Especially considering Antony's doing his level best to earn that very same description in this thread.

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In a country that gives away public goods, shifts all tax burden onto laborers, and aggressively manages the rate of inflation to almost nothing, national debt is indeed a problem.

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Dude, you don't need propaganda about actual things in the right wing press.

You just need stories about how yeah, even though this guy molested his sisters and some other girls, the people who are wrong are the liberals that think he's a bad person for doing so.

This is how the right works. You distract from actual issues, and pander to the morons who elect you via the only issues they care about (ones vaguely related to the building they pray in on Sunday) because your actual base comprises less than 5% of the nation's population.

The rich certainly spend a lot of money on it.

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Are you referring to Charles or David Koch?

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I'm sure we would still have politicians with right-wing ideologies (like wanting to weaken social security) in Finland even if it weren't for some billionaire using his money to affect US decision making.

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We do, but that doesn't prove Peter G. Peterson's money has a direct influence on Finnish politics.

Conservatives outsource most of their rhetoric. Common themes, language, and even shot-for-shot reproductions of political ads show up almost simultaneously across the english speaking world. Neoliberalism is a vast conspiracy, they're literally doing the exact thing that motivated redscare.

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My favourite part is how the term neoliberal is so offensive even to neoliberals, because they've worked so hard to poison the progressive discourse that even being associated with Lockean economic liberalism is hateful to them. But it's a completely accurate term for their policies, even the "progressives" in most countries adhere to neoliberal policies.

The frustrating part about the whole thing is that I do not have a good handle on what these rich people want out of the transparently unsustainable and destructive ideas they are promoting. I'm honestly not sure if they're stupid or just progressive leaning accelerationists who are leading capitalism to greater and greater excesses in the hopes that the entire system will collapse. You hear stories about Wall Street tycoons joining secret societies dedicated to a return to the "good old days" of 1929 and I'm just like... What.

but then I remember that most rich people are stupid children who have never been challenged to do anything, cow-eyed halfwits like Mitt Romney. So the real reason they skew conservative is probably clintons taxes on their immoral, godless vices.

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Considering the extreme efforts they expend on anti-expropriation and lobbying for ever growing barriers to entry, I disagree. I think they're painfully aware that the world is full of much smarter, hungrier working class people than they could ever be.

I have decided to rejoin this thread... I didn't read everything that was posted, but I do have some questions, which probably somebody else has already asked and has already been answered.

So, as I understand it, having millions or billions doesn't actually make you rich, but instead you can only be rich by employing other people and making a profit from their labor?

The example of an NFL team, where the team owner(s) is/are making more money than the players sort of makes sense, but in turn, who does the team owner(s) make money for?

What if the team owner(s) actually make less profit than the players, and actually have less money, but are still getting richer? Are they still the "rich" and the players the "poor"?

If understand this correctly, being rich is not about how much wealth you have accumulated (I don't agree a 100% with this, but ok), but rather how much wealth you accumulate by "renting" out "assets" in your possession, regardless of how you came into possession of said assets.

While I understand this point of view, I just can't help but feel it is flawed, because you keep sustaining the notion that it is impossible to become rich. Ok, how about this scenario. Over the course of a decade, I save around 1/4 million of dollars and start some sort of company somewhere, employ people and over the course of the next two decades, the company and my wealth grows because of proper management and good decisions. Now I am making several times more than what I used to make working at another company, but I only have a couple million dollars that are actually mine and not part of the company I started from saving up. At what point did I cross over from poor to rich? If I have not crossed over, and this trend continues, at what point will I cross over? If I begin launching other initiatives that are also successful, and my wealth accumulation accelerates, am I still poor? The part that bothers me the most, why am I evil for doing this?

Sweet strawmen, bra. God you are insufferable. Agree with me, disagree with me, whatever, but at least have the intellectual honesty and courage to do it openly, rather than this sloppy turd dressed up as a bunch of questions.

You didn't understand the earlier discussion at all. You don't know what rent is in the context we're discussing. Rent is not about "renting" out "assets". Don't put it in scare quotes. I know what I'm talking about, you don't.

Team owners are not simply employers. Playing professionally means playing in a league, and the leagues are controlled by the team owners. Every professional sports player effectively pays a tax to a team owner in exchange for access to the league, and this tax is called an economic rent. It is money the team owner did no work to make, and does not deserve, and was only paid because the team owner is friends with all of the other team owners. Because the team owner profits from an economic rent, he is called a rentier.

The reason all rich people are evil is because all rich people are rentiers. There are no safe havens for wealth: productive capital suffers depreciation, demand deposits above a certain amount ($100k in Canada) are uninsured. That leaves bonds, equity, and real estate, a.k.a. rent, rent, rent. If you're rich it means you're a rentier; you have no other choice, and regardless of what you personally want you will distort the real goods markets upon which people depend. Just look at what's happened to the real estate market worldwide since the bond markets started to run dry. How about the commodities markets. Wanna know why food prices have doubled since 2007? That's the rent you're paying Goldman Sachs, which they extract from you thanks to their privileged position of having enough money on hand to twist global food markets.

