The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

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Burning ghost
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Burning ghost »

H&N -

Do you have any suggestion as to what to do in order to help capitalism along? Raising taxes and inhibiting tax “evasion” (overseas accounts) is one obvious choice. I am curious myself about the effect this may have on the long term economy though - would the positives effects outweigh the negative effects long term?

One thing that bothers me more is farming subsidies. If the economic community banned government (or at least lessened it) help in some imdustries then it would create a fairer playing field. I do remember that this was proposed in the UK years back but other countries wanted to protect their little golden geese - it didn’t even make it to the discussion table sadly.
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Eduk
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Eduk »

Here we blame irrational accumulations of wealth on those who are so endowed
As I understand it it is possible not to work for Amazon with options other than being unemployed and living on the street. For example I don't work for Amazon and I don't live on the street. I was assuming you did not mean what you said literally as there are examples of people who grew up in poverty and become billionaires, for example Howard Schultz.
One counter to the helpless worker being paid low wages for unskilled easily replaced jobs is to not be unskilled. Perhaps try at school. Work hard, develop a talent and then be paid much more reasonably for skilled labour in hard to replace jobs.
You seem to be suggesting the 'poor' are mindless automatons incapable of learning and destined to work in unskilled jobs from birth. I was pointing out that CEOs can be thought of in the same was. As mindless automatons destined to take control of mindless masses from birth. After all in a world without Howard I suspect there would still be coffee chains.
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Eduk
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Eduk »

inhibiting tax “evasion”
This is presumably a very simple thing to do that no government has thought to implement before. I don't mean to be overly harsh, but saying things should be good is easy, actually making things good is crazy hard. For example I think the NHS should have shorter queues. Easy to say, now try to implement it :)
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Hereandnow
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Hereandnow »

Eduk
As I understand it it is possible not to work for Amazon with options other than being unemployed and living on the street. For example I don't work for Amazon and I don't live on the street. I was assuming you did not mean what you said literally as there are examples of people who grew up in poverty and become billionaires, for example Howard Schultz.
One counter to the helpless worker being paid low wages for unskilled easily replaced jobs is to not be unskilled. Perhaps try at school. Work hard, develop a talent and then be paid much more reasonably for skilled labour in hard to replace jobs.
You seem to be suggesting the 'poor' are mindless automatons incapable of learning and destined to work in unskilled jobs from birth. I was pointing out that CEOs can be thought of in the same was. As mindless automatons destined to take control of mindless masses from birth. After all in a world without Howard I suspect there would still be coffee chains.
It is a popular argument among the rich. I wrote this earlier and it expresses my view on the matter:
BG
There is some truth to giving as little as you can get away with and it works two ways. It allows people to survive and doesn’t encourage them to expect to be taken care of
Why would they need taking care of? Because they are poor and don't have the means to do so themselves. Why are they poor? No skills that pay well. Why don't they have the skills? Education failed them? Why did education fail them?:

Because conservatives refuse to pay for public education that will prepare them for viable employment. That is why. This is not debatable, it is wht they do. They reason that there is no excuse for for being poor other than the failure of the individual's lack of will to make success happen. This gets them comfortably off the hook to have tax payer money pay for education: just complain about how badly their doing, show righteous indignation and make a lot of rhetoric waves with talk about those lazy good for nothings, win over the marginally educated citizenry and, of course, the wealthy who see tax breaks for not having to have their tax dollars pay for lower class educational needs, get elected and gut education expenditure. This keeps the poor, poor, because arguments about a failure of "will" neglect to address the problem of how will is bound to possibilities social environments create, and allow educational deficit to translate into unemployment or, poverty producing low wage employment, drug addiction, and all the rest of social ills that plague the poor.

It is precisely this phenomenon that keeps poverty, ignorance and crime alive in society. I blame the wealthiest class for all of this. Those with limited ability to think things through clearly respond to social problems viscerally, not discursively-- that is, they react rather than think, these people are at the mercy of the malicious rhetoric that pours out of the conservative intelligentsia. The Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the like feed lower middle class and middle class resentment by espousing choice and freedom and the god of the bible giving everyone choice and freedom, and so freedom means, by this simple Manichean thinking, a reduction of complex social events to what is manageable in the simplest mind: guilt of innocence. The poor, it is concluded, implicitly if not outright, deserve to be poor.
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Hereandnow
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

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that's guilt OR innocence.
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Burning ghost
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Burning ghost »

H&N -

Like Eduk says your habit is to view everything through a black and white lens. Anyway, why do you blame yourself?

What is our proposal?
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Eduk »

Howard Schultz, as I understand it, went to state ran schools. You seem to be expressing the extreme view that nothing as anyone's fault unless they are rich?
Also wouldn't you expect those with might well express that they deserve it while those without may well express that they don't? Seems obvious to me? Perhaps reality is somewhere in between?
My main point though is that you can't have it both ways. Either people are rational agents and hence able to change their circumstances or they are not. If not then nothing is anyone's fault. If they are then they are rational agents and able to change according to their abilities depending on the circumstances they find themselves in (which is what seems to happen in reality).
Of course you can argue that the cards are rather stacked in favour of those with rather than those without. But that would then require talking about exactly where the cards lie. Where is agency impinged and to what extent and what can be done about it. This however is far from black and white.
By the way are you by any chance poor due to no fault of your own? Would you like the government to take away your rights so they can protect you properly as you would a child?
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

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Hereandnow wrote:Why would they need taking care of? Because they are poor and don't have the means to do so themselves. Why are they poor? No skills that pay well. Why don't they have the skills? Education failed them? Why did education fail them?:

Because conservatives refuse to pay for public education that will prepare them for viable employment. That is why.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, there was a society in which capitalism and "free" markets still operated but where taxation was used to fund good quality education and healthcare that was free to all at the point of use. Suppose, in that society, there were still very large wealth differences between the richest and the poorest. Would these differences now be acceptable? If not, can you envisage any situation at all where such differences are acceptable?

