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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday October 29 2017, @08:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the goose-and-the-golden-egg dept.

Wealth inequality stands at its highest since the turn of the 20th century - the so-called 'Gilded Age' - as the proportion of capital held by the world's 1,542 dollar billionaires swells yet higher. The report, undertaken by Swiss banking giant UBS and UK accounting company PwC, discusses the roles technology and globalization play in the status quo, and appears two weeks after the IMF recommended that the rich should pay more tax to address the enormous disparity.


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by khallow on Sunday October 29 2017, @05:11PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday October 29 2017, @05:11PM (#589117) Journal

    extremely wealthy people hoarding money

    This illustrates the enormous flaw in your thinking. They don't hoard money, they invest it.

    If there was a maximum limit on how much you could leave to your children it would greatly reduce the need to bribe government officials for more tax breaks.

    No, it'd create incentive to bribe government officials so that you could leave more to your children.

    It's a similar deal with the rest of the billionaire class, even allowing them to leave an obscene amount of money to their children, there's still a massive amount of it to go around and mitigate what they did in the process of accumulating it.

    Such as employing tens of thousands to millions of people for decades. Do we really need to mitigate that?

    But, the biggest benefit to the rest of us is simply that accumulating money past a certain point wouldn't be worthwhile. You'd see a larger number of individuals and businesses splitting the pot rather than a small number that are able to exert undue influence on the country in terms of refusing to pay decent wages and buying votes.

    I don't get my jollies from this activity, be it accumulating wealth, being poor, sky diving, getting married, driving, bicycling, walking, having and speaking other opinions, eating weird food, living in another country, getting an education, having a family, just about anything really. Thus, I don't see any reason anyone else should be doing these activities either and hence, they should be banned.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29 2017, @07:05PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29 2017, @07:05PM (#589168)

    This is why nobody takes you seriously. You're deliberately missing the point. The economy doesn't grow because people invest. The economy grows because there's more people buying things and engaged in trade. It would make business a lot easier if all we had to do is invest more money and suddenly we'd have more profits, but that's not how it works and that's why supply side economics has been such an abysmal failure.

    They don't employ tens of millions of workers out of the goodness of their own hearts, they do it because that's how they're able to steal from the rich. It's mind-blowing to me that you assume those people would be out of work when more likely there'd be numerous smaller businesses that would serve that market. If not, that's a pretty good indication that the market never really existed in the first place.

    This whole idea that the greedy at the top create jobs is a complete load of crap with no evidence to support it. Jobs are created because there's a need and people willing to pay money to have that need met. End of story, those jobs do not exist because somebody is willing to pay people to perform them, businesses like that go out of business rather quickly.

    As for your last point, you're a fucking moron. People accumulate far more money than they can possibly spend for a reason. It makes their dicks bigger and it's pretty fucking clear that they aren't going to stop doing it just because it's destroying the country and the world. Those other things you list have little to no impact on other people.

    • (Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday October 29 2017, @08:47PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday October 29 2017, @08:47PM (#589202) Journal

      The economy doesn't grow because people invest. The economy grows because there's more people buying things and engaged in trade.

      Investment is both buying things and engaging in trade, which is one of the reasons it makes no sense to call it "hoarding".

      and that's why supply side economics has been such an abysmal failure.

      With significant economic growth from 1982 or so to 2000. If only all our abysmal failures turned out so well.

      They don't employ tens of millions of workers out of the goodness of their own hearts

      [...]

      This whole idea that the greedy at the top create jobs is a complete load of crap with no evidence to support it.

      Except we see that you acknowledged such job creation in the previous paragraph. Owned goal.

      Also, once again we see the ludicrous pathology where the greedy motive of the wealthy magically outweighs all those tens of millions of jobs they created. I guess it's better to have people poor and unemployed, huh?

      As for your last point, you're a fucking moron. People accumulate far more money than they can possibly spend for a reason. It makes their dicks bigger and it's pretty fucking clear that they aren't going to stop doing it just because it's destroying the country and the world. Those other things you list have little to no impact on other people.

      I don't have any problem with the wealthy pursuing more wealth for the purpose of dick embiggening even though I don't bother with it myself. It's not something I'm going to start caring about. But if they want to accumulate wealth for that purpose, I'm fine with it.That's what freedom is about, after all. The right to do things, even if small-minded, bitter, jealous busy-bodies can't handle people doing things for impure motives or motives that they can't understand or do.

      Though I quite agree that this activity does have impact on other people, mostly positive - keep in mind that they're employing people and making goods and services of value. We should just steer that activity with a modest amount of regulation.