Impending Minimum Wage hike causing restaurants to close

[Starlight]

This 6-minute youtube clip I just ran across, which discusses a recent article by Bill Clinton's secretary of labour, Robert Reich, summarizes many points I would make that are highly relevant to this thread.

Essentially, currently in the US, many poor people are working very very hard for not much money, while many rich people are inheriting fortunes from their parents without doing anything to earn it. The distribution of wealth is not reflecting effort or contributions or merit. The rich have way more money than they deserve, while the poor have way less than their efforts and productivity merits. In such a situation, the government acting to channel some of the money back from rich people to poor people seems highly warranted.

He notes this statistic from Oxfam: The 85 richest people on earth have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people on earth combined. I find that horrifying and utterly immoral.

[Mountain Man]

I see Dimbulb is pulling his usual stunt of disappearing from a thread after taking a shellacking, and then returning later to regurgitate his arguments hoping that everybody has forgotten that they've already been refuted.

For instance, this: "Essentially, currently in the US, many poor people are working very very hard for not much money..." was addressed way back on page 4 of this thread. Here's the relevant portion:

The [Heritage Foundation] study also notes, interestingly, that "2.9 percent of all workers in the United States" would benefit from a minimum wage increase and that while "some minimum-wage workers do struggle with poverty, they are not representative of the typical worker in minimum-wage jobs. The data simply does not support the stereotype of minimum-wage workers living on the edge of destitution. [...] The notion that workers are trapped earning $7.25 an hour for much of their working lives is mistaken and ignores the primary value of minimum-wage jobs. Their importance lies not so much in the low wages they pay in the present, but in making workers more productive so they can command higher pay in the future." Finally, "Two-thirds of the studies in this 'new minimum wage research' utilizing state variation in minimum wages came to the same conclusion that previous economists had: higher minimum wages reduce the employment of less-skilled workers. Among the most methodologically rigorous studies, 85 percent came to this conclusion."

In summary, raising the minimum wage would end up hurting the very people that it is supposed to help.

Then Dimbulb says, "The 85 richest people on earth have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people on earth combined. I find that horrifying and utterly immoral."

And do you find it similarly "horrifying and utterly immoral" that you very likely have considerably more wealth than some of the poorest people on earth? What have you done to address this disparity?

[Sparko]

This 6-minute youtube clip I just ran across, which discusses a recent article by Bill Clinton's secretary of labour, Robert Reich, summarizes many points I would make that are highly relevant to this thread.

Essentially, currently in the US, many poor people are working very very hard for not much money, while many rich people are inheriting fortunes from their parents without doing anything to earn it. The distribution of wealth is not reflecting effort or contributions or merit. The rich have way more money than they deserve, while the poor have way less than their efforts and productivity merits. In such a situation, the government acting to channel some of the money back from rich people to poor people seems highly warranted.

He notes this statistic from Oxfam: The 85 richest people on earth have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people on earth combined. I find that horrifying and utterly immoral.

And you are richer than 97% of the people on earth. What are you going to do about it?

[Bill the Cat]

And you are richer than 97% of the people on earth. What are you going to do about it?

Rant and rave and demand the redistribution of other peoples' wealth.

[Bill the Cat]

He notes this statistic from Oxfam: The 85 richest people on earth have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people on earth combined. I find that horrifying and utterly immoral.

Why? It's just survival of the fittest. You have no objective reason to determine if something is immoral.

[Joel]

Hmm... it seems a few pages have happened here during my Easter holiday. So, addressing the general discussion...

I find it frustrating when trying to dialogue with right-wing Americans that your perception of politics is:
Communist Dictatorships versus America.
And under those categories, you place the USSR and China on the one side and America on the other, and say the first two didn't do very great, and America has done better. And as far as that level of hand-waving type analysis goes, I agree with you.

But, a rather important thing, is that you seem to like to leave out the rest of the Western world from such an analysis. And, funnily enough, when I see you leaving out my own country from your analysis, not to mention all of the European countries that seem to be doing really really well, I tend to think your spectrum is incomplete.

