PJ O'rourke said this:

Collectivism doesn't work because it's based on a faulty economic premise. There is no such thing as a person's 'fair share' of wealth. The gross national product is not a pizza that must be carefully divided because if I get too many slices, you have to eat the box. The economy is expandable and, in any practical sense, limitless.

"The chief virtue of a capitalist mode of production is its ability to create wealth. Wealth is created when assets are moved from lower to higher valued uses." -- Luke Froeb

That's not a popular sentiment. The man or woman on the street is offended to think they might have to expend effort to learn and reflect on what others care about.

Gates was good at that. And now he's making serious efforts to defeat malaria.

Yeah, he did some shady shit. But the microcomputer revolution might well have gone much worse without him and his avarice... Would we have wanted IBM in control? Of course not.

There's a nearly-Christian core of truth to this: There's no theoretical limit to how happy we can make each other.

There's ways to make each other happy that have nothing to with being paid in return.

But for lot of the best ventures, you will be paid.

People are going to do the most they can to maximize happiness in any given system, and for some people that involves making tons of money. It is natural to want to do the best for yourself.

That said, I'd say a system in which all the wealth is at the top and there is massive poverty at the bottom is an immoral one, and one I would prefer not to live in.

Unless I'm at the top of course.

So, you don't get it.

> a system in which all the
> wealth is at the top

Try Tulsa.

Headline: "…fought capitalism and won."

We know you'll be happy!

The first false assumption that so many who are jealous of others' wealth make is that those wealthier than them some how or other got their money through theft.

The second false assumption that so many who are jealous of others' wealth make is that they, and not the holders of that wealth, have the right to say how much money others should have. Obama was guilty of this ("at some point in time you've made enough money"), just one more reason he was/is an ass.

The third false assumption so many who are jealous of others' wealth make is that they, and not the holders of that wealth, know better what to do with other people's money.

Fought capitalism by going to Walmart instead of Dollar Store? The headline writer slept through his economics class.

There is no solution to the problems of the poor that doesn't involve having them create more wealth.

The problem isn't creating wealth so much as it is the super-wealthy purchasing government vassels to pervert the law to give the wealthy even more control over the nation and markets.

The term 'robber barons' wasn't created by a jealous hippie.

I remember once I opined the wealthiest simply can't possibly need the vast fortunes that some accumulate. With the fury of a thousand suns, Conan chided me for my presumption in deciding how much others need.

Well, are these people on life support and running full-service intensive care units out of their homes?

Still, no one ever increased their fortune by resenting those who have a fortune.

Now, now, it was only a coupla hundred suns.

Okay, have it your way, Conan. I might have exaggerated slightly.

I reject all the premises by Giridharadas. A well-run and profitable business on average is paying MORE than other businesses, not starving them. Like Microsoft or Apple or Google or Amazon. It is not business that burns fossil fuels but you and me--and it was clever businesses that figured out how to get lower CO2 natural gas out of shale rock. It is business that invented the Prius, not Greenpeace. Yes, some business gets gov to get special incentives for them, but the worst offenders here are "green" energies like windmills and ethanol which would not exist without subsidies. And the solution to this problem is smaller gov not bigger, fewer rules, not more.

The classic hatred of the "robber barons" was quite misplaced. Rockefeller was the most hated but he brought the price of kerosene so low that poor people could afford it. He hurt competitors and they complained to politicians and newspapers. He didn't hurt the public, quite the contrary.

"That said, I'd say a system in which all the wealth is at the top and there is massive poverty at the bottom is an immoral one, and one I would prefer not to live in."

Ahem.

You're way into dreamland - because there will always be a fraction of the population which is unemployable for any task.

As it is, we already cripple ourselves with the idea that if we just lower standards we can get better performance.

Hmmm... Let's see...

"...find clever new ways to pay people as little as possible and as precariously as possible."

You've still got to pay them enough that they don't quit. Just like employees have to work just enough that they don't get fired. That's the natural order of things. But "precariously"? If your job is that precarious, keep looking for something better. Starve the "robber barons" of willing employees if they are really that bad.

"They avoid taxes illegally and legally, with trillions hiding offshore,"

Good! Starve the Beast!

"They lobby for public policies that don't benefit the public interest--in fact, cost the public interest but enrich them."

That's a natural consequence of allowing society to be polluted with political government. You can't give people such a tool and expect them to not use it.

"They form monopolies that asphyxiate competition."

Monopolies are impossible to maintain with government help. Abolish political government if you hate and fear monopolies.

"They cause social problems to make a profit: obesity by selling sugary drinks; the opioid crisis by selling OxyContin; the housing calamity by speculating in dodgy mortgages; climate change by selling fossil fuels."

