Atheism
Politics
Memes
Mind
Matters
String
Random
Interact
Feedback
Links
Debate
Home
War: what is it good for?
More tea vicar?
Are atheists communists?
Is sex with animals always wrong?
How to beat speed cameras
How not to be eaten by aliens
The Civilized States of America and Jesusland
Buckingham Palace admits Princes Charles and Edward are gay
Advice to the young
Eating Horses
The Theory and Practice of Masturbation
Why Grown Men Lust after Teenagers
Captain Kirk Meets Pollyanna
It's OUR Money!
Invade the Isle of Man
Billionaires and Capitalists
Why Bolsheviks don't want to kill Billionaires
Are atheists communists?
Daniel Barulich: wannabe millionaire |
Perusing through some of your articles regarding taxation of the wealthy, I cant help but be compelled to email you again, as I see some extremely critical faults in the logic you are using in formulating your thoughts. It all starts off with the concept of "work" and what is justifiable in pay. You claim that Bill Gates doesn't do very much "work" per week, although you work 40 hours. Lets assume that bill Gates currently works 1 hours per week and you work 40. You work 40 times as much yet he's millions of times richer. Seems like a problem right? Wrong! The importance is in what is produced, not in how many hours are in the time clock. In the 80's, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and the rest of his Microsoft cronies developed an operating system for the IBM compatible PC's that changed the way we live our lives. I'd take a bet that you're using Microsoft products currently. If not, you're using Linux or Apple software. What he produced, the concept AND implementation of a operating system that was universally available on computers changed the very foundation of civilization and business infrastructure. That is not an overstatement. Meanwhile you and I, while we may work 40 hours a week, produce items that are much less comparable in scale to what he has. As the saying goes "the proof is in the pudding", Bill Gates has pudding to prove it, both in his bank account and his software monopoly. "Replicability is what makes people richer if they are serving
richer markets. Replicability should be taxed." Prince controls have decimated Europe. Europe was at the forefront of medical research and innovation in drugs, yet they as a whole have fallen behind America in the past several decades. American drug companies now manufacture and invent the vast majority of pharmaceutical drugs distributed throughout the world. There's no secret here, Americans are not smarter or more clever than Europeans by any stretch of the imagination. We are more successful because we implement a free-market system with minimal price control and taxation that allows the individual, not the government, to pave the way. "Bitter? You bet. And why the hell shouldn't we all be?" Bitterness is a destructive force. Better to build a society which uses humanities vices such as greed though a capitalist system to create wealth than to create a "Bitter" society through class resentment and ruthless taxation. There in lies the reason socialism doesn't work, bitterness. |
Are you a millionaire?
I wish. But I know the government isn't going to do that for me. |
How do you plan to be rich?
You only do as much as you can have control over, there's no such thing as guaranteed wealth. You play the cards you're dealt and if you are frugal with your finances, invest, work hard, and better yourself through education then you are doing everything within your power to become wealthy. Bill Gates was an average guy who didn't plan on becoming the richest man in the world, he's an exception. We don't make societies laws based on the few exceptions. |
Bill Gates was never an average guy. Do some research. |
 |
The point I was making was nobody would have ever predicted Bill Gates would become the wealthiest man on the face of the planet. You still haven't addressed any of the other examples I proposed, only skirt around them with irrelevant questions. You never materialized your point by asking me questions like "How do you Plan do be Rich". What relevance does that have to what I stated about the ineffectiveness of government allocating other peoples income? |
I don't want to go off half cocked.
Whether and how you plan to be rich is extremely important.
You are no doubt used to living in a society that takes a lot of stuff for granted that shouldn't be taken for granted. I intend to make you significantly less cocky and sure of your own thoughts and reasons before I address you head on.
Looking at the young Bill Gates who would have predicted he would be a nobody?
I see where you're going with this. You're going to try to paint America as the exception by juxtaposing my argument in say, a country that's drastically less developed economically. You'll make the point essentially, 'you have the ability to become rich because you're part of a privileged society, not all nations are as fortunate economically.' But maybe that's not where you're going so I'll answer the question. I think I misstated myself talking about Bill Gates. I never inferred that he would be a "nobody", I was simply stating nobody could have gauged the scope of his future success. No doubt he was an exceptional youth, amazingly brilliant in math and science. Yet after dropping out of Harvard to pursue a completely unproven business venture, the point I was making was "who would have taken this guy seriously at the time?" By all means, he was not seen as somebody who would eventually change the world. A young Bill Gates showed promise, but let's remember he was attending Harvard intending to become an attorney like his father, his success was very unplanned for. |
“but lets remember he was attending Harvard intending to become an attorney like his father, his success was very unplanned for.”
