Is it ethical for wealth to be distributed among so few people?

[debbierlus]

I had a long discussion the other day with my husband about the ethics of wealth. It started with a discussion about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and their new 80 million dollar French vineyard. He believed that because they did so many good things with their money, he thought it was fine. I countered, it didn't matter - the poor of the world should not be subject to the possible goodwill of the rich. (I like Angelina and Brad, the argument wasn't about them, it was about ANYONE having that much wealth). My argument was that the poor wouldn't need the charity, if they had enough to enjoy a modest but decent life.

[Fovea]

1. Earned wealth versus dividend wealth.

I think capital gains need to be taxed far more than income from actual labor.

Having said that, there is definitely such a thing as obscene wealth, and Truman had the cure for it.

Let's re-instate the ninety one percent top margin rate we had under Truman. It didn't stop the rich from getting richer, and that is saying something.

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-taxgrowth.htm

[Cleita]

5. I'm with you. There are a lot of sources of taxation that would target

the wealthy that are not being used today. I really don't think the average wage earner should be made to pay income tax. It used to be that way. Only the very wealthy were taxed on wages and other income.

[margotb822]

2. Making money at the cost of others

That is the real problem. Corporations secure benefits for the top and screw over the workers. I would say that I support making money, but not by hurting those that work. Personally, I believe that corporations should pay bottom to top.

[Fredda Weinberg]

3. Ah ... back to the equations!

You have a feedback system, else you don't know what level of taxation to apply. So, as communication improves, different strata of society present their perspectives ... heard from any homeless lately?

So, as I step over the huddled bodies where I live, you may enjoy celebrity chat. I assure you, with a steady diet of TV promotion, anyone can believe that the glitz is meaningful.

As for ethics ... life is neutral. The equations keep me focused on rate of change ... the French revolution asked for too much too quickly and our own post Great Depression awakening was stifled by our natural avarice.

Go figure what's comfortable for you and find meaning in the role you play defining ethics. It sure wouldn't exist without your consideration. That's worth sumpthin' ... bet that's why he married you.

[sui generis]

4. wealth ain't wealth until someone has it

Can you imagine the kind of government that disincentives retention of wealth? Why would anyone bother to work? To invest or innovate?

Wealth and is a red herring. It is as ludicrous to say eat the wealthy as it would be for the wealthy to say "eat the poor".

If you want change, real change then you have to be sure that no non-living entity has more rights than a living entity. That simple. A corporation does NOT have the right to work you to death, to undercompensate or fail to compensate you, to send you updated "customer agreements" in the mail every two weeks. A corporation does not have the right to say "it's too expensive" when it comes to assuring worker safety and consumer safety.

Let's start along those lines if you want to see improvement.

Secondly, what do you plan on "buying" with your newfound reappropriated wealth? I'm thinking, food, healthcare, a place to live, utilities, higher education, transportation.

So the answer is not reappropriation of wealth, but re-regulation of pricing in those "shared resources". You will go a long way towards real solutions if there isn't a class war first.

The other way just leads to bastilles and guillotines, eventually of anyone who disagrees with you.

[TahitiNut]

8. "Commonwealth"

:eyes:

[sui generis]

19. sorry, my telepathy went out when I was eight

and never came back on. Think louder or use words.

[blindpig]

9. but the wealthy do eat the poor

every minute of every day. They didn't get all of that money and power by their own effort but rather by the effort of those they exploit. As long as they have it they will want more, it's not so much simple greed(tho' that's there) as the logic of capitalism. That's why we're where we're at despite the New Deal. Capitalism cannot be regulated, it must be eliminated.

[Fovea]

16. Wrong verb, I think.

Wealth is not had, so much as made. 200 acres does not make you wealthy, 200 acres of corn, on the dock, might well do so.

Producing 200 acres of corn required a lot of labor before gasoline, and will again after gasoline. The producers of that wealth either do get to participate in it fairly, or someday the farmer gets one in the back. By fair I mean that all those things you list above should be within the citizen's reach without resorting to heroic, killing effort. That is commonwealth, and we, all of us deserve it. Commonwealth supposes a safety net for all that removes class hatred and personal insecurity, and thus keeps the arrow out of the gentleman's frock coat.

