Wealth Does Not Come From the Wealth Faeries
After reading (or watching) several comments from prominent progressives over the past couple days, I’ve been asking myself if they have any idea where wealth comes from. Notice I didn’t say “money” because, really, anything that can has value and can be traded is wealth though not all of it is money (for instance, you could make furniture and trade what you make for food or a car or what have you). Nancy Pelosi got the ball running with the ridiculous statement that the unemployment benefit program “creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name”. Now, here’s Hillary Clinton musing on where we get economics wrong.
It’s important, too, that we look at how to promote broadly-based prosperity. One of the problems in societies around the world today is that too much of the productivity of the economies are going to too few. Too few people, the political and economic elite, are realizing the vast majority of benefits from economic activity.
Now, those of us who get the origin of wealth understand that prosperity only happens when people own the fruits of their labor. The principle that what you produce belongs to you and you have the absolute right to dispose of it as you wish is the cornerstone of all the wealth and wonders created in America for well over 230 years. If you noodle it through, you can easily figure out why this has so. Economic freedom is the first, and most important freedom we have. From it stems all the others (including the freedom of speech, which runs a very close second).
The reason the economic “elite” get the vast majority of benefits is because they produce the largest amount of the wealth. In other words, the man who works hard and builds a business building furniture, who has countless hours of time invested in that business, will realize a greater benefit from his investment than the man he hires to deliver the furniture to customers. That’s the way it is supposed to be. The business owner is withdrawing from the vast account of effort he has built up over the years. Why shouldn’t he benefit from his efforts more than someone who has not invested as much as he?
For most of our country’s history this has been a guiding principle of taxation and government spending. Legislators remembered that when they took your money, they were taking your time and your labor, and they considered each rise in tax and spending carefully. However, in the last 60 years or so the countervailing belief has taken over the Democratic Party and is taking hold in the Republican party as well. Here is that belief in a nutshell:
What you produce is not yours but rather goes into a vast pool of resources that must be apportioned out evenly by a handful of concerned experts, each of whom is compensated lavishly.
Do you see how egregious this belief really is? Do you see the eventual end of such a belief (hint: it ends with benign slavery)? Do you see how the well being of everyone in this country is threatened by such a belief?
Wealth does not simply appear from the thin air. It has to be created by human beings who act out of their own self-interest and have the freedom to create as much as they desire. That’s the only way it works. Without that freedom, wealth dries up and we end up like Zimbabwe.
(Cross-posted at The Greenroom)
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Category: The Economy and Your Money
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[...] Jimmie Bise: Wealth Faeries? [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jimmie. Jimmie said: New blog post: Wealth Does Not Come From the Wealth Faeries http://bit.ly/bgsUFR [...]
"I've been asking myself if they have any idea where wealth comes from."
You could have stopped that sentence four words earlier, really. The answer is still the same: no, they don't.
[...] is the cornerstone of all the wealth and wonders created in America for well over 230 years. . . . Economic freedom is the first, and most important freedom we have.” var addthis_append_data='false';var addthis_language='en';var addthis_options='twitter, [...]
I think the problem boils down to the fact that they are parasites. It would be nice if people would wake up to their parasitic natures.
The Wealth Faeries are engaging in discrimination. They never come to visit me except to laugh and jeer.
The Problem is Government that once was symbiotic in nature as a defensive barrier against people which all governments ultimately are taking away certain guaranteed freedoms has turned into a cancerous parasite infecting everyone it can into forgetting what the original nature of the partnership was.
The problem is this is all based on incredible over-simplification and an out-dated model.
This article is based on a false premise:
"The business owner is withdrawing from the vast account of effort he has built up over the years."
In theory, this is how it works. In today's climate however, this is often not the case.
Your example is perfect for the past:
In the past, I could go out into the forest and cut down a tree, build a chair, sell it, invest those profits in continuing the cycle, etc….building up the furniture store in your example.
This is not how it works anymore.
Nowadays the small business owner in your example is not wealthy, he or she is struggling. Fools like you try to place the blame on "parasites" and those intent on "class warfare"….
The problem is the people who are generally accused of being intent on "class warfare"…they're only intent on defending themselves in a war thrust upon them by those who started it.
Let's look at the richest people in the country:
The people with money are not drawing on a pool of EFFORT, they are drawing on a pool of SOCIAL CONNECTIONS, "IN's", and dirty tricks.
They aren't rich because they are good businessmen: they are rich because they cheat on their taxes…and the government helps them under the guise of "trickle down economics"….except the money doesn't trickle down…..it accumulates in pools where the cheaters and club members hoard it as leverage to make even MORE money unfairly.