Are you trying to be ironic?
I'm simply stating his initial career choice had nothing to do with what he eventually became a billionaire for. |
What proportion of Harvard students whose fathers are rich lawyers end up earning less money than you?
I don't know, find me a statistic and I'll give you a response. We've gotten very off topic and I dont see this coming to any logical conclusion. |
I am just waiting until they've all felt uneasy and gone home - that crowd in your head urging you on.
Are they still there?
They're waiting for a legitimate rebuttal to my points. They'll be ready to respond when that happens. |
Tell me when they've gone, eh?
Ok they're gone. |
The buggers never give me any peace.
The world is full of people who have no realistic prospect of ever becoming rich who prop up a system which allows a tiny minority to be fabulously wealthy.
Why is it in the interests of the bottom 99% to allow the top 1% to be so problematically rich? Do you honestly believe that it is only the prospect of obscene and unspendable wealth which motivates people to do great things? Do you have any evidence to back up that idea?
In the old Soviet Union a lot of people pretended to work and then got drunk when they got home. Now the sky is the limit. They can earn fabulous wealth. The incidence of alcoholism is now so high that the life expectancy has dropped substantially. Is Russia greater than she used to be? Does she do greater things? No. The ability to work harder and do better for yourself is a wonderful thing, it makes the world go round, but only up to a point. Diminishing returns sets in. If you have a car, a holiday home, better food and good quality clothes how much is extra wealth going to be a major spur for you? Admit it, it isn't. Once you have reached the point at which you can live well, travel and have no fear of being poor money ceases to be a major incentive to extra activity. At that point recognition matters more. If the only way to be recognised is to earn more money that is what you will do. But that only happens in societies that haven't got the courage to let the market be the servant of the people rather than its tyrannical master.
The rich don't really want to be rich, to have so much money that they don't know what to do with it and spending becomes a problem. The rich want to be successful. Of course they might say different but that is because they have been so locked into the system that to say they didn't want more and more money would be seen as some kind of heresy and treason against their class.
What enables people to be ridiculously wealthy is almost always down to multiplying something by the size of a country or the world. People don't tend to get fabulously wealthy by having a small number of people give them a large amount of money. Most fabulously wealthy people have come up with a way of taxing the population size. It is the fact that there is a lot of people that makes their business lucrative. Take JK Rowling as an example, my family has contributed quite a bit to making JK Rowling rich, about the same amount as we have contributed to the take away kebab shop down the road. JK Rowling is rich because she can get thousands of other people to sell books, DVDs and cinema tickets to my family and hundreds of millions of other families. She is not tens of millions of times better at her job than the man who makes kebabs and she doesn't work millions of times harder: she doesn't deserve millions of times more. The point is that it isn't the talent of JK Rowling, or Microsoft, or McDonald's or Disney that makes phenomenal incomes it is the population size that does it. McDonald's isn't rich by making a few people buy all their food from its restaurants, it is rich because it has taken a reasonably successful formula and mutiplied it by a very large number: the size of America and then the world.
If we shrank the world to the size of the Isle of Man there would be no millionaires. The honest rich acknowledge this. Warren Buffett has freely stated than if he lived on a small island he wouldn't have amounted to much. The Isle of Man is full of millionaires. Why? I doubt they go there for the bracing Irish Sea air. It is the low taxation and the lack of officious regulation that draws them in. The Isle of Man is a small island in the middle of the Irish Sea relatively convenient for trading with the lands that you can spy from its highest point: England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The Isle of Man exports poor people, imports rich people and has a virtually zero chance of being invaded by foreign powers: Britain would never let an unsinkable aircraft carrier and harbour complex just off the coast be taken by a hostile power. I think all tax havens should be invaded and seized by their bigger neighbours to take back what is rightfully theirs: the fruits of their own market. The Isle of Man survives by taxing people who wouldn't be there if they taxed any more highly. Rich people go to the Isle of Man to stop the nation which generated their income being able to tax it. If you want to live on the Isle of Man confine your trade to the Manx, and be poor.
France should seize Monaco. A combined army of the European Union should isolate Switzerland, making it a no-fly zone, anything bigger than a clock cuckoo to be shot shot from the sky until they surrender or commit mass suicide, either way is cool by me. The Pope should surrender himself to the nearest police station in Rome and hand over Saint Peter's keys to the mayor.
What was the question again?
