[quote=squat250]
I think you’d agree that excessive concentration of wealth, even if it was gotten with skill and brains and good old fashioned hard work, is not a good way to set up a society that has any chance ofbeing a decent fair, longlasting, good place tolive…
You don’t want all 99.9% of wealth with just one, or in a nation our size, two or ten or 50 or 1000 dudes.
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Think about what wealth really is and what you hope to do with it and you’d realize that most wealth is indeed somebody’s obligation to provide goods and services. A slave owner on a plantation would have 99.9% of the wealth on the plantation. A King would have 99.9% of the wealth inside the walls of his castle. What they really have is control over a group of people to provide all the goods and services he desires. The owner/King gets to keep it all while the people providing the service get to keep basically nothing other than sustenance to keep providing goods and service.
These type arrangement usually end up in revolt at some point because nobody wants to work for nothing in return. Fairness depends on who defines it, but a general definition that everybody is relatively equal is a pretty common definition. The problem is that this idea flies straight in the face of evolution, natural selection, or Darwinism. Mother earth or nature doesn’t reward fairness/equality it rewards evolution/innovation. It’s why a solution to solve the problem of fairness in many peoples definition of fairness just doesn’t exist. The best you can probably do is practice true capitalism and allow those that make bad bets fail.
Throughout history many companies have come and gone. Many individuals have been poor, wealthy, and poor again. The problem now is we don’t allow those wealthy to fail anymore, if we did the wealth gap would shrink. The biggest shrinking of the wealth gap that ever occurred happened during the great depression. It will likely happen again, but this time because of our reliance on 401Ks and self funded retirement more than just the top 5% are going to get hit. Everybody is going to take a hit and it’s why we’ve become so desperate to find a solution that doesn’t really exist. Your wealth and your retirement really depend on another person’s debt.