So look, even if you did somehow manage to create a successful business (you won't), it doesn't matter. And yes, you would be evil, and the long-term stability of the global economy would demand that your wealth be stripped away.

Hahaha...



So, in conclusion, it is evil to hire someone, or to increase your earnings. What a crock of bull****.

You simply hate the rich because you don't earn as much money for the same or lower amount of effort, and that's it. That is all you really have. You have built everything else around this, taking convenient actions by rich people who actually happen to be evil, and using it to justify your worldview. This is really just poor man thinking inside an intellectual wrapper.

You are frustrated by not winning the genetic lottery of being born into a rich family, which is understandable seeing as you are a very educated person with great capacities, and you are probably entitled to more than what you have.

Of course, you are not totally wrong. You are right in several important things. There are people who do make way too much money for almost no effort, and gamble with other people's futures, and get bailed out by the government. They also use their vast influence and power to monopolize markets, and pull in political favors. We can all agree on this, and know it needs to come to a stop.

However, we don't need to strip the rich of their wealth in order restore fairness to middle and lower classes. What we need is regulations, reasonable caps on how much people can earn, and to get rid of lobbying. This is an oversimplification yes, but I don't want to get into too much detail.

People should be able to get rich if they work at it hard enough and long enough. Period. That is the fruits of their efforts.

You are illiterate and stupid.

Translation: Hurr durr hurr durr.

No no, please do. I'm sure we would all like to hear these "details".

By the way, I'm currently $0/0 €/£0/AU$0 etc. in debt.

Unless you count all those giraffe & hedgehog furry porn site subscriptions I get each month as debt. Hooooooooooo!

Yeah, that's basically what I'm saying to you.

The money you make from hiring people and making products is different than the money you make by extracting economic rents.

Hiring people and making products is good, it makes the economy grow and creates prosperity for all.

Extracting rents is bad, it means you are skimming off the top, taking from people who make things. It shrinks the economy.

A single rich person generates macro-scale free rider effects. Developing economies in high corruption countries significantly stall out due to runaway rents. The destruction and expropriation of capital in the west following WW2 is what broke the United States free from similar market conditions and develop into a successful economy, but accelerating inequality is quickly leading it back towards the sorts of problems previously only seen in Africa.

Also I make more than 99.5% of Americans my age so I'm guessing that I make a lot more money than you do, if that's worth anything at all (it's not, nobody cares)

The problem isn't how much rich people make, the problem is how much they have. Income capping would accomplish nothing because rich people have relatively little income compared to their unrealized capital gains. Their destructive influence comes from wealth, not income.

While it is dumb to compare my income to American income (which isn't your case), I do make significantly more than most (probably around 65-70%) Mexicans in my age group, which is relevant because I work in Mexico, but then again, it is not too difficult to make more considering that a disproportionate amount of people here make at most 2 to maybe 3 times minimum wage (I make 5 times as much on low work months, and around 7 to 8 times when I really have lots of work).

I agree with your last two posts, but what still isn't clear to me is at what point should a successful person be forbidden from accumulating further wealth? What should be the highest standard of living and wealth you should be allowed to pursue? How do we define this?

Table of page 2:
http://www.inmujeres.df.gob.mx/work/sites/styfe/resources/LocalContent/288/1/2008_4.pdf

8% of the workforce has no income
12% makes up to one min. wage
20% makes between one and two min. wages
23% makes between two and three min wages.
17% makes between three and five min wages.
12% makes more than five min wages.
7% unspecified (most likely tax evaders)

Seeing as I make a little bit more than 5 min wages each month, and then I have the odd months where I make significantly more than that, I make more than almost 80% of the workforce population.

EDIT:
Furthermore, this data is from 2008, more recent data (which I can't find an official gov. source like the one above, only newspaper articles) suggests that less people make up to 5 min wages. So yes, I'm doing pretty good considering where I live, and that I haven't finished studying a career yet.

EDIT 2:
The way I deduced that I was making more than people in my age group was by looking at a mexican salary page, where when I inputted what I do (IT), and my monthly earnings, it said that the average age of people making this or more was 30. Seeing as I am still 24, 25 in a couple of weeks, I'd say I'm doing really good.

For a second, let's ignore the fact that your percentages don't add up to 100%.

Let's also look past your nearly decade-old information and following assumptions.

A brief search shows me that current minimum wages in Mexico are set at 70.10 pesos daily. This works out to be 10,515 pesos a month, or roughly $681.24 USD, assuming one works for an average of 30 days a month. You're poor. You might be doing "really good" for a Mexican, but you have no idea what wealth is. Because you're dumb.

Goddamn, I do better than that and I'm absurdly poor by American standards.

Excellent! And these are excellent questions, and I hope I can provide clear answers for them.