Look at the people in Congress, both Democratic and Republican: they are doing much better stock market than the rest of us….it's not because they're smarter than us it's because they're cheating with insider trading and favoritism.
Once you have money, it's easy to use it as a club to beat others in society over the head with and extract more money.
The math proves everything I have said:
The richest people in the country make exponentially more than the rest of us.
Is it because they are smarter than us, or work harder?
No, it's because they bribed a congressman to get a government contract, where they are paid much more than their work is actually work.
It's because they use their insider knowledge to cheat the rest of us in the market.
It's because they don't pay the true costs of their own business: the people in oil companies make their money by cutting corners and extracting natural resources they didn't create.
The wealthy in this country make their money on the backs of the rest of us.
Let me pose a hypothetical question:
Let's say you're at the office, and attend a meeting.
As usual, there is a box of donuts for the benefit of those attending. There are plenty of donuts, enough for everyone to have 1 or 2 which is more than enough.
The first couple of people take a donut, or perhaps two if they are hungry.
Then a man comes in and takes 20 donuts: more than he could possibly eat.
There are now not enough donuts for everyone else….he starts trading favors for donuts to those who didn't get one.
I ask you….would this not strike you as a greedy and unfair thing to do? Those donuts where there for everyone and there was enough for everyone.
He didn't put in any great amount of work or added value to society, he just did what would strike most people as a dirty thing to do….
This is the state of our society.
I dare you to sit there and say if you were in this situation and you saw someone hoarding donuts you would not say "Hey why don't you leave some for everyone? maybe give some of those donuts that you unfairly took back?"
The people in this country need to wake up and realize that this is not about the liberals vs conservatives.
It's not even about rich vs poor, most people who consider themselves rich are not.
This is about the uber-rich vs everyone.
They got their wealth through unfair means, and the only way to fix our society is to fix the distribution of the wealth.
I dare you to study this…..go look at how the distribution of wealth has changed….how it used to be somewhat evenly distributed but now it is clearly lumped at the top. How people who actually work for a living, including business owners, make LESS ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION than we did in the past.
Than look at the wealthiest people and you'll see they didn't make their money honestly:
They got it by cutting corners somehow which passed THEIR costs on to society. (oil, gas companies, walmart, etc)
They got it by using insider knowledge to get an unfair advantage (politicians)
They got it by using dirty business tactics (Microsoft).
They got it by cheating on their taxes.
and more…
I'll leave you with a quote from THOMAS PAINE:
"There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it….Create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property."
Wow, what a bunch of ridiculous blather.
to clarify:
The wealth in this society as it is now is like chocolate milk with all the chocolate settled at the bottom….we need to stir it up into a more natural distribution.
Redistribution of wealth is an artificial solution to this unnatural state….it's not to be done as a matter of course.
Lets see using your example RealTalk
Who buys the Donuts? Does the Company Buy The Donuts if so Then the donuts belong to the owner of the company and if he sets no limit on what someone can take then your example falls apart. If someone in the company bought the donuts and they say nothing about the guy grabbing 20 then thats their fault. The Donuts belong to whoever bought them to distribute them as they wish. You want to come in and claim its not fair that guy got 20 and we must distribute the Donuts like I deem as fair even though you didn't buy the donuts.
Even using your own example I prove your basic theory wrong.
Lets see Microsoft started by a couple guys in a basement. Wal-Mart started by one man who had an idea and made it reality.
Basically your basic premise is its unfair they have all this and everyone else doesn't so we need to take their stuff and pass it out.
Another basic theme in your denunciation of Jimmie's is they cheated somehow to get their wealth which in Microsoft and Wal – mart is proven false right from the start.
Again to go back to your Donut analogy Why not say The Donut seller is being too greedy and cheating people with his products so his donuts need to be redistributed to all those hungry people I mean after all you did that maybe that poor guy who took the 20 donuts wouldn't have felt compelled to do so.
BTW Chocolate Milk is an artificial creation because it doesn't start out as chocolate milk its normal milk with chocolate added in. I always find it astonishing that somehow when people accumulate wealth its unnatural but when its redistributed back out that it wont accumulate back into the hands of a small collection of people requiring redistribution again.
[...] is wise. Over at The Sundries Shack, the free market view (also what actually happens in nature): Prosperity only happens when people [...]
@Jimmie
Notice that rather than actually addressing any points that were made, and providing arguments for how they are wrong you simple dismiss it as "blather"…
I wonder if you don't provide counter arguments because you can't….
I called it blather because it was. Bad facts, bad conclusions about the facts that weren't bad, just bad.
And I didn't provide counter-arguments because I didn't care to involve myself in a debate with you.