You're applying strictly hypothetical "Island" model of thinking to a real world system in which billions of individuals are interacting and trading through a complex market. Your theory may work for thought exercises but it holds little if any practicality in the real world. So what if one person can become rich because millions of people buy their products. Have you lost sight of the fact that these people consensually handed over their money to purchase Microsoft and J.K Rowling materials. I personally have never read a Harry Potter book in my life, don't plan on any time soon either. My sister on the other hand was quite infatuated and read through them all, it was a personal choice. Why should personal choice be deprived on the individual level to spite the wealthy through excess taxation? These wealthy entrepreneurs are providing services that are in demand. Tax the top 5%, and you are taxing the Henry Fords, Bill Gates', Warren Buffets', and Richard Bransons' of our era. Better yet, why don't we impose a 100% tax on these people, and return it to the market where it belongs? No billionaire I know of fits your mold of diminishing returns in which they suddenly become content with their wealth and place. These people are undoubtedly driven by "recognition", but in this modern era recognition is in the dollar. Better to allow the pursuit of recognition than hinder it through market barriers and coercive taxation. |
100% taxation is something I approve of, as a marginal rate, obviously. The point at which it should cut in is debatable, up way past the point at which money ceases to motivate people to do things.
Billionaires don't suddenly become content with their wealth, they go on accumulating wealth because that is how they run their lives, that is how they find meaning in their lives. They run out of sensible things to spend it on and end up servicing a huge army of hangers-on. If we took that useless money from them efficiently and unavoidable they would carry on driving their businesses forward as before because they enjoy it.
JK Rowling would have written 7 Harry Potter books, in just the same detail, even if she didn't earn a penny from sales outside of Britain. Don't doubt it. All the rest of her earnings are entirely unnecessary from the point of view of motivation. She takes the money because she doesn't want to see anybody else take it instead. In a sense she deserves it, but really what that means is nobody else deserves it more, but of course that's wrong, the huge extra earnings that people can make because the world is big belong really to the world.
Paul McCartney doesn't go on tour to make money, he has a hard time handling the money he already has, he does it because he enjoys it. He makes money from it because it is very hard not to when you are in his situation.
High taxes are a deterrent to work for middle ranking earners and for those who can choose to sponge off the state or parents or some other source or choose to work. That deterrent to work effect disappears for the top earners because people don't strive to go from the status of billionaire to multi-billionaire because they want the money, they want the status and the feeling of winning. The money is simply the scoreboard. Of course this only works if you can do it on a global basis, otherwise you just export rich people to tax havens where they will go to show they are not being "beaten" by the taxman, if they don't think of it themselves somebody will make themselves rich by selling the tax avoidance scheme to the rich man. Accountants earn money from the amount they can "save" their clients, the amount they can get their clients to resent losing. Making people resent taxes is as important for accountants as making people fear hell is for the preacher in a town with too many churches and not enough tradition.
"J.K.Rowling would have written 7 Harry Potter books, in just the same detail, even if she didn't earn a penny from sales outside of Britain. Don't doubt it." Would have, could have, should have, who cares? Fact of the matter is she earned tens of millions outside of Britain. The precise reason she because ultra wealthy is because she exported her idea outside Britain. Ideas are meant to be shared and nourished, not selfishly hidden away and oppressed. 100% taxation does just that. Just be frank and say you support radical Socialism, or dare i say "Communism", because a 100% tax rate is no different frankly. Individuals possess the ability to self-organize and distribute resources adequately. Nobody is dying in America or Britain because the government isn't protecting their "income equality". What is that term anyway? As if perfectly level wealth distribution somehow produces more favorable results in society. Fact: Income equality is unnatural. Every man and woman is not created equal in their ability to produce wealth or inventions that will benefit society. Unto each his own. Those who produce should be rewarded with the seed they sow and those who choose not to produce as much or cannot can live their lives accordingly. Therefore, by using the government as a means to allocate resources taken from societies top earners, you are encouraging those who are not top earners to be even less ambitious. Man is a hunter and capitalism is the ultimate hunt. When people compete society is at its best. When the government steps in you are essentially domesticating the wild hunter. He looses his teeth, becomes fat, dependant, and most importantly: Lazy. Who ever revels at a hound eating out of his dog bowl at home? Conversely, when you witness the cunning of a wolf, fit, strong, and healthy in his natural habitat, you cannot help but to be wowed. Capitalism is the way of the wolf, Socialism is the way of the domesticated hound, and everybody knows what happens when the wolf meets the domesticated hound in a fight. |
The wolves retreat or get torn apart, usually.
How big is the biggest crowd you have ever been in?
