I am not asserting that wealth has not be created. I am asserting as others have that what has been created has disproportionately gone to capital. Do the boses work hard? Sure they do, but no harder than the “line” workers. Same with execs, yet they draw up to 400 times what the worker gets. Does that make any sense?

What should shareholder’s earn? When you think that a shareholder typically purchases his shares NOT from the corporation but from someone else who is selling them. His purchase price does not go to the corporation. He’s not helping fund them. But he is expecting to get a dividend from the certificate he owns. The deal with share value is that it is supposed to represent a portion of the value of a company. This relationship is not really there any more as share value computation is hardly based on real metrics and more and more based on other market factors and “psychological” factors. If there is bad market news it often tanks all shares regardless if anything has changed in any particular company. The entire system of shares is bizarre, arcane and needs to be rethought. Never owned one and never would.

William Golding was completely prescient in his writing. The rant is on, no amount of calm reasoned restraint will deter the demagogues calling for hate the rich, dismember the wealthy. No other voice will be heard above that din. OK, have it your way, Golding is prescient there as well.

In this thread, several “facts” have been stated; a handful for ending estate taxes, a thousand making a written declaration for the retention of estate taxes, and the demagogues in their economically ignorant self-righteous ravings are leading the ill-educated on a crusade to forcibly divest those from their property. Golding is prescient again. It seems that more of those who these charlatans are against actually agree with the need for estate taxes.

This makes one wonder just how many aristocrats the French “Terror” murdered actually had world views that supported the revolution. One will never know those numbers, but without a doubt their number would be significant.

There is little cause to continue calling out those who persist in their beliefs, for that is all they are, to consider the economic, historical, social, and legal implications of their crypto-”judgments”, and the effect those judgments have on the public well-being. Here again Golding is prescient, the mob rules.

Look for no justice from a mob, their judgments have no righteousness to them.

Look for no more such entries as well, your arguments fail even though they prevail. ;-(

There has to be some way to determine actual culpability or else you’re just not delivering real Justice.

Somewhere along the way, I think some people in our country have come to believe that they are citizens of the world first, and citizens of this country only in a rah-rah for the team kind of way.
Somehow, the rules don’t apply to them.
They don’t get it that people sacrificed work and money for them, and they must do the same in turn.

If a company makes $1M profits and it has a combination of human work and capital investment involved, then how much of the profits should go to the human work and how much should go to the capital investors?

If you can nail that down without union-owner wars, then you’ve got something.

But, more than that, is it right to tell people who have earned money in a completely legal way how to pass it on to their children or how to use it? Do we tell Joe Sixpack how to use his bass boat?

It seems to me there’s a lot of hatred in this diary of the Rich (Lord knows they work for it) and not enough idealism. Perhaps I’m too idealistic at times, but I hate to focus on individuals or industries. I prefer to look at some fundamental concepts applied.

Obviously our economy has worked well to produce great wealth. Trouble is it hasn’t been distributed properly. Recently we’ve had a tremendous financial sector bubble and a lot of corruption which manipulated it for the benefit of a handful of people. That has to stop. But, does that mean we lock up the rest of the economy too? No, we start in on a new alternative energy economy and a new world trade regime so the world can begin to benefit more from what we have used here.

We start with freedom, add some structures to enable people, add some regulations which we know have worked and oversight AND one other important thing, an imperative that because government has helped the beneficiaries of that have certain duties.

When you have a concept you can derive particular laws with less randomicity and with better orthogonality.

My mom told that to some people who raised pigs commercially (think hundreds in barns in pens) and they put up a sprinkler system with slightly warmed water that came on about three times a day. The pigs loved it – and the pig farm did not smell like a pig farm.