The spectrum holds when you include the other countries.
There exist some attempts to measure how free-market are the policies of different countries. For example, the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World index. http://www.freetheworld.com/release.html The Heritage Foundation also has such an index. It turns out that across the countries of the world, more free-market policies correlates well with how well countries do economically, including living standards of the poorest in each country.

As for your country, I don't know what your country is.

I'm taking for granted that there should be a democracy, and should be free market capitalism: That's the basis on which the non-American West has operated for the past 100 years. The question is, within such a system, how high should taxes be, and how much redistribution should the state do, and how much control should it regulate business enterprises?

You are saying, granted that there should be free market capitalism, but the question is (given that markets are free) how unfree should markets be?

Reminds me of the Monty Python bit about "Stay here and make sure he doesn't leave the room."
"Oh, yes! we'll keep him in here, obviously. But if he had to leave and we were with him..."

This 6-minute youtube clip I just ran across, which discusses a recent article by Bill Clinton's secretary of labour, Robert Reich, summarizes many points I would make that are highly relevant to this thread.

Essentially, currently in the US, many poor people are working very very hard for not much money, while many rich people are inheriting fortunes from their parents without doing anything to earn it. The distribution of wealth is not reflecting effort or contributions or merit. The rich have way more money than they deserve, while the poor have way less than their efforts and productivity merits. In such a situation, the government acting to channel some of the money back from rich people to poor people seems highly warranted.

He notes this statistic from Oxfam: The 85 richest people on earth have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people on earth combined. I find that horrifying and utterly immoral.

1) Reich is terrible at economics. He should not be taken as an authority on economics.
2) It's not clear why you think people have a right only to that which they earn. Anyone who has ever received a birthday present knows that isn't true.
3) People don't usually spend their money in exchange for effort, they usually spend their money in exchange for economic value.
4) Just because one person receives a gift, doesn't mean that some other person is earning less than the economic value they produce.
5) I don't know why you find statistical distributions immoral or horrifying. On the other hand I find it scary that many people care more about such statistical histograms more than they care about the wellbeing and justice of actual human beings.

[Sparko]

Yah Starlight keeps bringing up rich people who are only rich because their parents are rich.

If I worked my whole life to become rich, is it wrong to leave my gains to my children?

Why does Starlight think that it is wrong for rich parents to leave money to their own children who may have not earned it, but it is just fine to take that inheritance away from them and give it to total strangers who have not earned it?

I think Starlight is just greedy and wants people to give him money for nothing.

[Starlight]

For instance, this: "Essentially, currently in the US, many poor people are working very very hard for not much money..." was addressed way back on page 4 of this thread. Here's the relevant portion:

Hmm, well the primary problem I see with that rebuttal is you cite the Heritage Foundation for the entirety of it. They're a group who deceives for a living, and twists facts and misrepresents information to serve the interests of their oil-billionaire inheritance-baby donors. They could tell me the sky was blue and I still wouldn't trust them. They are the ones making up and propagating the lies about the deserving rich and undeserving poor in the first place.

And do you find it similarly "horrifying and utterly immoral" that you very likely have considerably more wealth than some of the poorest people on earth? What have you done to address this disparity?

Yes. I try to keep myself well-educated about the causes of the global wealth disparity to try to understand how I can best help. I support various charities who do work in the poorer regions of the would. I buy fair-trade products where possible. I vote and donate money in support of political parties that favor redistribution of wealth.

[Starlight]

You have no objective reason to determine if something is immoral.

I have an extremely strong objective moral framework. Which as an atheist is not clouded by complicating factors like trying to work out how to interpret difficult parts of the Bible and try to apply them to issues they're not directly talking about. We discussed it recently in this 28 page thread in Apologetics.

[Starlight]

If I worked my whole life to become rich, is it wrong to leave my gains to my children?

What this causes over time is the development of an upper class / aristocracy, where some people are born into extremely wealthy families. Over time* this group exerts greater and greater political influence, until the country essentially becomes run by them for them.