Tens of thousands, at a concert. |
Did you feel a significant part of that crowd?
Of course not. |
Why not?
Because I was one small voice in a collection of tens of thousands. |
Where do you live?
Los Angeles. |
Does being one three hundred millionth of the world's biggest economy mean a lot to you, as a source of personal satisfaction and life affirmation?
|
Its not about how much stake you hold in the economy monetarily, its about how that stake is obtained. Those who own multi-billion dollar businesses did so with the help of millions of other of Americans who purchased their products. There was no stealing or pillaging of resources. Those individuals innovated and provided a service that others valued, this is not an American concept. The true stealing of resources is when the government steps in to "re-allocate" resources through means of taxation. Giving an individual a tax hand out from a rich man will not make him more intelligent or harder working. Teach men to fish rather than steal from the Fisherman. The grief and bitterness you describe is corrosive and destructive to society at the most basic levels. It's one thing to detest a person for their behavior, but to take that detest to the next level and advocate the government to step in and procure resources from them is quite another. In reality, there is no difference between the thief who robs a bank and a politician who advocates money be taken from those who have earned it. The government is just a more socially acceptable means since we associate certain good things with the government such as the police department, food management, drug inspectors, water sanitation, and the military. These services are created to protect the public, the subsequent bureaucracy and inefficiency of a government is tolerable in these instances because consistency is required to maintain them. Addressing the symptom and not the cause will always produce unfavorable results. Government wealth distribution is purely symptom related and will never solve societies major problems. The greatest wealth distribution system in history had a name: Communism. How did that work out? |
Communism was not about wealth redistribution it was about changing power distribution. It was a flawed theory leading inevitably to a flawed practice. I am not in any way shape or form a communist or an apologist for communism. I don't think a communist society is inevitable, possible or desirable and any route to be taken in that direction is likely to be a bad one to take for a significant proportion of humanity. This American obsession with portraying anything other than the unalloyed blind worship of rampant free market capitalism as dangerous Jesus-hating un-American 100% state controlled totalitarian communism is so very old and so very dumb it is no longer even funny. It is perfectly possible to have a state which redistributes some wealth without making capitalism grind to a complete halt, the constant simple denial of this fact by ideologues in America does not change anything.
The greatest wealth distribution system in history has a name: capitalism. This system has ensured that a minority become fabulously wealthy to the point that money loses its meaning and its power to act as an incentive to enterprise or effort. The system is screwed because it cannot cope with the enormous and ungainly size of the world market. There are so many people in the world today that if you can sell something, anything, to an appreciable fraction of them you will inevitably earn quite unmanageably large sums of money. Some people are earning more money than they can spend sensibly which results in huge problems with disposing of it without screwing things up even more. Rich men these days regard giving money to their children as cursing them with the problems they created by the actions of their greed and ego. At the same time there are people who have their lives destroyed by poverty. How can addressing those problems be a bad thing? It simply isn't.
Capitalism needs to be moderated to protect it from the damage that excess can cause. Of course the opposite of free market capitalism would be a bad thing because the optimum very rarely occurs on any extreme. Extreme capitalism is nasty, it inevitably results in casualties, damaged and blighted lives. And because of the way human society operates advantage and disadvantage follow people through the generations. Breaking out of a ghetto is hard. It is hard if you have the drive of the immigrant, the wide-eyed gullible optimism of the first generation American and the support of a community which is looking out for you. It is massively harder still if you are born in a ghetto in which all the get-up-and-go got up and went three generations earlier, in which if somebody asks you where your father is you think of God or a priest and in which trying to succeed is regarded as uncool and an act of treason. The capitalist solution to that problem is to deny that it is a problem, or your problem. Casualties are inevitable. You need failure to put success into perspective. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Poor people form the labour market. The only poor people are poor people. Caring for the stragglers is only encouraging people not to try. And other such inhuman bullshit.
Poor people are far worse things to have wandering about in your cities than wolves and bears. They are smarter, meaner, better armed and capable of causing a lot more misery and suffering. I don't like poor people because I don't like what poverty does to people, whether that is fecklessness and bling culture or sanctimonious Jesus-freakin' working class solidarity bullshit or toadying to the rich and famous or aristocracy. It all stinks. Poverty is bad to experience either first hand or second hand. Surely this is obvious to any observer. Poverty is a blight on a whole community, city, nation or indeed species. Anybody who thinks it is somehow unavoidable will still have a bloody hard time convincing me that it is something we should put up with. I don't want to share my planet with damaged people and I don't want any smug gits telling me it's all for the best.