Quicksand Fans

http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... n-combined

I'm all for meritocracy and free market capitalism, but something is not right here.

PINK PONY wrote:http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/18/richest-62-billionaires-wealthy-half-world-population-combined

I'm all for meritocracy and free market capitalism, but something is not right here.

This will probably get ugly fast so I'll get it started.

What's wrong with it?I haven't done Jack to get rich and most of these people have. Most of the world gets a days pay for a days work because that's all they do.

On one hand.......meh. Rich people are rich and poor people are poor. That hasn't changed since we fell out of the trees.

On the other hand......pigs get fat. Hogs get butchered. One should be careful not to be a hog.......

Duncan Edwards wrote:What's wrong with it? I haven't done Jack to get rich and most of these people have. Most of the world gets a day's pay for a day's work because that's all they do.

Agreed.

I attended a seminar many years ago on wealth creation and the speaker said at the outset that self-made wealthy people are so because they focus their efforts on performing highly paying activities.

Contrast that intense focus against the average "range of the moment" agents of action whose only vision is to get through the next day or week or month or pay period with no effort made at broadening their minds to understand systems and how to leverage them to create new wealth.

Let me amend that. Many understand how to leverage welfare systems to their advantage. So they have the brains to do it. But welfare systems offer perverse incentives to get bigger payoffs for less effort from welfare systems than from capitalist systems.

We live in a world of slackers in body and spirit who want to drag everyone else to their level and too often succeed at it.

I will not deny that at least some wealth is ill-gained through deception, fraud, and manipulation, but the tangible assets we see all around us did not just spring fully formed from the head of Zeus. Someone had to take initiative to bring them into being through long-range, integrated thinking. That is how material wealth is created and sustained.

I find it interesting that the same people who moan about poverty also moan about systems that create its opposite, wealth.

Wealth is a relative thing. When I visit Central America I'm in the 1%. Does that mean I should dissolve my assets, empty my 401K, and give it to everyone? No, that money would be gone in seconds and there would be no real benefit. Instead I use what I have to help build an orphanage,houses, a medical clinic, for very disadvantaged people. It's easy to point to statistics and say something is wrong. A lot of those people are now in charge of wealth that used to belong to the British Empire or other colonial interests instead of private individuals. Was that any better? While there are many insanely wealthy Arabs they also provide free education, medical care, and subsidized food and fuel to their people. In the end the descendants of hardscrabble Bedouin Arabs are infinitely better off than their predecessors. And they are doing it with wealth that didn't really exist before WWII.

I love the way Oxfam tries to make it sound like $14 Billion in missed taxes would somehow find it's way to poor people in Africa. It's not always an either/or situation. We spend far more than that on frozen pizza and illicit narcotics and those are two things we could live without very easily.

I just watched The Big Short, the new movie about the financial crisis of 2008. It is worth watching. It figuratively and literally makes an effort to explain the financial Jenga that led to the crash; unfortunately, it barely explains the perverse incentives in public policy that motivated the shady dealings and excessive risk taking in the first place. For that insight I recommend The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure by John Allison. The author traces policies across decades that rewarded the actions the film depicted as leading to the crisis. Here is a sample passage outlining the impact of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA):

It was now a legal and ethical duty of the banks to participate in making high-risk housing loans to low-income buyers who would not meet traditional bank lending standards. In the end, the ethical justification was more important than the legal. Most people today view subprime lenders as taking advantage of poorly informed low-income borrowers. By the end of the process, this was certainly true in some cases. But it is important to remember that subprime lending was primarily driven by government policy based on a goal of wealth redistribution.

Allison, John A. (2012-09-27). The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy's Only Hope (p. 57). McGraw-Hill Education. Kindle Edition.

Earlier I made dismissive remarks about welfare. I want to emphasize the damage of corporate welfare as vastly outstripping that of other welfare programs. If you want to look suspiciously at wealthy people, consider how much or how little they benefit from corporate welfare.

I fear this is going to become a political topic soon... Which is supposed to be against the rules...

I agree with DJLURKER. This has been political from the start.

It's inherently political but the OP just wanted to pull something out that would make a big stink. So we're accommodating him out of courtesy. He has a style of opening a fussy topic and then not responding again. Pretty obvious troll.

Duncan Edwards wrote:It's inherently political but the OP just wanted to pull something out that would make a big stink. So we're accommodating him out of courtesy. He has a style of opening a fussy topic and then not responding again. Pretty obvious troll.

Darn, where's my hand mirror, so I can show the troll his own ugly face and scare him away?