Is it just about differences, or about absolute levels of wellbeing? Take these two hypothetical levels of wealth between the richest and the poorest:

A. Richest: 1000. Poorest: 100
B. Richest: 100000000. Poorest: 1000

Which situation is best? A or B?
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Hereandnow
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

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Steve3007
Suppose, in that society, there were still very large wealth differences between the richest and the poorest.
So, what if high skilled jobs paid sh**? Errrr, that would be the end of the middle class. Sounds like a revolution.
If not, can you envisage any situation at all where such differences are acceptable?
If human nature were such that in order extract the stellar performances in production for the social good, there had to be a vast disparity of the distribution of wealth, then one could argue such a thing. This IS the assumption behind the zeal for capitalism: just look at what happens when communism decimates human drive. East Germans workers were utterly clueless in a world where hard work translated into better wages (so odd to read about how there was actually disincentive to do more in communist East Germany).

Obviously there is something to this and I am no "leveler" as Burke put it. But the assumption that there must be in place the possibility of unlimited wealth, for smart people to be motivated, is blatantly, painfully absurd. It is the kind of reasoning that works in the minds of the disingenuous wealthy, who know better, and the undereducated who are taken by the conservative propaganda of "what is good for GM is good for America" (or however this works in other countries).
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

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Steve3007
Which situation is best? A or B?
It's not about eliminating the wealthy class. It's about making quality education available for all. This is much more difficult than the mere saying, for it would require addressing the social conditioning that occurs at home and outside the educational environment. The damage is done and it has to be repaired. I want to see 10 hour school days, hundreds more teachers in the most afflicted cities, computer ed for three year olds (like it is in Korea!) Cost a fortune! I think Bill Gates' money alone (let him keep a billion) could resurrect Detroit if not stupidly spent. In less than a generation, structural poverty and ignorance would disappear.
Eduk
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Eduk »

When I was under 11 I went to school with a good friend of mine. He came from an abusive household. He is not doing well. I am doing quite well. I did not come from an abusive household. Perhaps better schooling would have helped more than not coming from an abusive household but I very very much doubt it.
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Alias »

Eduk wrote: September 10th, 2018, 10:34 am As I understand it it is possible not to work for Amazon with options other than being unemployed and living on the street.
Sure. You can work for Uber, until your car is repossessed, or KFC, until you're down with kidney stones or Walmart until the customers learn to do their own checkout.
For example I don't work for Amazon and I don't live on the street. .... examples of people who grew up in poverty and become billionaires,]
Think in numbers. There are x high-paid jobs, y-medium paid job, z low-paid jobs y>x; z>y+x, the adult job-seeking population is x+y+z+a+b+c, where a is adolescent and retired, b is migrant and c is unemployable.
If all the x and y jobs are filled by people with a choice, there are not many openings for ambitious zetas. They can go to school all they can afford to - but there will always be fewer openings than aspirants. Up in millionnaire and billionnaire tiers, there is one opening for every million aspirants - and that requires the fiercest competitive style and/or a wallop of luck.
Factor in, too, that technology invariably eliminates jobs at the z level earlier and in larger numbers than in the skilled, clerical and executive tiers,
while religion and conservative politics restrict the lowest classes to the least reproductive freedom.
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Alias »

I missed close quote and didn't review. No edit button. Oh well.
I cannot make another post so soon.
I cannot add to the old one.
Difficult site.
Those who can induce you to believe absurdities can induce you to commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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Burning ghost
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

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H&N -

The thing is if you give the money to the government to spend they’ll not spend it on education because they have to think about a whole other number of areas to fund. Without billionaires who would actually improve the education system? No one. Sad but true - the only real exception was Finland.

Bill Gates found that punping more money into education did nothing. The issue is having passionate teachers. It doesn’t matter how much money you give someone to do something, if they aren’t interested, they aren’t interested. If teacher wages were to be driven up a little it would make things better I expect - too much and you’re likely to attract the type you dislike (the “only money matters” bunch.)

Throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve it. Frivolous natures make the most of everything and see where the money will be best put to use. Mrs. Gates comments about sex ed and general education - money doesn’t help if its not put in the right place. Taxes go the government, and the amount of politiking there makes it hard to get anything done.
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Eduk
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Eduk »

Alias I'm not sure why you are addressing me? I didn't say there wasn't wage inequality. I didn't say wage inequality is just super. I didn't say we live in a perfectly just society. I didn't say all poor deserve to be poor and I didn't say all rich deserve to be rich.
I said it wasn't black and white. If you, or anyone, thinks a problem is so easily solved then I highly doubt you are in a position to solve it. By which I mean you are mistaken and your ignorance stops you solving real problems because you get stuck on fake ones.
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