How many of these poorest 3.2 billion would love to live the life of the poorest in the US? How many would instead like to live in China or Russia? That, my friend, is what capitalism does for the poor.

Most of these poorest 3.2 billion owe their very existence to the wealthy and to capitalism. Let me repeat that. They owe their very existence to the accumulation of capital and the efforts of the megawealthy. Wealthy crop scientists and their capitalist millionaires and billionaires risked tens of billions of their own money in the 60s and 70s coming up with better plant genes, pesticides and fertilizers, causing the Green Revolution that lifted billions out of malnutrition and food insecurity. Did Chinese and Russian socialists in their grand socialist states come up with these breakthoughs? While megarich entrepreneurs were risking their money to support crop scientists in the west, the cuck and loser Chairman Mao was busy solving China's crop issues by getting the whole country to bang pots day and night so that sparrows fall out of the sky from exhaustion. That's what happens when losers who hate the rich have the capital instead. The capital shrinks through massive misallocation, because it's harder than anything and more valuable than anything to allocate capital well. Is there a starker contrast between unfettered capitalism with its accumulation of wealth to the competent, and socialism with its accumulation of wealth and power wealth and capital haters like yourself?

The wealthiest people in the world also spent trillions of dollars of their own money - they could have sat fat and rich and just enjoyed their wealth rather than worked long hours and risked everything - investigating biotechnology and cures for diseases. Poor people with AIDS and other horrible diseases now have cheap antiviral drugs because the wealthy first risked their money to create these drugs then gifted these drugs to the poor, producing them en masse for poor countries at near cost price. Rich Americans subsidize that because they pay full price. The poor are currently being vaccinated against awful diseases not by governments, but by the generosity and intelligence of the third wealthiest man in the world - Bill Gates, and the generosity of millionaires and billionaires who run drug companies and donate $400 billion a year to charity in the US alone.

The wealthiest people in the world spent trillions developing a tech industry, which now allows cheap access to the world's information, to banking in places without banks, to ultra cheap mobile communications, and which ultimately drives society forward such that poverty is dropping like a rock worldwide.

The rich are the saints of this world, they are hardworking hyper intelligent people who spent more than half their life as slaves for the poor, and all of this stuff you whine about them owning is actually 99% pure capital accumulation through meeting human wants better than others, which is used and kept humming to pump out goods and services for the world's poor. You think the US poor should have their money instead, and spend it on smokes and nicer cars and phones and healthcare they don't need? You'd hurt the world's poor immensely if you did that.

History shows that people who attack the rich are truly awful people who've made disasters everywhere they've done it. You don't care about the poor, you hate the rich because they're better than you. They certainly do far far far more for the poor than you. Own it and become a better person.

Most of these poorest 3.2 billion owe their very existence to the wealthy

I'm not into kink shaming in general but this hating the poor is one twisted fetish you have.

That's a factual statement which has no emotional or moral content. Your problem is that you think in loaded emotions rather than data and facts and rationality, so you completely and spectacularly miss every single point.

It is a fact that the Green Revolution was driven by rich people in capitalist societies, and hugely increased the world's food capacity and food supply stability, enabling population explosions in these countries and a much better standard of living. Most poor alive today owe their existence to the Rockfeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, two private foundations founded by the wealthiest people on Earth, as well as numerous other billionaires and millionaires who worked as their slaves to make the lives of the poor better and let their kids live rather than starve.

That's a fact. When you wrap your head around that fact (you never will, you're full of toxic sloganistic hate for the rich, so we're speaking hypothetically), you will understand why your demented crusade against rich people is about the most harmful thing you can do to the poor.

This is what wealthy people do with their spare capital - when not pumping out goods for the poor with their held capital. They do this rather than selfishly spent on themselves which would be the result of your desired redistribution to less efficient capital allocators. In fact the rich get rich in capitalist markets by consistently and intelligently reinvesting capital in satisfying human wants efficiently. They are the best capital allocators on Earth, and who better to control capital for growing worldwide production output and variety than the best capital allocators? Chairman Mao? You would have backed him because he hated the rich and wanted to bring them down. Different decade, same anti-intellectual emotional mess as the evil people who supported Mao.