I appreciate that you used the word 'accumulating', because there is an important difference between wealth accumulation and wealth formation. Remember that 'good' income I was talking about, which is derived from making and selling goods? In order to make goods, you need some form of capital - whether it's human capital in the form of job training, real estate, machines, or even intellectual property. In most cases establishing a business creates new productive capital. This capital is a kind of wealth, a superior kind of wealth, the formation of which is economic growth (a long-run increase in the total potential output of the economy). Now, indefinitely extracting a profit from ownership of such capital is also a form of rent, essentially a claim upon the productivity of the workers using that capital, but in most cases this is balanced out by some form of depreciation - something like parts wearing out and needing to be replaced, or copyright/patent expiry (the fact that copyrights in practice no longer seem to expire is an important but different discussion). The lazy do-nothing riches don't like productive capital because it isn't safe; you need to understand your business and work hard at maintaining and growing it, or else your wealth will diminish over time. Lazy do-nothing riches want lazy do-nothing wealth, and that's where base rent-seeking come sfrom.

The main deterrents to new fiscal and monetary policy to dismantle bad wealth is the fear of chilling the good investment. You want harsh, punitive divestments of men like Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, and the Koch brothers, but it's hard to do so without also quashing beneficial one-in-a-billion shots like Oprah Winfrey's, or even the beneficial-but-less-incredible cases like Bill Gates, who was born rich but at least did something with his life worth talking about. One ideologically 'pure' option popular among academics and policy wonks is using an expansionary monetary policy to artificially increase the inflation rate. High inflation rapidly devalues the more 'idle' wealth holdings like lending, because the real face value is decreasing, and increases the value of productive capital. A high inflation rate would punish base rentiers and reward the rich for investment in economic growth. Unfortunately this is no longer possible from an established central banking framework; failed neoliberal governments in most western countries (think Thatcher, Harper, Reagan, Bush) used monetary policy to conceal the irreparable economic damage they've inflicted upon their countries, which has exhausted all of the remaining options our central banks had to control the rate of inflation. Some others have suggested putting expiration dates on batches of money, like sending out a surprise letter once a week saying "all bills with serial numbers ending in K are no longer valid", but considering the ever-so-wise zero reserve fractional banking popular in most states you can probably imagine how that would play out. Anything here would also make any fixed-income assets go poof, which would wipe out most retirement savings and defined pension plans. It's not really feasible to cast a dragnet across all wealth, here.

Basically there's one group of rich people that we need to care about: their children. Second-generation rich are universally subhuman garbage and textbook rentiers. They never earned it, they don't know what to do with it, have absolutely no ****ing clue how hard their parents worked for it, and if it were taken away from them they would literally die of exposure within a week. The social pressures of being a rich basically center around becoming just enough of a prissy nonce to **** another rich kid, because at least one rot-blood rich back at the dawn of time had enough brain cells rattling around to understand the exponential function of population growth is bigger than compounding interest and managed to fart out the Codex Wincestshire before succumbing to the unconscious animalism that drives this bunch of ****ing idiots. The quote unquote best period thing period ever period that we could do as a society is to make rolly polly retards like Gina Rinehart actually work for their money before granting them a public voice or, god forbid, control over a multinational corporation. Basically make it impossible to transfer any amount of wealth beyond a generous inflation-indexed trust fund per child, enough for them to get the best education in the world and even enough to piss away for a lifetime without working, but not enough to create more satanic hellbeast do-nothings who spend their money buying elected officials for wont of anything else to buy.

Let's also mention that Bill Gates is only leaving his kids $10m each, about the same as his own trust fund adjusted for inflation. So if you don't believe me when I talk about how inheritors are subhuman scum, you can believe the guy who is giving away the largest fortune in human history to prevent his children from joining them.

No, literally. He thinks rich kids are ****ty do nothings. He said so. I'm not kidding, he actually said he doesn't want his kids to turn out as bad as them.

I'm gonna miss your effort posts.

That reminds me of a story I heard from an old HP engineer.

One of the first things Carly did was close HP's machine shops and outsource the work to a firm in China. She reasoned that machinists are highly educated skilled laborers, but the profession exists to more or less an identical standard everywhere, so you could save money if you only had to pay a living wage for Shanghai instead of Palo Alto. Makes sense, right? In typical MBA fashion she narrowed in on a source of cost, but didn't have the domain skill to understand the original business case for it. The original reason HP operated internal machine shops was for prototyping: an engineer could go to the shop, put in an order for some new printer part, and they'd have a working prototype to test by the next day. Outsourcing their machining work didn't just introduce a three week delay to the production and delivery of each part, it also turned each prototype into a separate PO that demanded a clearly articulated business case. Engineers who could previously experiment with a different design every day were dropped to one a month, a 30 fold decrease in engineering productivity across their entire company. All this to save at most $15 an hour on labor.

I can think of exactly one person who would make a worse president, but I don't think Bush counts because he already did it twice.

MBA = Management By Autism

quote this if you get this joke & laugh

We recently did this at our company (defense). We shuttered our machine shop, lost almost all of the people (and undocumented knowledge) who had experience with manufacturing and verifying our products, and in addition to quality problems due to relying on other shops that have never made these before having no idea what they're doing, we also lost the ability to just call them up and whip out a prototype. Our productivity didn't drop *that* much, but there's still a significant hit we took due to not being able to adequately test parts with 1-peice builds. Everything is now "you need to order 5, or I'm going to charge you out the ass", so we wind up reworking a lot of what we get in.

We did get a 3D printer though, so we at least tried to make up some of the prototyping ability that we lost.