You are perfectly free to shun these people and products if they offend you. Me, I choose to let people drink what they want even if I think it would be better for them to not drink certain things. I am thankful opioids exist for those in serious pain-- you have the choice to not become an addict. Don't provide a government bail-out for those who speculate in "dodgy mortgages" and see how careful they become.
And "fossil fuels" have saved so many lives you can't even comprehend it. If you don't like them, come up with something better... not something you believe is better, but something that works better and doesn't create pollution of any kind. Or just shut your yap.

To Hades with typos!

"They form monopolies that asphyxiate competition."

I meant: Monopolies are impossible to maintain withOUT government help. Abolish political government if you hate and fear monopolies.

Aw, c'mon, just machine gun the coal miners that won't comply. And their wives and children, too.

Worked for Rockefeller, anyway. Besides, they were in poverty because they were lazy. Commie bastards.

If the government confiscated the entire net worth of all the billionaires in the U.S.A. (about $3-Trillion) it wouldn't be enough to pay for one year of Medicare-For-All.

All the $Billions of Bezos, Gates, Buffett, Zuckerberg, Musk, Koch, Walton, et al, aren't concentrated at the top. Their lavish lifestyles - mansions, yachts, private planes... use up a tiny fraction of their wealth. The rest is distributed throughout the economy, invested and managed in things like Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, SpaceX, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, Georgia-Pacific, Walmart. Every $Billion Bezos makes that's more than he can spend on himself is another $Billion more for someone else to benefit from. Even if he spends it on himself - more mansions, airplanes, yachts - that's employment for anyone involved in supplying, managing and maintaining those things.

If the government taxes the wealth of billionaires how will that tax be paid? Could Bezos write a check for $3-Billion? Or would he just sign over $3-Billion of Amazon shares to the IRS? What would the government do with them? Sell them? To whom, the Russians? More politicians would have to set up philanthropic organizations to launder the kickbacks.

I think the rich and the poor are better off if all that wealth is managed by the people with the ingenuity and acumen to create it. I'm happy with the way my mediocre life and the lives of my family, friends, neighbors and coworkers have been enhanced by the way billionaires, including the one who founded and controls the company I work for, have managed their wealth.

I doubt that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren could manage the wealth of a nation any better than Nicolás Maduro or Kim Jong-un. What they call managing the economy is what other people call wasteful spending. After they've spent all the wealth of the top 1% whose money will pay for the second year of Medicare-For-All?

"You've still got to pay them enough that they don't quit. "

To riff on this, and the stuff that Crid wrote above: Leftists make two huge incorrect (and easily refutable) assumptions about economics. They are:

1. Assuming that wealth is a fixed pot. A leftist claims that wealth cannot be created; it can only be taken from someone else. (They also implicitly claim that wealth cannot be destroyed. They never talk about this part, but you can see it when leftists take over a company and run it into the ground. They aren't concerned about it because they assume that the underlying wealth will still be there.)

2. Assuming that the supply of labor is infinite, and that labor is always a buyer's market. This is evident in Giridharadas' statement about businesses paying as little as they can get away with. Presumably, only minimum-wage laws stand in the way of all of us being labor slaves. Funny, but the last time I checked, Microsoft pays pretty well. Why? They have to. The supply of people who have both the skills and the inclination to do that kind of work is a pretty small fraction of the population. The same goes for many fields, whether it be cybersecurity or oilfield roughneck. Even unskilled labor has a non-zero market price.

Now, to loop back to what Nicole said:

"That said, I'd say a system in which all the wealth is at the top and there is massive poverty at the bottom is an immoral one, and one I would prefer not to live in."

It depends on how it got that way. The key to the health of any Western society is economic opportunity. Are there ways that the aspirational can improve their lot in life? If so, the current situation doesn't matter much because it won't last for long; a lot of the poor will move up into the middle class, and some of the middle class will move up into the wealthy. Yes, this can all be perverted, and there certainly were robber barons in the 19th century -- look up Jay Gould and James Fisk. However, I would argue that the actions of such people are not capitalist; they are anti-capitalist. Gould and Fisk relied on exploiting inside connections in the Grant Administration for their scheme; such are definitely not the actions of a free-marketer.

Need is a terrible metric for wealth. Millions of people live just fine on $50/mo. You could too Patrick, if you really had to. So much in our lives we don't really 'need'. But I'm glad to have public sewage and indoor plumbing. Amy would have a very difficult time running a blog for free without an internet connection. But I doubt most of us would die if we lost the internet. . . . maybe Crid if he got cut off from Twitter?

Either way I'm glad to have more than I need.

That said, I'd say a system in which all the wealth is at the top and there is massive poverty at the bottom is an immoral one, and one I would prefer not to live in. ~ NicoleK at November 17, 2019 12:11 AM

"Massive poverty?" The "poor" in this country have flat-panel televisions, cell phones, and an obesity epidemic.

We've created a society in which the rough edges for those at the bottom have been sanded down. And we did it with capitalism, not collectivism.

I would prefer to live in that society than in a grass hut in some Third World Sierra Hotel with diseased water, warlords, constant violence, and disease.