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Originally Posted by Max Cut
welp...my primary point is that thoothsayer is a horrible person and a stain on 2+2
Well, using this thread as a microcosm, you seem to be the horrible person and stain on 2p2. Close to zero content, bizarre hard left viewpoints, zero interest in evidence or new ideas.
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Then I get sucked into responding to people like augie who is mortified that some rich dude might get an unfair shake living in a society like the US which offers huge benefits to the wealthy, not the least of which is not having that wealth stripped away violently.
The US offers far more benefits to the poor than it does to the wealthy. Rich vs poor in pretty much any country has a greater divide than in the US in terms of quality of life.
The dream of selfish wealth and personal power is what motivates the highly talented to give up their best years working 80 hours a week with incredible efficiency to produce massive positive externalities, of which they take a mere cut. The US partly drew such innovators from around the world because it was one of the few places in the world where you could reliably make your wealth if you were good enough and keep it too. It had a culture of rewarding entrepreneurial individualism with riches, and a strong disdain for socialism.
Some people are far, far better than others in term of economic output. The top 20% builds most of what we have and supports the rest. The child Max Cut can't accept this, but it's undeniable. Studies on the highly uneven talent distribution have been done. Just a sample of the work:
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...The original study that found huge variations in individual programming productivity was conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968). They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years’ experience and found that the ratio of initial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20 to 1; the ratio of debugging times over 25 to 1; of program size 5 to 1; and of program execution speed about 10 to 1. They found no relationship between a programmer’s amount of experience and code quality or productivity.
Detailed examination of Sackman, Erickson, and Grant's findings shows some flaws in their methodology... However, even after accounting for the flaws, their data still shows more than a 10-fold difference between the best programmers and the worst.
In years since the original study, the general finding that "There are order-of-magnitude differences among programmers" has been confirmed by many other studies of professional programmers (Curtis 1981, Mills 1983, DeMarco and Lister 1985, Curtis et al. 1986, Card 1987, Boehm and Papaccio 1988, Valett and McGarry 1989, Boehm et al 2000)...
This is quite standard across industries. Extraordinary individuals who have natural talent and work hard to build up talent stacks are the ones who run this world competently and make it far better for everyone else, including the miserable Max Cuts who hate the competent because he's not one. For that they take a fraction of their output as recompense, and lose quite a lot of even that small cut in tax already, subsidizing the least competent in a massive way (both through their work and then taxes on top). It's my view that competent developers of wealth ecologies are even higher multipliers.
The ability to organize people, decide what the market wants, marshal resources effectively, not make expensive mistakes, have a strategic vision, are incredible and rare talents. Which is why Mao's China fell into a massive economic hole when it imprisoned these rare individuals because of sheer envy of their success.
Max Cut is so blinded by this base envy he wants to further disincentivize these people from working 80 hour weeks to become highly competent with massive positive externalities. Ok bro. Let's see how that works out for you.
If you want to argue that the system can absorb more tax and should, then sure, argue that (at least you're not a balls-out loon), but you're deeply ignorant if you think the top earners aren't net carrying the rest of society and that what we have now is unfair. The system we have is already strongly tilted in favor of the competent forcibly subsiding the incompetent, and the data is clear on that. Your notion that the current system is unfair or that the rich are parasites rather than massive net generators of wealth for all is just you being too much of child to accept what the evidence clearly shows.
Last edited by ToothSayer; 03-20-2019 at 08:39 PM.