rEvolutionist wrote:Of course it's a moral and ethical issue. A lot of wealthy people did nothing for their wealth other than being lucky enough to be born into it. And the others who allegedly "worked" for it, owe an ethical debt to those that they fleeced via an unfair exploitative economic system.
And yet again, OPM can't run out, unless you believe that wealth is destroyed when money is moved around in the economy.
I didn't say wealth is destroyed, I said OPM runs out, which it does, when the people to whom it belongs tire of working to produce wealth that is then taken away from them and given to others. An economy requires a constant stream of produced wealth in order to operate. Once the capital has been sunk and is no longer producing new capital it becomes unavailable to the government for redistribution. Just look at China's abandoned and derelict but brand-spanking-new cities it built when capital was flowing in, but which have never been occupied because demand for them ceased to exist.
For an economy to operate, somebody has to work to produce value-added wealth. If nobody does so, the economy grinds to a halt pretty quickly. Since socialism disincentivizes value-added wealth production because it seizes the fruits of the productive class's labor for redistribution (non-wealth creating zero-sum transfer of capital from one person to another) to the dependent class. This transaction does not increase (and usually decreases through bureaucratic overhead) the value of the capital to the markets, it merely transfers the benefit of that capital from one person to another while reducing it by an amount extracted to pay for processing the transaction by the government.
What the dependent class person spends the transferred wealth on results in no more creation of wealth than would be created by the original owner of the capital spending it himself. Therefore, there is no net gain (but there is a net cost) to transferring a dollar from one person to another. It's still a dollar and buys a dollar's worth of goods. All that changes is who spends it.
The problem is not the flow of capital itself, it's the effect of taking capital from one person and giving it to another on the productive class's willingness to
continue to labor and add value in order to create "excess" wealth that can then be redistributed to the dependent class.
It's really quite simple. If I grow two acres of potatoes and the government seizes one acre's worth of potatoes to give to someone I've never met, even if it allows me to keep one acre of potatoes for myself, the government is stealing half of my labor to give to others from which I benefit not at all. So, next year I'm not going to bother planting and tending two acres of potatoes, I'm going to do the minimum amount of work possible in order for me to meet the needs of my own family and/or tribe, and I'm not going to work harder to produce another acre of potatoes because I won't get any benefit from doing so. It will just be taken away from me, so why bother growing the potatoes in the first place? I don't need them, I only need one acre's worth of potatoes, and I don't give a flying fuck about some dependent class schlub in a city somewhere who thinks he's entitled to force me to labor on his behalf to grow potatoes just so he doesn't go hungry.
And so the potato crop nationwide is reduced by 50 percent in the second year of redistributive taxation.
But the government still has dependent class mouths to feed, else they will rise up and smite the bureaucrats for failing to provide them with food, so what does the government do then?
Does it kick the dependent class out of the cities and welfare programs and tell them "root, hog or die" and use tough love to encourage them to not be dependent but rather become members of the productive class?
Nope, it comes to me and says "You have to grow two acres of potatoes next year because we need the surplus to feed the dependent class."
To which I respond, "Go fuck yourself, I don't need two acres of potatoes and I'm not going to work to produce two acres of potatoes without any chance of profit just because you have a problem with indolent dependent class schlubs in the city. I'm going to grow only what I need and fuck all the rest of y'all."
And that's when the slavery begins. The government doesn't like this answer, so it has to use force to compel me to labor on behalf of the dependent class by requiring me to work harder than I have to in order to satisfy my own needs.
Rejecting the involuntary servitude, I do what I can to resist by only growing 1 3/4 acres, only to have one acre seized, leaving me only 3/4 of an acre of potatoes, which is insufficient to meet my needs, so me and my family begin to starve.
We are unable to continue to produce 1 3/4 acres because there isn't enough to keep us health, so we only produce 1 1/2 acres, but the government still has one acre's worth of dependent class mouths to feed, lest the chickens come home to roost and THEIR heads get put up on spikes by a hungry dependent class.
And so it goes. The more the mouths of the kine are bound, the less labor they produce, which creates a vicious cycle ending in me giving up farming altogether, moving to the city and becoming a member of the dependent class rather than the productive class.
If you can't see the inevitable end of this cycle, you're far too stupid to be given any consideration or respect.
And that's such an idiotic belief, I'm not surprised you follow it. Every dollar given to poor person re-enters the economy. And more of it enters the national economy than with a rich person.
There's your problem right there. You're simply mistaken in this assumption. In point of fact, rich people's money produces far more wealth than does the consumer spending of poor people.
Every such dollar generates many multiples of dollars of wealth, and provides demand for an economy, which is the primary thing that supports an economy.
Your mistake is in thinking that a dollar spent by a poor person on consumption generates greater wealth than does the investment of that dollar by the wealthy person in creating products for the public to consume. You're quite simply wrong.
If we adopt your economic system of neoliberalism, we get increased inequality and the destruction of the middle-class,
Marxist claptrap. You see, you're conflating "inequality" with "economics." Big mistake. It is the inequality of absolute wealth between the consuming class and the producing class that makes wealth generation possible. This "inequality" is actually available capital which is risked to create new products and companies to make those products which the consumers will buy. Without that available capital, no car factories or burger shops get built and there is no supply available to meet demand, much less create new demand for new products that is the hallmark of a growing economy.
If everybody has exactly the same amount of money as everybody else, there is no reserve pool of capital available for capital investment (risk) to create infrastructure and products for everybody else to buy. That capital is only made available because the owners invest it in pursuit of profits. If they don't stand to profit from their investment of capital, they won't invest it, they will merely spend it until they don't have any more to spend...or until the tax man takes it away from them to give to someone else.
We can call that the entropy of socialism.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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