Not a bad post, you make some decent arguments. A couple of thoughts though?
shickingbrits wrote:Wealth is relative, as you pointed out in your village example.
When a guy writes a piece of software that allows everyone to do their own accounting at 1% of my salary, I will be out of a job. Did I not work hard to become an accountant? Did I not work hard as an accountant? Am I not willing to continue to work hard as an accountant?
This isn't something new. There were people who made great horse and buggy buggies. And when the automobile took overthose companies died and people lost their jobs. And the very last horse and buggy manufacturing company probably made the best damn buggies the world had ever seen.
But it doesn't matter, because their business was dead. Life, death, just the natural order of things. If we refused to innovate, to make more efficient and cheaper ways of making and doing things just to save people from losing their jobs, well, we'd still be living in caves, chopping wood all day everyday until we fell over dead at 40 years old.
But I'd feel for ya! Certainly I would.
shickingbrits wrote:
The alternate is to provide me with handouts.
Is that the only alternative? I bet if we put our heads together we'd be able to come up with other alternatives. But Ok, lets roll with this for a minute.
shickingbrits wrote:Warren Buffet said that he would only leave a bit of his wealth to his children as he didn't want them to be wealthy beyond the need to work. Perhaps you understand wealth better than him.
Yeah, ummm...Warren Buffet isn't really a good example. So, do you think Warren Buffet is going to give the rest of his "wealth" to you? Doesn't matter.
shickingbrits wrote:If, for my handout, I was required to clean graffiti of walls, then it wouldn't be a handout and I would have an incentive to better myself. If, instead of being hungry, homeless, naked and alone, I was cleaning graffiti and could keep my wife, kids and dog, many future social issues could be averted.
See, you are getting into the broken window fallacy here. Handouts are fine. If you have excess and you wish to just hand out that excess to whomever, more power to you.
But by handouts you are talking about government welfare. Or I assume. And that's fine as well. But let me ask you something.
We'll use you as an example. You haven't lost your job, your wife isn't banging the milk man and your dog hasn't run away. You see some poor schmuck and you decide to give him a handout. So, you break out one of your credit cards that you haven't quite maxed out yet and you get some cash for a handout. Hell, you can even say "Mow my lawn for this handout".
Except, your "handout" was given on credit. It wasn't from excess you have saved. There in is the problem. That's a different animal don't you think? If you had to break out your credit card to provide the handout, then you've only made yourself poorer and haven't changed that poor schmuck's overall position at all. Sure, he won't go hungry that day, but what about tomorrow? How long can you keep going into debt before the day comes when you tell the schmuck "Sorry man, I can't help you today".? And then, to make matters worse, the schmuck has come to rely on you. When you pull the rug out from under him he gets pissed, at you!
Now we take the government, which is running trillion $ deficits for years, over $17 trillion in debt, in ten years we'll be paying $1 trillion
just in interest on the debt we've accrued! we can see that our "handouts" are not handing out from what we have saved, but we are handing out our future labor. When the time comes when we say "Sorry man, can't help you out today" it's too late because we've already given up the rest of our labors until the day we die to pay off the handouts we've been making for all those years!
shickingbrits wrote: If the rich were required to do the same,
Whoa now! Didn't you say-
shickingbrits wrote:I don't have the right to tell people what to do
Apparently you do!
shickingbrits wrote: which they could easily manage by being employers,
I can safely say that you can figure out what you can manage for yourself. Do you think I can figure out what you can manage?
shickingbrits wrote: then perhaps I would have private funding for cleaning the graffiti.
Now that is all right by me! Private funding, sure! That I can dig. Of course, you cleaning graffiti has to be able to generate some sort of revenue if you want it to continue. Can you dig me?
Let's say you have $1,000. That's your starting bankroll for your new private business. You are going to hire people to go clean graffiti off the walls. So after the first week you have spent $200 of your bankroll so now you have $800. If the graffiti cleaning doesn't generate some sort of revenue to replace your bankroll, how long are you going to be able to afford to keep hiring people to clean graffiti? Four more weeks by my calculation, then you are dead broke and you'll be hoping someone will hire you to clean graffiti.