America has not historically had much of a class-based system, although most people are now familiar with trust fund kids. But Europe historically had an aristocracy, and they decided it was rather bad, and they're generally not very keen to see it return.

* not very much time, as the US has already become an oligarchy.

Why does Starlight think that it is wrong for rich parents to leave money to their own children who may have not earned it, but it is just fine to take that inheritance away from them and give it to total strangers who have not earned it?

It's about trying to make sure everyone has a good opportunity in life. The children of rich parents will likely already have everything they need to do well, but the children of poor parents not so much. Your comment wrongly implies that I am advocating that the poor child ends up with more money than the rich child. Children who grow up with wealthy parents will benefit from that in quite a large number of ways during their life, quite apart from whether they ever get to inherit the entirety of their parents' fortunes.

I think Starlight is just greedy and wants people to give him money for nothing.

I stand to gain quite a decent inheritance when my parents die, just like my mother did when her parents died. If I wanted money for nothing I would be supporting the inheritance of fortunes. But I don't think that sort of thing serves our societies particularly well. Why give so much money to people who did nothing to earn it beyond being born, when there are people in our societies who could really benefit from that money to get a fair start in life and who would be able to contribute much more to our societies as a result of some financial assistance?

[lilpixieofterror]

What this causes over time is the development of an upper class / aristocracy, where some people are born into extremely wealthy families. Over time* this group exerts greater and greater political influence, until the country essentially becomes run by them for them.

America has not historically had much of a class-based system, although most people are now familiar with trust fund kids. But Europe historically had an aristocracy, and they decided it was rather bad, and they're generally not very keen to see it return.

* not very much time, as the US has already become an oligarchy.

Your proof of this seems to be your own assertions and claims (which don't pass muster). See, the problem with your entire argument is the chances are... family wealth and family business will not last beyond 3 generations (at least it is unlikely they will be owned by the family). If somebody starts a family business and leaves a small fortune to their kids. Odds are that business will be gone along with that money, by the 3rd generation (from what I've read, the odds are 97%). Why is that? It is quite simple... as the generations grow up with money, they often don't learn how to keep it and earn more of it so the family fortune ends up disappearing and business end up growing broke/sold off because they don't know how to run it. Something you don't seem to take into account because it seems you really don't understand money. A fortune only last for so long without anybody around to build it up, so the reality is there's very few of the 'old money' type families that actually exist. Just look at the current rich list and their biographies for proof of that.

It's about trying to make sure everyone has a good opportunity in life. The children of rich parents will likely already have everything they need to do well, but the children of poor parents not so much. Your comment wrongly implies that I am advocating that the poor child ends up with more money than the rich child. Children who grow up with wealthy parents will benefit from that in quite a large number of ways during their life, quite apart from whether they ever get to inherit the entirety of their parents' fortunes.

This just goes to show how little you actually know and how little you actually study this stuff. The rich actually have some pretty large substance abuse problems as well (trust babies, in peculator, have some serious issues). Why do you think family wealth doesn't end up lasting that long? Don't take my word for it though, read stuff like this for evidence of my claims. Ever read the story of the Busch family (The one that used to own Anheuser-Busch)? Well August Busch IV has had lots of run ends with the law and seems to have a lot of problems with drug abuse and people dying around him (not counting losing control of the company that his family has ran for generations). Wealth brings its own problems or do you forget that little part because you're too busy being jealous of other people's money?

I stand to gain quite a decent inheritance when my parents die, just like my mother did when her parents died. If I wanted money for nothing I would be supporting the inheritance of fortunes. But I don't think that sort of thing serves our societies particularly well. Why give so much money to people who did nothing to earn it beyond being born, when there are people in our societies who could really benefit from that money to get a fair start in life and who would be able to contribute much more to our societies as a result of some financial assistance?

It creates lots of problems, but it isn't your place to tell people what they can and can't do with their own money. Sure, lots of inheritance babies end up with serious problems with drug abuse, being unable to hold down a job, blowing wads of cash and ending up broke, having no job skills, living off mom and dad's time, etc, but it isn't my place to tell people what they can and can't do with their own money. Something you seem to need to learn.

