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Originally Posted by O.A.F.K.1.1
Investment banks making huge profits purely on merit. (See quantitative easing)
What are investment banks privileged to do that allows them to make huge profits that you can't?
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Im not going to reply yet to your post because it looks like you are clearly arguing that all financial actors have equal access to credit/margin/leverage and the opportunities derived thereby. If so lol. I mean this is so clearly wrong (Not even the posters in this thread have equal access to credit) that you must be saying something else.
Aside from not being seen as creditworthy by other private market participants, yes everyone has equal access to credit. And let's step back for a second. Even if we grant you that Goldman Sachs, as opposed to any other private pool of capital, benefits from its easier access to credit, who disproportionately benefits, shareholders or employees? Nothing stops you from working at Goldman Sachs or becoming its partial owner, either, except through decisions made by private market participants. You know, despite all this talk about how financial institutions have this easy way of profitting from the system, one recommendation I've never seen from anyone in the ACist/Austrian-Economics/Voluntaryist/Fed-conspiracy/etc faction is buying into financials.
To the extent that opportunities to share this profit from inflation or whatever are available to the general public, again, those who buy it when it was cheaper and sell it when it's expensive, profits at the expense of those who do the opposite. To the extent that doing so correctly confers little benefit to society at large, this results in distribution of wealth that isn't connected to contribution to society.
If your general point was that there's something about the system that allows some people to disproportionately get rich beyond their contribution to society, well that's my point too. I'd argue that it's necessarily so - in any sufficiently wealthy society, the connection between wealth and productive contribution to society is likely very tenuous. Regardless of how you feel about the general case, do you agree that it's the case at least in this world we live in? After all, you've just talked about all these rich people who made money because of the system! After investors, lawyers, bankers, doctors, lobbyists and government contractors, I mean, who else is that rich anyway? Don't other rich people also get rich mostly by providing assisting those other rent-seekers?
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Its amazing how a debate about applying more taxation on the rich in which posters defend this very idea, evolves to the point where those same posters are defending the financial status quo which allows the super rich to be super rich. Superb cognative dissonance.
I don't care much about taxation on the rich either way.