You create whole elaborate fantasies about what anyone who holds a differing opinion (mainly loving freedom for all) thinks.

Twenty six people vs 3.8 BILLION people and you go full-blown projection about how someone must hate poors for thinking that might not be a natural thing, or healthy for society, or sustainable, or fair.

You think billions of people owe their very existence to a small handful of people. I don't have to make **** up about you. Those are your actual words. You actually think it is a fact of the world. Just freakish levels of weird sadistic hate.

You've stated your opinion very plainly throughout this thread.

I think it's natural, I think it's healthy for society, and I think it's fair. You've quoted a stat provided by Oxfam, a charity looking for donations. You haven't critically analyzed it, you haven't stated why it makes your case, you haven't adjusted for the fact that 99% of the capital these people own is capital put to productive use making goods for the poor (it's not consumption), you haven't adjusted for the fact that 100 acres of land in NY is worth 1,000,000x more than 100 acres of land in rural India or Africa, despite both being 100 acres of land.

You're a clown bringing nothing rational or moral. Bring an argument for why this stat is a) real, b) bad, c) unnatural, and d) not fair.

But they do owe their very existence to the efforts of a handful of rich people. That's an actual fact. The targeted efforts of rich people have been the sole reason the carrying capacity of the world's crops has increased 3 fold since the 60s. The world's very poor have contributed nothing at all to crop science. Rich people did it all for them.

I literally laid out in detail why it is a fact. The actions of a handful of very rich people in the 60s and 70s (notably through the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation) pushed the Green Revolution which drastically increased crop yields and reliability in the second and third world a long time before it would have happened from government efforts, quickly decreasing famines and wiping out cropping limits which had previously put a much smaller upper limit on populations in the third world. These actions literally allowed a few billion more people to be born that otherwise could not have been. One of the main guys who did won a Nobel Peace Prize for it.

This is a literal, actual fact. But facts and evidence don't even enter into your head.
Where's the hate in that fact?

And where the hell is a the sadism? Most of the world's desperately poor live perfectly satisfying rural lives now that the rich have solved global hunger and much childhood disease for them, and the poor are happier than most poker players. The very poor are less happy than the rich, but not by large amounts, while also feeling more meaning, love and compassion than richer people.

Your patriarchal view of how people should live their lives, your insane view that poverty is some horrible ill and not actually a more meaningful, loving, human life than being rich, is just your own sick cultural imperialism. Get out a little more. Having lived many years in both rich and poor countries, people in poor countries seem a lot happier and closer to me than those in rich countries.

As for hate, where is the hate in the fact that most of the poor owe their very existence to the work of the rich making their life possible through technology? That's an actual fact.

It is preposterous on it's face to claim it's a fact that half the world's population owe their existence to a couple dozen people, and even more so that it's fair and natural, etc. I am pretty confident you believe slaves owed their existence to their masters. That's some twisted sadistic ****, Einstein.

Typically companies reinvest in the means of production to garner those returns. But that doesn’t appear to be the case at least as it relates to increases in consumer spending:

I would say a few thousand, all of them rich. And the people who funded the research and the technology transfer were millionaires and billionaires.

Let's step back a bit. Wealth at its most abstract analysis is hoarded energy that allows non-obvious and non-easy abstraction.

Creating new abstraction pathways is energetically expense AND it's also unknown what to abstract and what the end results will be. Thus decentralized merit-awarding abstraction attempts are incredibly important, and have been throughout human history. A functioning natural ecology has energy hoarding at all levels, from phytoplanton to superpredator orcas. Similarly, a functioning wealth ecology requires some people be allowed to amass vast sums of wealth. Let's look at just a few examples of what wealth amassing can do - there are so many that I can pick them relative to your causes:

- Oprah's ability to amass billions in a capitalist system has allowed her to create alternative media based around personal wellness and female empowerment, more effective than any government program.

- Bill Gate's ability to amass billions in a capitalist system has allowed him to solve serious problems for the very poor in Africa, more effectively than governments have, using far less money

- The Rockefeller's ability to amass hundreds of billions (in that day's money) enabled them to create the Rockefeller Foundation which was instrumental in creating the Green Revolution, changing the lives of the desperately poor and malnourished 100x more than any government program ever did. Most of the poor owe their very life to this wealth.