Or, you could take that $1,000, and instead of using Keynesian principles of just having people dig holes, you could invest that money into something like an oven, flour, sugar and other such ingredients and hire people to bake cakes. Sell the cakes and make a profit. You can part of that profit for yourself, because after all you have a house, a wife and a dog to take care of, and you can use the rest of the profits to expand. Buy another oven, hire some more workers, bake more cakes.
But the key difference here is, that without the profit you are just digging a hole for yourself and everyone around you. Yes those evil profits that if you succeed not only will you be employing people with something other than handouts, you will become filthy rich. You keep expanding, getting bigger, buying other bakeries as you expand until you have built a massive corporation employing ten's of thousands of people and you will become one of those hated, evil rich people.
For every penny someone else makes you give on handouts instead of profit generating endeavors-
shickingbrits wrote:If the rich were required to do the same
Are dollars you can't use to expand your business, hire more people to produce goods that others desire. When you sell a cake it's win win for both buyer and seller. The seller is happy with the price, for if he wasn't he wouldn't have sold it. And the buyer is happy with the price, for if he wasn't he wouldn't have bought it. The buyer values that cake enough to pay the money he earned.
And hopefully, if everything is functioning right, the buyer who purchased the cake got his money from doing something that created value, brought profit.
We can only give if we have savings from which to draw upon. To give without having the actually money, i.e. go into debt, is not only unwise but it's foolish and is a path to ruin. This is true with individuals and with governments.
shickingbrits wrote:Is there no cost on society from poverty? If there is a cost, which is preferred: to engage the poor in society's well-being, to create an apathetic class, or to spend on security that such a society would demand?
Now don't get me wrong, there are some greedy, shady Mf'ers out there, bankers come to mind. Investment traders, people like Warren Buffet and such and especially politicians who are the worst of the bunch.
Politicians have a vested interest in making sure there are people in poverty. Does that strike you as shocking? Or unbelievable? There are people who make their living off the poor and politicians are some of the worst. For politicians strive on there being problems, it's how they get elected by promising to fix those problems. And if there are no problems, then you can be damn sure that politicians will create some, to get elected. Government is the last place we should be looking to "solve" these problems. There are no solutions, only trade offs.
So, what are we willing to trade to get rid of poverty? Maybe, giving up your freedom? Would that be a good price to get rid of poverty? If everyone was a slave, given a job, fed by their overlords, would not poverty disappear or theoretically disappear? Maybe a war. Make everyone who isn't working a soldier, send them over to some land to fight, kill and die?
Order everyone can only make but "X" amount of money? But then when people reach that limit, what incentive would they have to continue working providing goods and services?
We could make a whole huge list of things, but it always comes down to the bayonet, doesn't it? "Do this or else!"
This is how the sought after Utopia turns Dystopian. Always with the best intentions of course, but it always goes bad because we ignore or don't consider the trade offs.
Trade offs, my friend, it's all about the trade offs.
Anyway, here's to hoping you don't lose your job as an accountant. Oh, and I'm not trying to diss you, but this made me chuckle-
shickingbrits wrote: but I'm still paying off my student loan for accounting
It's a bad idea to go into debt. Even for a college education. But hey, people justify it be saying "It's an investment!" and forget, investments imply risk. If one misprices risk, which often happens a lot when it comes to student loan debt, then things get ugly.
shickingbrits wrote: Where will I direct my anger?
This brought something to my mind. In another thread there were a couple of forumers discussing what kind of questions it's ok to ask. Your comment here made me remember something.
There are two fellows sitting and watching the news. In a city there was a city wide power outage. This happened in the mid morning, broad daylight. By noon there were riots and looting in the streets.
The first guys says- "Wow! It's only been a couple of hours and everyone is going crazy already, why are they doing this?"
The second guys replies-" You are asking the wrong question. The question you should be asking is how many people are just waiting for something like a power outage so they can go out looting."
And the first guy had a new understanding, just by changing the nature of the question. Oh yes, shickingbrits, where indeed will you direct your anger? Handouts aren't going to help that, only true wealth production which means creating profits. And profits doesn't necessarily mean money per say, only that it's money in which that wealth is measured. Money itself isn't wealth at all. And that's why handouts on credit isn't creating wealth, it's destroying it by using up future resources, productivity and labors today. Then tomorrow comes and we find ourselves lacking what we need because we've already used it yesterday.
Trade offs.
Sorry for the long post, if you made it this far, kudos to you!