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On another note, those wonderfully happy Medieval serfs also tended to die at age 35 (or far younger) of a wide variety of diseases brought on by malnutrition, woefully inadequate sanitation, and living in hovels with inadequate heating and ventilation.
While I agree with your viewpoint generally on this issue, the "they only lived to 35" thing isn't right. The aggregate life expectancy was very low because of childhood and infant death. If you made it your teenage years or adulthood, you would usually live to 50 or 60.
Isn't the top percentile of net worth somewhere around $8.4 million? That must have been some incredible fund-picking to get to $8.4 million by the age of 45 with under $85k a year in salary. If that's the case, I'd be interested in learning more about the details and your investing approach. When did you start investing and how much were you investing a month?
While I agree with your viewpoint generally on this issue, the "they only lived to 35" thing isn't right. The aggregate life expectancy was very low because of childhood and infant death. If you made it your teenage years or adulthood, you would usually live to 50 or 60.
Fair enough. My recollection without a doubt produced the average life expectancy rather than the average adult life span.
The gullible, fueled by media with an agenda, think they will someday thru hard work and austarity become wealthy. True wealth is more than most of the 99% can imagine. The "death tax" doesn't kick in until after 5 mil$ less your home. We (those of us with a European background) have a heritage of escaping an aristocracy. Do you want a more and more consolidated pool of capital assets? An inheritance tax is a good thing. Oh, BTW do you want a Bush or a Clinton for your next POTUS?
The OP's question is one that seems to appear here on CD in a different form every few weeks, and looking at the number of responses I'd imagine that money is still uppermost in the minds of the average American. The obvious answer is that those with the most money have simply taken advantage of a system that delineates production work as something different than production benefit. Most people will also say that wealth is the reward for hard work, but if that was true I'd imagine that the hardest working people would be the wealthiest. We know this isn't true but that myth persists regardless of the facts.
Our financial system wasn't constructed to reflect the tenets of any particular economic "ism". That said however, most know that we exist in a system made up as a hybrid more than one of a free market capitalism or, the often heard charge of the US becoming a "socialist" economy. Throughout human history there seems to be one thread of continuity, and that would be the fact of a smaller group lording it over the majority. Our own one percenters aren't really a deviation from the historical norm. We complain about taxes and other takings that further reduce OUR benefit, but we often find the worst tax complainers being on the side of that one percent that controls the government that taxes them!
The constant bickering over what political views/policies can be held responsible for our current financial situation seems to have become our national sport. "Libs, Cons, progressives, neo-liberals and neo-cons", all these terms are being used to connote blame between warring factions for the fact that our economy is not capable of producing a wider spread of benefit, but the fact remains that these terms do reflect the socio/political diversity of those who comprise that one percent of our wealthiest citizens. That alone should be our first clue to another historical facet of human economics, and that is that while the low men fight the ideological battles among themselves, those on top are loving it, divide and conquer, thats how you sustain a system that separates labor from benefit....
We have the producers and the predators. The predators feed on the producers of course. They rely on privilege and appropriation of "economic rent". Most do not view themselves as predators. Economic rent is where there is no enterprise or cost of production. In short someone else made the wealth, which is invariably us the community - common wealth.
In this greed winner takes all western mentality we have to change the focus that there is common wealth and this must be valued and stays in the commons. The productive and enterprise must not be penalised as we current do. There are mechanisms to ensure that commonly created wealth stays common and used for the benefit of us all. Conversely private wealth must remain private. Currently:
Commonly created wealth is appropriated by private individuals and concerns.
Private wealth is appropriated by the government and commonized.
We need to do exactly the opposite:
Commonly created wealth must remain common and used for common purposes.
Private wealth is must remain private.
This the problem. It is easy to rectify by using simple tax shifts, or more accurately, reclaim commonly created wealth and use it for common purposes.
