Lizard_King wrote:

Senor Barborito wrote:

I'm surprised you missed this, honestly:

Of course it does nobody any harm the Bill Gates is wealthy, that much is obvious. But if his wealth was reduced 99% and that 99% redistributed to working Americans below the poverty line relative to how far below the poverty line they are, he'd still have half a billion dollars and millions of people who cannot otherwise support themselves despite contributing to society would be able to do so. Stripped of example: it does nobody anybody harm for one to be rich, but it does many good for one to be substantially less rich.

1. Unless you believe that majority consensus (ie mob rule) is inherently moral, there is no way your system is morally acceptable. Like it or not, that wealth was earned by Gates until proven otherwise. It is his to do with as he pleases, not for politicians to spend on their constituencies or the poor. There is no way such free money would do anything except defeat the purpose of money; it is not a useful commodity in and of itself, but rather a standardized system of value representation. These hordes feeding at Mr. Gates' trough would have done nothing to earn that wealth, thus making money as valueless as it was in the Soviet Union or as it is in Cuba. It is not by accident that neither of those societies produce much that is really worth buying for consumers.

Think about; the value of money is based on inequality and individual tastes. Seek to normalize it, and you return to barter for all practical purposes, destroying economic fluidity and progress as we know it.

2. Bill Gates does not, in fact, simply sit on his money. It is invested or in a bank, either way providing capital in a manner that he deems in accordance with his desires. Microsoft BOB aside, I am willing to bet that Gates is a better investor than most people, and certainly than the government, and thus a better judge of how to use that money to greatest effect. The profit motive alone ensures that he will seek to make his money work for him, and thus for whoever he hires/invests in.

3. The government has proven time and time again to be the least efficient and most corrupt system of wealth management. When you remove an objective standard like how much money a person has by forcing everyone into coerced mediocrity, you inevitably replace it with a wholly subjective system of favours. I would urge you to see the excellent film "Brazil" if you are looking for an amusing take on that sort of world.

And nobody, at all, would be the worse off for this proposed redistribution. Not even Bill Gates. The same applies to the top 50 wealthiest individuals in America. Lower it to 80% and you can apply it to the top 50,000. I believe Krugman's finding was that the top 1% of Americans hold 50% of the nation's wealth (at worst it's 5, at best it's 0.1%, sorry for my poor memory here) - and what's more hold the majority of it out of circulation. That, frankly, is a problem that does hurt everybody involved in our economy. This might be why whenever I talk about what I'd like to see for an economy, I talk about a 'limited capitalist' (meritocratic earning yes, meritocratic earnings outside the $30,000-$75,000 range for all who work no) system devoid of inheritance or the ability for money to last longer than a year from when it was earned.

I disagree with Krugman's conclusion. Worst case scenario is a millionaire simply stashing his money in a bank (well, even dumber would be buying low interest bonds, but that would be directly in the govt's hands and thus no doubt preferable to Krugman) account. Even there, you have a profit guided enterprise making efficient decisions about whom to loan the money; it does not simply stagnate.

In any case, why is the scope of your redistribution focused only on the most wealthy? Shouldn't you be consistent, and demand people sleep on single beds as they do not "need" king size, and wear uniforms as they do not "need variety, etc. Think of all the "excess" you could avoid!

The downside of this is that it makes investment, while not impossible, significantly harder than what we see in our current system. One only has to glance at the NationStates game we all played a few months back to see the nature of the problem - everybody has several ideas they want others to invest in, and it's impossible for the people who know what they're talking about to be heard above the ambient babble.

That is the understatement of the century. Your system would create chaos for any long term investment. It would remove incentives to be financially prudent, and it would abolish incentives to excel on a truly grand scale as, say, Mr Gates has.

Homework assignment: solve this problem and you've provided the final key major element (there are roughly a billion minor flaws that need attending to here) necessary to a workable utopist economy. Certain USENET groups still manage to maintain a good S/N ratio, however, so while difficult to solve there may be a solution to the problem after all.

Good luck on this one,
--SB

By the USENET groups I assume you are referring to those that trade in pirated goods. If that is what you consider as a legitimate example of success, I think you had better think what it means that the nearest examples you can think of are based on theft. If that is not the case, please explain in greater detail what you mean by "certain".

bouncing this question/idea off of everyone is something of a hobby of mine, so once you're done criticizing the part where I'm actually responding to you, let's see your attempt at completion of my utopist system

I am afraid I will be of no use in this capacity. Even purely as a thought experiment, I cannot even see your foundational premises as rational or useful, much less work further down the chain built on logical fallacies.

I was trying to put it into terms he'd favor. In my mind, I call it 'rewards-based socialism.' It's the same thing either way - a hybrid hoping to combine the push to perform of capitalism with the lack of the accompanying excesses.

What is your hatred of other people's excess based upon? Say Ted Turner decides to gild all his toilets in gold...that's still money that is used to employ and pay people.

Yes, large amounts of money can be gathered in private hands - you just have to convince a hell of a lot more investors. Gathering capital is less like giving presentations to a few wealthy investors and more like getting a massive petition signed. Please don't tell me that this is impossible, one of my family's friends raised $5 million to create his dot-com by talking to thousands of people, the overwhelming majority in the $50-80K salary range. Similarly, my own mother ran a funds drive for the new church building project for my family's church three years ago - and raised $1.7 million in about three weeks.

Larger amounts of capital (hundreds of millions) may be problematic depending on the amount they capture public interest, but if the public really wants that mall built, it will happen. Furthermore, the next fifty years, nanotechnology or no nanotechnology, are going to see a wealth of new extremely efficient construction/manufcaturing techniques - significantly lowering the barriers to manifestation of the public will.

Why is such a "democratic" system so virtuous in your eyes? Think of all the advances in the modern age relative to the past in education, literacy levels, basics like that; has that made the masses any less susceptible to demagoguery? Mind you, I include all humans under that category; the difference between smartass Ivy leaguers and Mexican immigrants is what kind of demagoguery they are susceptible to.

The solution lies in economics just as it does in politics (where the republic is the supreme form of effective and moral government, as it most effectively balances the interests of the elite and the masses by filtering the latter through the form, but still keeping the men in charge reasonably accountable). In the free market, both rich and poor must exist, since they are comparative judgements. A greater disparity, just like in heat transfers, leads to an increase in the rate of trickle-down. It still cannot hope to catch up, but who says it should have to? The rich are richer in America than nearly anywhere else; but the poor are also better off than they used to be without necessarily having had to do much for themselves. The poor can't afford toilet paper because the government legislated it so; they can afford it because it trickled down.

Amenities that were once luxuries of the rich are now common among the poor, and it is because wealthy people could afford them first, and thus spur further development. Remember when the computer was a tool of the wealthy alone? Other countries can afford to stagnate technological progress because globalization permits other nations to take on the rapid rate of technological advance that wealth disparities produce.

The real problem here is the public. Better education methods, eugenics, genetic engineering, creation of a new country with an IQ test as part of immigration - I don't care how it's done, the public needs to be made far more intelligent and far less trusting than they currently are.

--SB