Saw this article. Liked it. Wanted to share. http://gawker.com/the-paucity-of-the-pro-inequality-argument-1585516075
Gordon is right, comparing it to things like the military doesn't count since people join the military for reasons other than the salary. This guy apparently thinks that people join the military just for the pay.
Take that up with the people who buy Miley Cyrus and Jay Z records, not the taxpayers. The constantly parroted "income inequality" stats are where the paucity lies. 1. So what? Such stats mean -nothing- unless accompanied by stats demonstrating that wage inequality accompanies denial of access to basic services like sewage, water, electricity, clothing, food, technology and climate control. Until the case can be made that income inequality leads to some undesirable social results, then the whole thing is hot air. Of course the left never makes a complete case in context. 2. Income inequality is explained by an ongoing technological explosion in which the superior capitalism of the US has been at the center of the computer and telecomm revolutions. The people who financed Google are stinking rich, and we all have massive amounts of information at our fingertips as a result. The people who created cheap cellphones that don't weigh three pounds and cost $400 a month are filthy rich and we all benefit from the results. The people who make movies are filthy rich, and people who like movies are happier as a result. Same with every industry and innovation that has brought mass prosperity to the industrialized, capitalist world over the last 100+ years. 3. The only thing that hasn't gotten smaller and better due to this tech explosion is government, which has become larger and more wasteful than ever. So who do we want to control more wealth? people who create prosperity and innovation for all in wholly voluntary markets, and continue doing that every day? or government that creates no wealth and no prosperity, only resentment, graft and dependence? 4. When a leftist ever accompanies the income disparity stats with something other than the raw outcome stats themselves, when a leftist adds graphs showing that more people in the US are -starving-, that more people are -homeless-, that more people are denied -basic services-, that life expectancy is going down, then I'll start to pay attention, but even if those were produced, they are only correlations. Until then, the left is all hot air on income inequality. 5. It is the height of arrogance for someone in the US to sit in a comfortable house with indoor plumbing, sewage, water, under electric light, climate controlled, typing away on a cheap computer, watching a huge tv, talking on a tiny cheap cellphone, living 10 years more than in the past, to whine on and on endlessly about "someone took my income," "someone took my wealth." What someone did is create innovations that vastly improved your quality of life that you are willing to pay for, that unlike government, no one is making you pay for. Anyone who claims wealth, prosperity, even an income pool are static, fixed quantities that someone is -getting more of- just because... of coincidence or bad actions, and then goes into a store or onto the internet to voultarily buy things that make someone who innovated the wealthy is a hypocritical asshat.
Health care is a pretty good example of a basic service that people don't have access to, and it's precisely because of income inequality. So? You've explained how it happens, which I'll grant you is a step up from denying that it happens. We could always take the government out of the economy completely and let rich people defend their own property rights, expand their own territory, find their own markets. That would be a blast. See, I would've said it was the height of arrogance for a billionaire to say that everyone else -- the people that made him a billionaire -- should starve so that he can have his gold-plated toilet seats. Like only have 10 billion dollars isn't enough -- gotta have 15 billion! Pollution is not an innovation, and just because the income pool is not static doesn't mean a thing. And anybody that claims otherwise is being deliberately obtuse.
How is everyone supposed to have access to a good or service that is limited? Income inequality happens for many reasons, but it is not the bogey man many make it. In fact those in the bottom of this countries earners are fabulously wealthy when compared to most of the world's inhabitants. According to the CBO in the past 30 years the poor have seen their incomes increase by 50%. Hyperbole and a bull(*)(*)(*)(*) argument, people who want less government aren't talking about getting rid of government 100%. Its not a black and white argument, although simple minds might see it that way. No you just want to use government as a middleman to excuse stealing from those with more than you. Pollution is not innovation? Are you seriously making the argument that people who have made billions only do so through polluting and haven't done things to improve our lives? If you take the time to think about what you wrote, you might see why people can't take your arguments very seriously.
Ohh another fun thing about income inequality... if you read Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-first century you can see from his data that income inequality goes down during depressions and world wars... So if everyones income is growing does it really matter by how much? Especially if we factored income mobility into it. Let's look at what the us treasury department says about mobility: link Take that information... especially the bolded parts and do some critical thinking.
No facical nature of the anti tax brigade they are quite correct. Higher taxes discourages investment. The real issue which is not addressed is what harm is doen by income inequality. No one can ever give a straight intelligent answer. The anti equality argument is clearly based on jealousy and nothing else.
That's not for you to decide. We decide what things are worth in aggregate. You don't have to like it, but the prices of things generally tend to represent how much we value them relative to each other.
No, we have specific safety nets for healthcare, both for the elderly and the poor, together with SS disability and hordes of private charities and charitably funded hospitals. We live in a country where no emergency room can deny care, so based on how terrible and disingenuous the above example is, the very opposite of "pretty good," I'm going to simply stop here as opposed to wasting time replying to the rest.