[lilpixieofterror]

This 6-minute youtube clip I just ran across, which discusses a recent article by Bill Clinton's secretary of labour, Robert Reich, summarizes many points I would make that are highly relevant to this thread.

This should be fun.

Essentially, currently in the US, many poor people are working very very hard for not much money, while many rich people are inheriting fortunes from their parents without doing anything to earn it. The distribution of wealth is not reflecting effort or contributions or merit. The rich have way more money than they deserve, while the poor have way less than their efforts and productivity merits. In such a situation, the government acting to channel some of the money back from rich people to poor people seems highly warranted.

Many do and many don't, something you seem to forget and as I already pointed out (and I'm sure you'll ignore). Few family fortunes will end up lasting more than a few generations mainly due to the fact that the skills required to earn that money don't seem to transfer well to the next generation. Likewise, your claim is far too black/white. Who are you to decided who has too much money and that they didn't earn it? Where did you get that claim from? Did you make it up? I also enjoy your absolute trust in the government and the government's ability to absolutely run your dreams of utopia, without it turning into a nightmare. Can you show me where governments have had a history of running your dreams of utopia without spending globs of money, with little to show for it? Right now, the US has over 50 million people living on government assistance. Are they objectively any better off today than they were before? Of course they are not and this requires yet more money to be taken, to be spent on yet more people, to not produce any result of people ever getting off government assistance. How much money will have to be taken, for your dreams of utopia to ever come true or will it require money money and an ever expanding government and will never end up coming true?

He notes this statistic from Oxfam: The 85 richest people on earth have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people on earth combined. I find that horrifying and utterly immoral.

Why? Because you said so? So what do you plan to do about it? Take it from them, by force and give it to others? You claim you are not a communist and yet all of your arguments come straight from the communist handbook. You are aware that the basic ideas behind communism is that the rich take advantage of the poor and the poor will take their stuff (often times by force) and redistribute it to the population? How well has that plan worked out the dozen times communism has been tried across the past century? As I recall, it lead to mass starvation, run away poverty, mass death camps, massive abuses of government power, etc. Yeah, lets try using the same system that has lead to huge problems again and expect different result from the past dozen times it's been tried and has utterly failed.

[Starlight]

It turns out that across the countries of the world, more free-market policies correlates well with how well countries do economically, including living standards of the poorest in each country.

A significant problem with this is that a lot of countries that were doing really well subsequently decided that it sounded like a great idea to switch to extreme free-market policies. A lot of the Western world made significant changes to the way their economies in the 80s, 90s, or 00s to switch over to extreme free-market ideas that quite a lot of economists had begun to think sounded like great ideas. A more careful analysis is needed to try and disentangle the question of whether these countries are doing better or worse due to opening up their economies more, which in itself is complicated by the fact that deregulated economies tend to cause cycles of booms and busts and so which years you choose to compare suddenly becomes really important.

As for your country, I don't know what your country is.

New Zealand. We led the Western world in strongly left-wing policies, being the first to introduce universal government-funded health-care, and having extremely strong redistributive policies, but then subsequently deregulated during the late 80s and early 90s and are now one of the most strongly free-market based countries (#3 on both your cited economic-freedom indices). The change-over was an extremely controversial period because it was done without the will of the people: The economics minister of the time simply decided that he'd heard a lot of ideas he thought sounded cool so went ahead and implemented them. And the general public was like "?????!!! what are you doing???" and went ahead and voted his party out of power at the next election, only to find that the other party's economics minister also had in the meantime come to hold those ideas and who continued implementing them. By the time the dust settled there was widespread resignation to the fact that the damage had been done and there was no going back.

