist world on a daily basis and buy from companies they ethically probably don't agree with on a lot of issues. They don't really have much of an alternative.
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Its absurd to pretend, that you don't have alternatives to amazon.
 
Andrew~ said:
Looking at wealth 'shares' by percentage is deceptive because while that might not change very quickly, the total amount can and does change. So you might find that 280 trillion you quoted might increase 380 trillion in five years, but the % 'shares' haven't really changed. Say the lowest percentile has 10% of the total in the first instance, they are better off in the second instance even if their share hasn't increased relative to the higher percentiles.

So the question is, would you rather have a more 'equitable' distribution of a smaller amount of wealth, or an unequal distribution of a larger amount of wealth.
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yeah no shit total wealth is going to increase, total wealth always increases and so does the cost of things, the problem is that cost of living has been outpacing wage growth while the distribution of wealth has disproportionately gone to the extremely wealthy
 
Silva said:
there were online shops before amazon and social media sites before facebook you div
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Yes but both these products were successful because of the features that people liked over the others. These features were the contribution of the creators.
 
Silva said:
yeah no shit total wealth is going to increase, total wealth always increases and so does the cost of things, the problem is that cost of living has been outpacing wage growth while the distribution of wealth has disproportionately gone to the extremely wealthy
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There are a couple things in there that need exploring:

a) why does total wealth always increase; b) why does the cost of things increase? This is a little bit counter-intuitive, but wages do not need to rise in order for the cost of living to decrease. Example, because of productivity increases, despite wages not rising very fast, most people have a computer in their pockets more powerful than the super-computers used by NASA in the 60s to take people to the moon.

That's not to say I think you're necessarily wrong that people are feeling the pinch in some cases, but wage increases or lack thereof are not the problem IMO.
 
prath92 said:
Yes but both these products were successful because of the features that people liked over the others. These features were the contribution of the creators.
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amazon succeeded because bezos was given hundreds of thousands of dollars by his family and had investment from the banking sector where he worked and had contacts, zuckerberg was also given a lot of money by his parents and had resources from the winklevos parents and harvard, there aren't ordinary people who started their business from humble beginnings
 
711 said:
Am I the only one who doesn't know who Rush Limbaugh is? Makes it all very difficult to follow.
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Rush Limbaugh was the first and and still one of the most popular far right talk radio hosts that dominate radio in America. He gained popularity among pretty much the exact crowd that would become the core Trump supporters in the 1990s. He was a firebrand, a blowhard and constantly reinforced the kind of dumbed anti-intellectualism that famous History Prof. Richard Hofstadter wrote about in an important 1966 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. He pioneered the way for all the future giants of conservative talk radio (see this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-listened-to_radio_programs). While conservatives in America were constantly whining about "liberal media" they were taking over the radio stations.

The message that Rush started in the early 1990s and all the popular conservatives continue to push is a scaled down, simplified version of Austrian economics. A lot of the arguments they use are directly reliant on Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek or Ludwig von Mises' laissez-faire capitalism. Its the simply doctrine that the profit motive is always better for everything and Rush, Hannity and co. sell this view relentless. They pound their audience's ears with only the cherry picked stats that support their view and they completely ignore any nuanced research disproving their assumptions.

This is why I linked the Colin Camerer research earlier because it experimental debunks the notion that the profit motive always works as an incentive. This is the type of information that gets completely ignored by the conservative talk media that has a heavy influence. They keep reducing any economic discussion into this mind numbingly false choice of "laissez-faire or communism". And then they glorify the rich. There is always this framing undertone of all the rich deserve all their money and poor people deserve to be poor.

I drove a lot through America in the 1990s. You couldn't turn on the radio on the interstates in between cities without being bombarded with conservative talk radio. In some areas I remember hearing Rush Limbaugh on two different stations with the only alternatives bible talk radio and mariachi music. I always though it was a learning experience to browse through the conservative talk radio and hear what messages were influencing the huge swathes of rural lands, small towns and mini-cities. And when I would hear the radio then hear the types of discussions people would have in truck stops, bars and restaurants it was very revealing. People were not going to the library or taking university classes to learn about economics. They were listening to Rush and Hannity and simply regurgitating their same arguments.

Here is a bunch of articles if you want to spend time reading more

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/why-speak-up-when-rush-limbaugh-lies/246859/


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wo...rofile-The-Most-Dangerous-Man-in-America.html

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/05/rush-limbaugh200905

Actually those aren't the best articles let me try to dig up some more

Add (this is a good example of how conservative talk radio operates)

The backstory is straightforward enough: George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas to the Supreme Court; Democrats opposed the nomination; Anita Hill came forward to allege that she'd been sexually harassed by the nominee; he denied the charges, and he accused the Senate of subjecting him to a "high-tech lynching." Liberals and conservatives are still at odds over who was telling the truth.*

When the controversy began, Limbaugh reminisces, he didn't know who the nominee was. "I didn't know Clarence Thomas," he recalled. "I had never met Clarence Thomas. I had to read about Clarence Thomas to find out who he was."

Nonetheless, "I began the biggest, full-throated defense of Clarence Thomas that there was, and I didn't know him. I'd never met him. I had to read and find out who he was and, you know, about his life, the things he'd done, where he'd worked, gone to school. Yet I didn't feel I was taking a risk at all in a full-throated, never-ending, full-fledged not only defense of Clarence Thomas, but an attack, a returned attack on Anita Hill and the Democrats. Now, how was I able to do this with such confidence, not having met the man, not having known the man?"