The folly of corporate tyranny is that the corporate management and investing classes think that the farm hands will be aiming at the logo.

I think that progressive taxation can be a useful, safe, and fair mechanism for re-distribution of poorly distributed profits. Between the fifties and the seventies, not a single member of the Mellon, Rockefeller, or Olin families sold apples on the street corner that I know of. And that was a top tax rate in the ninetieth percentile.

[sui generis]

21. In a lot fewer words - I completely agree

I think there are two views of the "problem" from the perspective of people who stand to benefit from a "commonwealth":

1. How do we get from here to there in realistic and executable steps.
2. All or nothing, hang the damn bourgeoise or send them to work the mines in Siberia.

From a solutions side, I would add to #1: and how do we keep on course driving towards a commonwealth. To underestimate how fully power is tied to wealth, or how much of a killing effort "wealth" will undertake to remain powerful would be folly.

As an example of a solution:

Let's start regulating the cost of medical school downwards, and build an infrastructure that allows more doctors to graduate and survive on lesser income. Paying back half a million dollars or more in student loans for some medical programs requires a commensurate salary. It's not enough to shuttle talent all over the U.S. for debt forgiveness programs either, although it is a useful start.

So, universal healthcare means controlling healthcare costs, which means active preventative healthcare, and reduced secondary and tertiary cost components such as those student loans, staff unavailability, murderous liability insurance premiums, reduced operating costs, etc. , across the board. Currently clinicical, acute and non-acute services are rendered via supplier based group purchase programs within the community hospital system. Granted that means that proven technology and generics in formulary are going to be offered first, but that's 100% more healthcare for people who are uninsured today than would have with insurance minus deductibles in most cases. And because we address the preventative side, we have fewer long term and chronic conditions developing and hopefully a dip in acute care too.

Let's embrace ordinary, run of the mill healthcare. Let's embrace fully funding chronic disease management. And if you want straightened teeth or the extra fancy knee replacement, you (or your employer) chip in for a premium rider, and that way only people who are LIKELY to use the insurance are in that pool as opposed to today's private insurance pools where only people unlikely to use the insurance pay premiums.

Ba da boom. Universal healthcare, Commonwealth Release 1.0.

[stray cat]

6. Should the US have to spread its wealth to other countries to equalize the world?

[pampango]

17. Good question. Should our rich be obligated to share the wealth with the rest of us, and

should the US (the "rich" by world standards) be required to share the wealth with the relatively poor of the world? Or is this "sharing the wealth" a strictly "inside our borders" kind of thing?

[TahitiNut]

7. How much do you suppose that vineyard would be worth ...

... if NOBODY were willing to pick the grapes and NOBODY were willing to buy them? The mere EXISTENCE of laborers who are either willing to harvest the grapes or HAVE NO CHOICE is that which creates the wealth embodied in the vineyard itself. That's something to consider ... particularly in the case of cotton fields in the desert southwest and 'new' farmlands. The interesting question is: Just WHOM should benefit from the very creation of that wealth? Those whose very existence creates that wealth or someone else?

[sui generis]

22. isn't that the goal of the kibbutz?

:shrug:

[TahitiNut]

25. Or a cooperative.

When the ownership (and benefits) of the means of production is, for one reason or another, DENIED to those who perform the productive labor, we effectively return to a feudal society.

We're so embedded in "the way things are" that we have great difficulty even understanding the way things are. ("Fish will be the last to discover water" ... Einstein.)

"Ownership" itself is a legal fiction ... an entitlement created and enforced by the state. That 'state' could be an absolute monarch, and was. When "ownership" is effectively identical to 'possession' and 'use,' we could talking about personal property. It's when 'ownership' is separate and severable from possession and use that we create the title ... a title to a car, land, buildings, factories, etc. The word 'title' itself derives from the days where titles included Baron, Duke, Prince, or King.