Overall, as far as I can judge, NZ has done a lot worse economically since the changes in the 80s/90s. One significant difference is that our economic performance has dropped behind that of Australia, who we were historically comparable to (and who we pay a lot of attention to because they are geographically and culturally a very similar country to us - like the US vs Canada). There is no widely agreed-upon theory as to why we have dropped relative to Australia, although the theory I find most convincing is that it's a result of deregulation in the banking sector resulting in all our banks being bought out by Australian banks, which means the substantial profit made by the banking sector now flows over to Australia which is essentially a huge money-drain on the economy. ie we've been running a yearly balance of payments deficit, which a lot of economists claimed totally didn't matter, up until about 2007 when most economists began to suspect that it does.

I suspect your economic freedom indices conflate together a lot of things I would be strongly in favor of with a lot of things I would be strongly against. Again, let me be very clear: I have no fundamental objection to the basic notion of free market capitalism and think it provides a fundamentally sound basis for society. I am all for free markets and efficient government, etc, and I say that as someone who lives in a country with a much freer market and much more efficient government than you're familiar with in the US. But we still have more redistributive policies than you have in the US: The government provides free healthcare to all citizens, housing for anyone who needs it, and a much wider range of welfare to the poor than is typically the case in the US.

You are saying, granted that there should be free market capitalism, but the question is (given that markets are free) how unfree should markets be?

No. First of all, markets are artificial constructs and so require quite a bit of regulation in order to run smoothly. People are greedy and so keep trying to find ways to sabotage markets for their own interests. They will try to form monopolies to force others out of business. They will try to break contracts when it is convenient. They will try and lie and deceive in their marketing so that customers are tricked into paying more money. So in order to run a market that runs smoothly and freely and doesn't get constantly sabotaged by the players, the government needs to be actively keeping it running smoothly, providing rules for businesses transactions and policing them. Setting up the rules and framework is essential for the market itself to be free and to function properly. You can't have a free market without government, which is one reason why extreme libertarianism is utter nonsense.

Redistribution of wealth is something that happens outside a market framework. Here's an analogy. Imagine that the market is a casino room for players to game against each other (say, at poker), with the government owning the casino. Players are given their chips, and go into the room and play their poker and other games against each other as much as they wish (policed by the casino to ensure no cheating). They return and bank their chips. The next day they come in, take their chips, and proceed into the gaming room. Let's say the casino has the policy of always giving out at least a few chips to the people who have nothing in their account. So if a player loses all their money or has none to begin with, the casino says "bad luck, but here's a few chips to get started with, because the gaming is better if everyone's playing". To fund this, they charge everyone a fee of a single chip at the end of each day for playing. My point is that redistributive process occurs largely independently of the free market system: The redistribution is occurring when players bank and subsequently receive their chips, whereas the free market is occurring in the gaming room when they play one another. The casino tampering with the rules of the game is not necessarily required in order to have redistributive processes also operating.

The operation of redistributive processes can therefore coexist with a free market, without inherently impinging on the freedom of the market mechanisms. Of course, there may well be some socially sub-optimal consequences of a totally free market, and it therefore may well be desirable to build rules into how the market can operate in order to make it more socially reasonable (the existence of a minimum wage being one such rule).

[lilpixieofterror]

Hmm... it seems a few pages have happened here during my Easter holiday. So, addressing the general discussion...

I find it frustrating when trying to dialogue with right-wing Americans that your perception of politics is:
Communist Dictatorships versus America.
And under those categories, you place the USSR and China on the one side and America on the other, and say the first two didn't do very great, and America has done better. And as far as that level of hand-waving type analysis goes, I agree with you.

You know what is frustrating about arguing with you? You make claims not to be a communist, yet most of your beliefs and arguments come straight from the communist handbook, but you just deny it does and try to make claims that don't muster up to reality. See, the problem with your entire plan is your absolute trust in the government to make it work, your ignorance of wealth generation, and your ignorance in general. Besides, if your plan was so great and wonderful, Europe should be thriving and doing much better than the US, yet the reality shows that Europe doesn't seem to be doing better then the US is. The HDI report shows a difference between the highest and the US, as being 3 points better or 3% by the measurements they use. 3? is the difference between an A and an A-, hardly something to brag about. If your plan was true and accurate, shouldn't most Western European nations be ahead of the US and not at or even behind the US? It seems almost as if your utopia dreams don't really seem to be making much of a dent in reality and don't seem to be objectively better than you claim the US is. Can you actually show your dreams of utopia are creating an awesome society that is way ahead of the US and other countries?