"Any good economist will tell you, as people's real disposable incomes rise, that money ends up in one place, and one place only, the LAND MARKET. As there is growth land values rise, and it should rise. Except, the problem occurred when that increase in value went into private pockets instead of going into services: highways, hospitals, schools and so on, that created that value in the first place"
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"This is the sources of our problem, not bankers, big bonuses, sub-prime mortgages in America and the other excuses they have. This is the heart of the problem of the market economy, we have to address it. There has to be political consensus, there has to consensus, with no body playing party politics"
Highly acclaimed economist Martin Wolf of the Financial Times agrees with Harrison and emphatically states that the destructive Land Cycle must be halted.
Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. This applies not least to the immense financial and economic crisis into which the world has fallen. So what lay behind it? The answer is the credit-fuelled property cycle. The people of the US, UK, Spain and Ireland became feverish speculators in land. Today, the toxic waste poisons the entire world economy.
In 1984, I bought my London house. I estimate that the land on which it sits was worth £100,000 in today’s prices. Today, the value is perhaps ten times as great. All of that vast increment is the fruit of no effort of mine. It is the reward of owning a location that the efforts of others made valuable, reinforced by a restrictive planning regime and generous tax treatment – property taxes are low and gains tax-free.
So I am a land speculator – a mini-aristocrat in a land where private appropriation of the fruits of others’ efforts has long been a prime route to wealth. This appropriation of the rise in the value of land is not just unfair: what have I done to deserve this increase in my wealth? It has obviously dire consequences.
First, it makes it necessary for the state to fund itself by taxing effort, ingenuity and foresight. Taxation of labour and capital must lower their supply. Taxation of resources will not have the same result, because supply is given. Such taxes reduce the unearned rewards to owners.
Second, this system creates calamitous political incentives. In a world in which people have borrowed heavily to own a location, they are desperate to enjoy land price rises and, still more, to prevent price falls. Thus we see a bizarre spectacle: newspapers hail upward moves in the price of a place to live – the most basic of all amenities. The beneficiaries are more than land speculators. They are also enthusiastic supporters of efforts to rig the market. Particularly in the UK, they welcome the creation of artificial scarcity of land, via a ludicrously restrictive regime of planning controls. This is the most important way in which wealth is transferred from the unpropertied young to the propertied old. In his new book, David Willetts, the universities minister, emphasises the unfairness of the distribution of wealth across generations.* The rigged land market is the biggest single cause of this calamity.
Third and most important, the opportunity for speculation in land both fuels – and is fuelled by – the credit cycle, which has, yet again destabilised the economy. In a superb new jeremiad, the journalist Fred Harrison argues that this cycle – with a duration of 18 years – was predictable and, by him at least, predicted. In essence, he notes, buyers rent property from bankers, in return for a gamble on the upside. A host of agents gains fees from arranging, packaging and distributing the fruits of such highly speculative transactions. In the long upswing (the most recent one lasted 11 years in the UK), they all become rich together, as credit and debt explode upwards. Then, when the collapse comes, recent borrowers, the financial institutions and taxpayers suffer huge losses. This is no more than a giant pyramid selling scheme and one whose dire consequences we have seen again and again. It is ultimately, as Mr Harrison argues, a ruinous way of running our affairs.
I have long been persuaded that resource rents should be socialised, not accrue to individual owners. Yet, as Mr Harrison tellingly remarks, “as a community we socialise our privately earned incomes (wages and salaries), while our social income (from land) is privatised.” Yet, whatever one thinks of the justice of this arrangement, the practical consequences have become calamitous. Do we want to start yet another credit-fuelled property cycle as soon as the debris of the present one is cleared away, some years of misery hence?
If “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”, here is an urgent case for action. Socialising the full rental value of land would destroy the financial system and the wealth of a large part of the public. That is obviously impossible. But socialising any gain from here on would be far less so. This would eliminate the fever of land speculation. It would also allow a shift in the burden of taxation. Perhaps as important, with the prospects of effortless increases in wealth removed, the UK might re-examine its planning laws. There is panic about the dire consequences of such a liberalisation of restrictions for the countryside. It is worth noting, however, how little is needed: an increase of just three miles in the radius of London would raise the capital’s surface area by 50 per cent. Would this really be the end of England’s green and pleasant land?