- The wealth amassed by the merchant oligopoly of the Venetians allowed them to create a high culture which spread across the European continent and then the world, and contributed to innovations in architecture, the arts, democratic ideals and the industrial revolution.

That's just a tiny fraction of what the amassing of wealth in merit systems has done. The communists destroyed their wealth creation ecosystems by destroying the rich, and life became misery for a billion people for two generations as a result, despite high population intelligence and natural resources in China and Russia for example. It's really that simple. If each person can't build their wealth stack as high as they want, through their own efforts and those they can convince to help them, then everyone stays down in the mud and no one can see ahead.

We're talking about the fairness of 26 vs 3.8 billion. I asked you to provide an argument why the data was real (100 acres in India owned by a poor farmer is worth 1,000,000x less than those acres in NY for example, which skews the data terribly), why this is unfair and unnatural, or why such wealth disparity is even undesirable given the data we have on meaning of life among the poor vs rich. Your response is a non-response. You refuse to question your assumption. If you did you might learn something about yourself and how little you know about poor people, philosophy, morality, greed. But you don't want to do that. You're content in the chimp part of your brain (he has more bananas! Attack!!!) and don't want to go any higher than chimp reactionary responses because that's what's comfortable for you.

You're comparing the rich altruistically raising the global total food capacity by targeted programs to increase crop yields that allowed billions more poor people to live and their kids to survive, with slavery? Come on, man.

This is an example of why it would be a foolish waste of time to engage with you in good faith rather than just occasionally point out your twisted morals. The comparison was between your position that most of 3.8 billion humans owe their very existence to a group of 26 humans and the position that slaves owed their existence to their masters. Seems pretty straightforward to me, but you will never ever argue in good faith. Keep posting walls of text and asking me to though. Stone stupid.

OK, so you openly admit avoiding engaging in good faith? And what twisted morals have you pointed out in this thread? Our morals are actually the same:

You want to help the poor as much as possible
I want to help the poor as much as possible

What we disagree on is how. You go into a chimp-brain rage when one person has far more stuff than another and you want to take that stuff and believe that will solve the problem, and I go post facts and data why the rich can't save the poor even if we raid them, and that the best thing we can do is to teach the poor that they have their improve their own lot in life, as no one else can. That's this argument summed up in a nutshell.
Nothing of the sort was ever said. You're confusing yourself and conflating two different things

1. That most of the poor alive today are alive solely because of the actions and altruism of the rich, which is a fact and a counterpoint to your rich-hating.

2. The (false) claim by a begging charity that 3.8 billion people have as much as the top 26 most wealthy.

You refuse to be drawn on what the claim means, whether it is false or misleading (I explained why it is), and whether that is natural or fair. You simply posted a tweet without commentary and won't discuss it further. You are the epitome of a zero content poster, which brings me to:
All of my arguments here are in good faith. Yours are not at all. What's more, your own confusion is the culprit here.

You have no comeback to hard facts and data, you haven't thought any of this through at all. Like I said, it's all chimp/toddler brain "He has more bananas than me! That's not fair! Attack!" way of thinking. There's no reasoning in anything you post and you seem allergic to data or discussion of data.

I'll engage you on this again:
This is a fake statistic put out by a charity looking for donations, but let's say it's true for the sake of argument.

Why would that not be a natural thing, why would it not be healthy for society, why would it not be sustainable, and why would that not be fair?

You asserting that this is the case doesn't add much.

Contrary to your point: I think this wealth disparity is natural, healthy for society, sustainable and fair. I have given some arguments why that is. But I would like to see you back up your assertions here with some actual arguments as to why you hold these views.

Reminds me of The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project.

Budapest as it existed in the late 19th and early 20th century would not have been possible without generations of capital accumulation.

― Han Fei

Juk

The scope of competency of a company is limited so you can't really fault them if they can't find anything worthwhile to invest. Some companies eventually becomes a bit of everything like Sony and Yamaha, but it is hard to manage such a company.

And most of the companies are already leveraged with debt so you can't really invest every bit of liquidity they have, otherwise they can't even suffer a small downturn without bankrupting themselves.