But, a rather important thing, is that you seem to like to leave out the rest of the Western world from such an analysis. And, funnily enough, when I see you leaving out my own country from your analysis, not to mention all of the European countries that seem to be doing really really well, I tend to think your spectrum is incomplete. In fact the spectrum looks something like:

As I showed above, for your claims to be true, we should see Europe doing way better as a whole, but do we actually see that or do we see that Europe is about at and sometimes even behind where the US is at, depending on what we are looking at. Besides, I tend to argue that direct comparisons between any two countries is quite hard because you got to take in a lot of things before you can make a true comparison. Here is a good example. Why does the US have more dependence upon cars vs most other western countries? The simple reason is that the US is more spread out than most other western countries are and the only way to get community to community, in a cheap and efficient way, is by car, so the reason the US mass transportation system isn't nearly as developed is because it wouldn't work as well in the US vs let's say Germany or the UK, where most people live in an area smaller than some of our states.

Communist dictatorships <-----------> All the many and various European countries and the rest of the non-American democratic Western world for their entire histories, drifting left and right over various parts of this spectrum <-------------> The extremely right-wing position of America

So what objective measurement do you have that shows your system is working any better? Shouldn't Europe be ahead in every area instead of at or behind, in order for your arguments to actually work?

I don't personally find 'socialism' a particularly useful label, so don't tend to bother to apply it to myself or anyone else. But if, in the US, you guys want to apply it to the "left-wing" of your political spectrum (and I use that term loosely, since the US is so far to the right of nearly everyone else that your left wing often seems to be to the right of our right-wing) and anybody further left than that (ie basically everyone), then fine, everybody else can be 'socialist' according to you. Or not, as you wish - lilpixieofterror seems to alternate between insisting I'm a total socialist and asserting that I'm not at all a socialist and that what I'm advocating is 'democratic socialism' which is apparently totally different. Again, I don't particularly care what it is or isn't labelled.

So what do you propose is a good word for taking money from one group of people and giving it to another group of people? Is that not precisely what the socialist propose? Besides, if your arguments run true, we should see Europe way ahead of the US, yet is Europe way ahead of the US? No, so what is your plan to make it happen? An ever expanding government that requires yet ever more money to make your dreams of utopia come true, which is taken from people that actually know how to make money and handed to people who don't know how to make money? Oh yeah, what can possibly go wrong. Besides, I was arguing with Papster when I said democratic socialism my dear, not you. Most of your claims and solutions come straight from the handbook of communism. The rich are making too much money, they are taking advantage of the poor, we need to take their money from them, etc. These are all arguments straight from the handbook of communism, yet you deny it and pretend it isn't because you don't like being associated with them. If communism is a complete failure, why on earth do you want to keep trying their plans again?

My general view is that:
1. The sane part of the political spectrum lies in that huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge middle-region that all of the non-American democratic West has occupied for the last 100 years.

So in 100 years, has the 'non-American democratic west' done any better than the US has?

2. Within that area of the political spectrum, I tend to personally favor quite left-wing views and stronger re-distributive policies of the sorts followed by many Western nations in the 1950s and which are most well-represented today in the Scandinavian countries. Because it seems to me that those policies and the countries that have them have proven to be the most successful. I tend to think that a lot of Western countries that have gone too far to the right since the 80s and they would be better served to swing back to the left a bit toward where they were around the 1950s and the 1960s. Again, because when I look at the empirical results, it is those countries with those policies that seem to have been the most successful.