I do not expect any government to dare to wean the English from their ruinous trust in land speculation as the route to wealth. But I can hope. It is bad enough that the result has been expensive houses and inefficient taxes. But it is surely far worse that such insane speculative fevers have ended up destabilising the entire global economy. Even if few know it, it is time for a change.
No, I understand quite well, yet I still disagree with your premise that this scheme is superior. Like many at the fringes, you can't seem to take disagreement as anything but ignorance. Ultimately, the closed mind turns to force when its attempts at reasoned argument fail - that is all your "You never understood" and "You don't get it" are - the rejection of a closed mind.
No ya don't. That's why you keep propping up straw men. You completely butcher Marx, reading no more what he wrote than what is on the back of a cereal box. So ya go with the prevailing BS Marx in effigy . What he saw was 12 year olds working 16 hour days and dying at thirty. So yeah, he saw a problem.
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And this is besides the point your vastly superior opponent in understanding is not even arguing Marx's theory but rather the classical economic rebuttal to Marx in HG,,, that clearly you never even heard of which is why you keep running on of the pap, yellow journalistic image of Marx.
There is nothing fringe about it. It was the prevailing economic theory in much of the 19th century and many of its principles were not completely abandoned until the 1970s where we became a noelib paradise. Unfortunately American progressive economic ideas were mixed in with socialist polices and lumped together like so many other incompatible nuts and bolts, an anti-captalist polyglot platform. Neoliberalism and socialists and Marxists are all using a dull spoon to cut out the bad humors. They solve one weakness of human nature while letting another run amok. Now the only real solution has been completely gutted with nothing but socialism, identity politics and wealth redistribution.
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Much as I, and most others, dislike income taxation, it is the surest way to have the bulk of citizens paying tax. All taxpayers should vote and all voters should pay some tax - anything else is just shifting the burden to some group that the shifter does not like - landowners, corporations, whoever.
No it isn't. People that sit on da gunberment enforced, legal monopoly profits pay half the rate with the option to defer indefinitely. They also produce no tangible product of any kind. They just ring it up on their toll booth.
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On another note, those wonderfully happy Medieval serfs also tended to die at age 35 (or far younger) of a wide variety of diseases brought on by malnutrition, woefully inadequate sanitation, and living in hovels with inadequate heating and ventilation. I'm certain I've never seen a claim quite so ridiculous as the preceding being "a superior quality of life".
That what they did in 19th century Britain. That is until they adopted some of the same social reforms in the Commie Manifesto. So yeah, even though there is a better way, much of capitalism has been removed. Can't put 12 year olds in factories. But why not? Let the market decide......
The Worst thing about Marx was that he declared the landed gentry dead. What he did not foresee is the landed gentry undead, now in the form of real estate speculators and finance who have now formed an unholy union. He blew that big time. He had the crazy idea that the Continental finance culture of funding capital would be the norm. Nope. All it does is grant credit to land squatters and now we go through bouts of inflationary bubble and debt deflation with what ever industry that results a side effect of these cash flows. . Irving Fisher , another sad story who got it right far too late.
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I'm guessing your reply will again be nothing more than "You don't get it"
Its quicker, but nothing is more certain then you not getting it.
Sure, I criticize those who prop marxism up on a pedestal, due to the results of attempts at implementing it rather than the ideal theory of it. The reason I do that is that I find the idealized renditions to be hopelessly lacking in predicting likely human behavior. That behavior is what always seems to sink it when they try to implement it.
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Originally Posted by gwynedd1
And this is besides the point your vastly superior opponent in understanding is not even arguing Marx's theory but rather the classical economic rebuttal to Marx in HG,,, that clearly you never even heard of which is why you keep running on of the pap, yellow journalistic image of Marx.
No, I got that. I just think that both are impractical because they ignore human nature and thus fail to predict outcomes that seem obvious enough to the rest of us.
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Originally Posted by gwynedd1
There is nothing fringe about it.
I'll concede that you put it forward much more sensibly than the other guy. I find him to be fringe (frayed even) due to his choice of words -- "wealth soaking into the land and crystalizing" for example. Maybe that was you? I can't remember now, different thread a couple weeks ago, waste of time to go look. Load of nonsense, regardless.
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