I'd begun to wonder that myself. Fortunately, Limbaugh goes on to explain himself, but first he underscores the degree to which he took Thomas's side immediately:

I was doing an appearance on Saturday when the Anita Hill stuff really hit, and all of the outrageous allegations, the "pubic hair on the Coke can" and all the sexual harassment stuff, and I can't tell you how livid I was. I spent the entire almost two hours on stage that night (it was a Saturday) talking about this, and how sick it made me and how angry it made me. The reason that I—and I have been fully vindicated, by the way—was able to defend Clarence Thomas with total confidence against this, is that I knew he didn't do it.

But how? Having heard, amidst a live performance, about specific sexual-harassment allegations involving two people he knew almost nothing about, alleged to have taken place some years before in a private setting, how did Limbaugh instantly discern who was being truthful and feel "total confidence" in doing so?

I didn't think I was risking anything. I really didn't. If I'd had the slightest doubt of his innocence, I woulda never opened my mouth. If I thought that there was just a tiny thread of possibility that what Anita Hill was saying and what the Democrat witnesses were saying was true, I woulda stayed silent. But I didn't. I went to the equivalent of the mountaintops and started shouting. Now, why? Character, conservatism, and my knowledge of the left.

He knew that Thomas was a conservative, and that his political adversaries were leftists. And that's all it took to "know" that Thomas was innocent. Evidently, no true conservative would ever sexually harass anyone, and no leftists would tell the truth about being sexually harassed by a conservative.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/how-rush-limbaugh-decides-what-is-true/283078/
 
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Andrew~ said:
There are a couple things in there that need exploring:

a) why does total wealth always increase; b) why does the cost of things increase? This is a little bit counter-intuitive, but wages do not need to rise in order for the cost of living to decrease. Example, because of productivity increases, despite wages not rising very fast, most people have a computer in their pockets more powerful than the super-computers used by NASA in the 60s to take people to the moon.

That's not to say I think you're necessarily wrong that people are feeling the pinch in some cases, but wage increases or lack thereof are not the problem IMO.
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the fact that some things are better and/or cheaper than the past does not change that it is more expensive to live than in the past, a phone may have more RAM than some of NASAs tech in the 60s, but your phone isn't going to the fecking moon either, they don't do the same thing
 
Silva said:
the fact that some things are better and/or cheaper than the past does not change that it is more expensive to live than in the past, a phone may have more RAM than some of NASAs tech in the 60s, but your phone isn't going to the fecking moon either, they don't do the same thing
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You've made that claim, but not backed it up. And I asked, why does the cost of things have to increase?

My contention is this: it can't be the case that it is most expensive to live than in the past (when?), if by all conceivable metrics, a person living on an average wage today has access to more goods at a cheaper price than previously. How then, is it more expensive to live now?
 
Vidic_In_Moscow said:
Let's say you sent the government round to Bezos Mansion and took away all his gold and pearls that he earned and gave it all to 'the people'. How long do you think it would take for all that wealth to find its way back to the top again? Then what? Since when was it established that we are in some crazy unprecedented time of growing inequality, or is it just a nice romantic way of showing how bitter you are. Last time I checked global poverty and starvation has been declining at crazy rates in the last few decades.
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I literally posted this a few pages ago.

Eboue said:
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For more a more detailed explanation you can try Capital In The Twenty First Century. Just because you choose not to read and learn about these things doesn't mean they arent happening. There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio
 
Andrew~ said:
You've made that claim, but not backed it up. And I asked, why does the cost of things have to increase?

My contention is this: it can't be the case that it is most expensive to live than in the past (when?), if by all conceivable metrics, a person living on an average wage today has access to more goods at a cheaper price than previously. How then, is it more expensive to live now?
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let's do america since most of the people talked about here are americans
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/an...-current-cost-living-compare-20-years-ago.asp
TLDR said:
these figures indicate that while the average person is still making the same amount of money – when accounting for inflation – prices for many of the daily necessities have gone up considerably, which means that each dollar earned does, in fact, buy less than it did 20 years ago.
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why? price of buying things has outpaced wage growth which is stagnant
 
Silva said:
the fact that some things are better and/or cheaper than the past does not change that it is more expensive to live than in the past, a phone may have more RAM than some of NASAs tech in the 60s, but your phone isn't going to the fecking moon either, they don't do the same thing
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Which is how it should be. A slight (controlled) inflation is a sign of growing economy. Demand is slightly greater than supply, people are willing buy, take risks etc. If price of good reduce (sign of deflation or when inflations falls below 0%) it really is sign of crisis.
 
Edgar Allan Pillow said:
Which is how it should be. A slight (controlled) inflation is a sign of growing economy. Demand is slightly greater than supply, people are willing buy, take risks etc. If price of good reduce (sign of deflation or when inflations falls below 0%) it really is sign of crisis.
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and if people's wages aren't growing at least at the same pace or higher, it's of no consolation to majority of people, and wages have been stagnant for decades because the extremely wealthy are hoarding bigger and bigger amounts of the wealth that has been created
 
Eboue said:
I literally posted this a few pages ago.




For more a more detailed explanation you can try Capital In The Twenty First Century. Just because you choose not to read and learn about these things doesn't mean they arent happening. There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio
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Why do you care about this issue so much? Are we expected to believe that you just have complete compassion for poor people? That's the hardest thing to swallow in all of this. You could take all of these guys money away but the poor would still be poor.
 
Vidic_In_Moscow said:
Why do you care about this issue so much? Are we expected to believe that you just have complete compassion for poor people? That's the hardest thing to swallow in all of this. You could take all of these guys money away but the poor would still be poor.
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:lol: embarrassing stuff. Try not being a sociopath
 
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