In which, by most measurements, your favorite friends in the North are only 3% ahead of the US, in terms of HDI and the US has a huge population, with quite a bit of diversity, that your Scandinavian friends don't have to deal with. Let's try dumping a few million immigrants on top of your Scandinavian friends and see how well they hand it. I love your claims of 'empirical results' and yet... the HDI doesn't seem to support your claims. 3% (using the HDI metric) is hardly a stellar success to make your claims work. Besides your plan backfires when one starts looking at individual countries and starts to look at several factors. The US takes in more immigrants than any other western country. Did you ever think that a huge influx of millions of people, that come with almost nothing, might have something to do with what goes on here in the US? Of course not because you don't want to look at these 'objective' factors because the entire story starts to unravel your arguments. See, for your dreams of utopia to be true... we should be seeing Europe leaps and bounds ahead of the US... yet... they are not.

To note the obvious: That sort of position isn't communism. I'm not advocating a communist dictatorship, so pointing to the USSR and China as examples to me is just irrelevant. Communism doesn't work. Dictatorships generally aren't great. I'm taking for granted that there should be a democracy, and should be free market capitalism: That's the basis on which the non-American West has operated for the past 100 years. The question is, within such a system, how high should taxes be, and how much redistribution should the state do, and how much control should it regulate business enterprises?

So why do you want polices in place that do not coincide with your claims here? See, free market capitalism doesn't work with your redistribution scheme because the goal of free market capitalism is to make as much money as you can, yet you have already claimed this is immoral. Seeing the disconnect here yet? Besides, has the 'non-American West' done better, worse, or the same as the US has done... for the past 100 years? Oh, that's right, the non-American West started two destructive wars that destroyed entire countries and took the US to rebuild them into what they are today. Funny how you forget that little detail too, eh? IE how the non-American West (which you claim has done some awesome) was saved and rebuilt by the US, eh? Lets get into the next part... has your redistribution plan worked yet? Are the poor still poor, despite (as you so claim) 100 years of wealth redistribution or does this require an ever expanding government, that requires ever more money, that doesn't seem to actually do much of anything for the poor?

When I look at international comparisons of how different Western countries are doing in different ways, the ones topping the list are nearly always the ones that are the most 'socialist' in the sense of having some of the strongest re-distributive and regulatory policies within the Western world.

Have you looked at some of these list Starlight and tried to do a comparison between the two? I've given several reasons above for why your claims are rather amusing. Your precious 'non-American West' was saved by the US and rebuilt after a destructive war ended up destroying much of it (remember, you want to go back 100 year, so we need to include everything that has happened over the past 100 years). You might of heard of this WWII thing in your history class? As I recall, wasn't in the US that ended up saving it and ended up spending lots of money putting it back together? A fact you seem to forget.... (hummm, I wonder why). Also, I've looked at these list and your precious 'non-American West' is, at best, a few points ahead in some measurements (and behind in others, all depending on what you are measuring) and well... if your redistribution plan actually produced some real results, we should see the 'non-American West' way ahead, but is it actually way ahead or is it only ahead by some measurements and behind in other measurements?

And Sparko, the points Paprika was making were highly relevant and largely what I would have said myself. You asked him a stupid question repeatedly and tried to make him defend a position he didn't hold, and predictably got no answer. Your fondness for kicking people off threads is childish.

Of course they were because you and Papster like saying lots of stupid things and showing you can't defend any of them.

[Starlight]

lilpixieofterror,

Over the 80 years in Western society there hasn't been a very big problem with inherited wealth because:
1) People have typically had more than one child, and so at every generation the wealth is split between multiple people, quickly diminishing it.
2) It has been subjected to significant inheritance taxes by the government.

As a result, yes, we have seen that most fortunes typically disappear by the third generation. Unfortunately the combination of people having fewer children on average, and the removal of inheritance taxes, means this will no longer be the case in the future. So saying it's worked fine for us up until now is not relevant, and it in fact did not at all work fine prior to the world wars when there was a very powerful aristocracy in Europe who had immense inherited wealth. And while it is true that a number of them had lost it all due to gambling, the majority of them had not.

