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Originally Posted by mookiemookie
Why is it acceptable then to have that top 1% take unfair advantage of a rigged political system that allows the wealth to be redistributed upwards?
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It's not. That's why I'm always whining about dismantling the government as much as possible. If it had stricter limitaions on passing legislation, creating agencies, interpreting the constitution, and a well-written budget amendment that mandated profitability and restricted tax levels, there would be no political system to rig. Nobody is going to lobby an impotent government.
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The solution isn't to say "ok we're taking X% of your wealth and giving it to the poor people." That's only treating the symptom. The cure is to treat the system that allows for such a concentration of wealth to occur.
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We're agreed on the first point. Half-agreed at least on the second. Concentration of wealth is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the system it operates in is alowed to continually generate more wealth. The distribution remains quite unequal (though I don't think the disparity would be as drastic as it is now), but the important thing is that everyone keeps moving up.
Perhaps more importantly, distribution of wealth seems to hover at around the top 10% having more than the bottom 90%, no matter what society you are in. In societies where that wealth is allowed to buy the inherently unethical mandate of force that only states have, that disparity gets even worse, and then it gets cemented in.
That's my view, anyway. If you have some other system I'm listening.
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You the consumer are paying $4 and $5 a gallon for gas. Meanwhile, oil speculators at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley drive the price per barrel up more and more. Traders at AIG make ridiculously stupid bets on the derivatives and credit default markets. When they blow up, who makes them whole? You the taxpayer. You pay for it with overcrowded schools because of slashed education budgets. You pay for it with 10% unemployment. You pay for it with reduced social services. All because the titans of capitalism are "too big to fail." Makes me sick.
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Is this all directed at me because I'm starting to wonder if you read the whole post, either. The reason I said the part in bold is because of just how harmful government intervention is. Goldman-Sachs and Morgan Stanley are only too big to fail because the government was captured by business, just as it always is in the end. The bailout money was stolen from the citizenry by the government. If the government wasn't in education in the first place there would be no more overcrowding of schools than there is overcrowding of supermarkets or gas stations. There would probably still be a high unemployment rate in the event of bank failures, but it takes state favoritism and iron grip to make it last more than a couple of years.
It makes me sick, too. Which is why I say we need to take that power away.