For those who want new projects you already have venture funds throwing money at ideas. I would rather argue for the opposite, that a lot of crap ideas are getting financing, wasting resources that could be used for other purposes.

Typically businesses reinvest in themselves by e.g. replacing hammers with nail guns to increase productivity.
I suspect that’s the main issue expect they’re likely anticipating weathering a large downturn. Nonetheless when there’s such a large gap between expected and actual behavior something’s amiss. I think everyone knows things are off, but there’s really no consensus as to why:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-dur...ust-1475066065

“Investment spending really has been quite weak for some time, and we’re really not certain exactly what is causing that,” Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said in a media conference following the Sept. 21 Fed meeting.

I agree but VC returns seem okay.

Bumping this to catch the political discussion from the politics forum invasion currently drowning out the corona thread. Hopefully they can take it here.

So for the guys that say rich people shouldn't pay more taxes are you guys outrage that you guys are playing by the rules and paying taxes while these people aren't? Do you guys think these people should be pursue by the IRS?

https://www.businessinsider.com/weal...-by-irs-2020-6

https://www.oversight.gov/sites/defa...02030015fr.pdf

Highlights. Btw this is our Gov. Audit not an opinion piece so please quote from this and not your assumption/words.







Forgot one more link https://www.govexec.com/management/2...-taxes/165814/

Pls share your solution so that we can pursue these guys to pay their taxes so that the rich hardest working people aren't being unfairly paying their taxes.

We are talking about $10-25B in total taxes over 3 years you are upset about over $3.46T collected every year?

The US government collected 3.46T in 2019 out of the possible 3.348T (divide $25B in 3). That means it collected 99.77% of the taxes it should have collected if you include those evil rich people not paying their taxes. And we aren't even including the massive amounts of poor people working under the table (paying their fair share amirite) not declaring their income.

Looks like the US government is doing its tax collection job very effectively.

Huge lol.

So you think it ok for this small group of people to get away w taxes while the majority of the rich has to pay taxes? Why would that be fair? I mean a lot of poor-middle class people probably don’t pay taxes too and I am mad at that also but what do you think we should do with this group though? Just let it roll because it such a small amount?

It's not hard, you hire more auditors and give them more teeth.

We hear all the time about celebrities that owe millions in taxes and don't file their taxes. Years later some of them get caught.

Should honest rich people pay more because **** heads like Michael Cohen went out of his way to cheat on taxes? Or should we give more ammunition to auditors to catch **** heads like Cohen and Manafort.

Don Juan: The rich aren't paying their taxes! An audit show that the rich are failing to pay 0.3% of the total taxes they should pay. What are we going to do about this terrible situation?

Me: Wat

So tooth do you pay your taxes? What is that amount compare to these guys. And why do you think it ok for you to pay your taxes but let this guys get away?I agree with Tien that they should do a better auditing. To me it not about the small amount but you don’t want a system that let people think it ok to cheat. Look at Italy. American is getting better but having leaks will cause a society to go downhill quick.

The leak in America is letting worthless people stay worthless by giving them handouts and grievance ideologies rather than encouraging self reliance. That costs a fortune. Even the fraud on that fortune is a fortune:

$15 billion/year is a rounding error on $3 trillion in taxes - 96% of which are paid for by the top 50%.

The US government is extremely effectively at vacuuming tax dollars. Look at 2019 vs 2020 below in terms of federal collections.

I'm pretty sure one of the reasons the IRS doesn't hire another 1000 auditors is because they honestly don't even give a damn to do so. As long as the money keeps rolling in hand over fist:

FY 2019 $3.46 trillion (actual)
FY 2018 $3.33 trillion
FY 2017 $3.32 trillion
FY 2016 $3.27 trillion
FY 2015 $3.25 trillion
FY 2014 $3.02 trillion
FY 2013 $2.77 trillion
FY 2012 $2.45 trillion
FY 2011 $2.30 trillion
FY 2010 $2.16 trillion
FY 2009 $2.10 trillion

Tien you seem more reasonable to talk to then tooth. So here we go.

https://www.propublica.org/article/i...audit-the-poor



fyi I am more Charlie Mungers Republican in thinking don't like union/insurance fraud/free college but I think some of the Republican are insane to push the envelope too far and create a system where there a lot of resentment on the other side.