A fortune only last for so long without anybody around to build it up,

That is not the case if the fortune is large enough for people to live off the interest/dividends generated by it, as is now generally the case with the very wealthy. People with sufficiently large fortunes need never work at all.

so the reality is there's very few of the 'old money' type families that actually exist. Just look at the current rich list and their biographies for proof of that.

I recall about half of the current rich list are inheritance vs self-made. That percentage is going down over time.

Wealth brings its own problems

Are you therefore in favor of helping these people by relieving them of some of their burdensome wealth?

It creates lots of problems, but it isn't your place to tell people what they can and can't do with their own money.

Well it's only their "own money" in the sense that society and the government has set up a social and economic system within which everyone participates and the government prints money and then says it has value and everyone agrees to that and various rules are followed about how the whole system works, and finally we say that if someone ends up with some money as a result of this system then it's "their own money". What I'm getting at is that the entire notion of people having "their own money" is a social construct and is the end product of how society has chosen to operate just as much as its an end product of anything the person themselves did to get that money (eg found it on the ground, worked for it, inherited it, earned it as interest on money in the bank, won it betting on a horse etc). So society quite reasonably can say what people can and can't do with 'their own money' because society had quite a large say in how that person got that money in the first place, and in fact is the one saying that it is 'money'.

The notion that some people seem to have that any money that happens to fall into their hands at any point in time is absolutely "theirs" by some sort of divine right, and that they are totally justified in keeping it or doing with it as they please, and that they owe nothing at all to society as a whole, and that anyone who tried to take away any of their money would be totally and utterly wrong to do so... I find to be utterly bizarre. It's a kind of extremely self-entitled greed. If anyone objects to society taking some of that money back to fund all the roads, courts, police, hospitals, schools, and social things that helped this person gain that money in the first place, then as far as I'm concerned that person is unspeakably selfish and ungrateful and is welcome to move to Russia and never come back.

I also enjoy your absolute trust in the government and the government's ability to absolutely run your dreams of utopia, without it turning into a nightmare. Can you show me where governments have had a history of running your dreams of utopia without spending globs of money, with little to show for it?

The people of most Western democracies largely trust their governments. The US is a massive exception because your government is ridiculously corrupt, plus most of your Republican party is currently trying to sabotage the functions of your government to 'prove' that government doesn't work. When government is actually by the people and for the people it tends to run pretty efficiently and people tend to trust it because they see it actually working for them. So currently, in the US public distrust of your government is around 75% while here in NZ it's 14%.

Right now, the US has over 50 million people living on government assistance. Are they objectively any better off today than they were before?

Obviously they are. Previously they had no assistance, now they have assistance.
Food = better than no food
Healthcare = better than no healthcare
House = better than no house

Of course they are not

I'm kinda lost for words at this point...
I'm trying to figure out whether your a troll, a moron, or whether you just like seeing people suffer.

this requires yet more money to be taken, to be spent on yet more people, to not produce any result of people ever getting off government assistance.

I'm baffled by the truly absurd and ridiculous and non-factual assertion that people receiving government welfare in general never get off government assistance.

I agree that sometimes that is the case - eg if they are too-old or too-sick to ever support themselves again. And the alternative - letting them die - certainly gets them off government assistance, but doesn't seem like a particular great solution.

How much money will have to be taken, for your dreams of utopia to ever come true

My 'dreams of utopia' as you put it, have been true in my own country's fairly recent history. I would like to see other countries learn from out example, and would like to see us walk-back some of the recent right-wing swings to our economy that were ill-conceived and which have been damaging.

You claim you are not a communist and yet all of your arguments come straight from the communist handbook.

I think you are getting confused because communists and myself see the same sort of things (huge wealth inequalities, the presence of severe poverty) as a problem and both want to act to address them. We have different solutions however to those problems. Communism proposes abolishing the free market economy and have the government directly control all business and all prices. Whereas I live in one of the freest capitalist market economies in the world and don't propose to abolish it and don't propose to have the government in direct control of all businesses and prices. Plus, historically communism has been associated with dictatorships, and I live in a democracy which I don't want to see change.