The abuses of capitalism surround the legal fiction of such titles ... an 'ownership' entitlement. We've created common stocks, commodity ownership, and even ownership of energy as a commodity. To extend the system further, we created markets where such entitlements are exchanged. Stock markets and commodities markets. Then we extended that system even further and created entitlements to something that doesn't even yet exist!! Wheat, corn, and other crops ... at some future date. (It must be understood that the future 'value' of anything absolutely DEPENDS on making certain that the labor is performed ... by hook or by crook.) We then created the "options" entitlement ... some enforced legal entitlement to buy something at some future date! So... it's not just the sepearate ownership/title to something that's 'real' - e.g. 'real estate' - it's something that isn't real ... and it isn't even ownership, just the entitlement to own. Derivatives. Futures. Etc.

ALL of that is completely and totally separate from those who perfomr the labor ... but totally and completely DEPENDENT on that labor. When people have a vested interest in and the means to manipulate the very laws that CREATE the titles and entitlements that're traded in a system that manifests wealth ... then labor gets FUCKED. The very people who both CREATE that wealth and under whose authority the laws are promulgated and enforced. It's a system akin to Frankenstein's monster ... killing its creators.

[Lyric]

10. I don't care how much money people have, so long as the workers

of the world are being paid a fair, living wage for their labor, and aren't being exploited. Unfortunately, the only way to MAKE obscene amounts of money is to purposely pay people far less than what their labor is worth, and pocket the difference. Therefore, although I have no *theoretical* problem with enormous wealth (with the living wage/no exploitation caveats), in practice I oppose it.

In practice, there is no such thing as profit without exploitation.

[The2ndWheel]

11. I figure you've got 4 ways to go

A ceiling and a floor.
A ceiling but no floor.
No ceiling but a floor.
No ceiling and no floor.

All have their positives and negatives. All can be sustained for a period of time, but if history teaches anything, it's that any system we create is unsustainable, because life tends to get in the way, and life is not static.

Like corporations and governments, wealth as we know it only has power because we don't say that it doesn't.

[Dukkha]

12. which is why Democratic socialism is favorable to Capitalism

or in this scenario profit sharing to the vinyeard workers would be the most ideal immediate solution.

[Selatius]

13. Martin Luther King was a socialist because he thought it was immoral. He got shot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_luther_king#Opposition_to_the_Vietnam_War

I'm a free market socialist myself.

[DadOf2LittleAngels]

14. Im the lone voter for people should be able to make as much as they want..

Makes it that much easier to find the people you really need to tax..

I have no problem with earning wealth, however, hording it is another issue..

Now if someone is paying a fair amount of their wealth in taxes ( for the uber rich say 60% to 80% ) and they can still afford an 80 million dollar vineyard, so be it..

[Bluerthanblue]

15. If we made a society where everyone had their needs met-

there would be few reasons for war.

There are those who would always want more, and those who would find ways to need even less, but oppression, and desperation, fuels violence. IMO

peace~

[PerfectSage]

18. It's only ethical for pychopaths.

[bryant69]

20. I'm a capitalist

While I favor managed capitalism, under any capitalist system some people are going to succeed more than others.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[blindpig]

23. do you mean

that you derive your income from the work of others and do not work yourself? If so, you are indeed a capitalist. Otherwise you are not a capitalist, even if you own a company but do work at it. That makes you middle class, along with the professions, the media and education elite. In which case you are a person who approves of capitalism. Misguided too.

[bryant69]

24. I am a capitalist in the sense that I favor capitalism

I don't think I am misguided. I am in favor of a managed capitalism.

Bryant

[tom_paine]

26. On this we agree, Bryant. FDR Capitalism, is what I like to call it.

That has been largely dismantled, witness the results.

I was in the odd position of probably voting in this poll with the "communist bloc" and yet in spite of that I disagree with my own vote in the sense that it's not that a "new system" has to be invented, it's that the old system, both economically and politically, must be restored to health and vigor.

Hell, as someone pointed out recentlt, Public Libraries are socialist institutions.

I think the Old American Republic was evolving nicely into a "Capitalism for the 21st Century" which as all societies, have some socialist components to them. Unfortunately for all of us, the Dulles Crime Family was taken over by a new generation of Dons, became the Bush Crime Family and decided to fufill Grandpa Prescott's 1934 dreams by other methods.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml

We don't need a "new system", we just need to repair the old one.