A Question For Supporters of Uncontrolled Free Markets

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
a reply to: Edumakated

The difference is, wealthy people only contribute donations/charity to those they philosophically and morally agree with.

huh? Most people only give or make donations to charities that they agree with... including the government! Did you even think about what you typed?

There will ALWAYS be some cause du jour that could use more money. ALWAYS. No system under the sun will ever eliminate that situation. There will always be wars, famine, poverty, drug addicts, homeless, etc because all of these things are a result of man being fallible. You could give every person on the planet $1 million and in within a week, we will be back in the same spot.

a reply to: Edumakated

The Capitalism you speak of included following the Sherman Act, without the loopholes that have allowed corporations to avoid paying taxes while hiding enormous wealth overseas.

The Sherman Act itself was a control of the wealth at the top level that ensured a competitive environment for small business.

The Capitalism we have now, is globalised exploitation of cheap oversees labor that is destroying the American economy. Today's Capitalism is much closer to Freemarket than the Capitalism that made this country the wealthiest in the world.

Capitalism was much more controlled with fewer loopholes for the wealthiest when this nation was at it's economic high point. Creating enough middle class jobs for anyone willing to work hard, even the uneducated.

This is also a Fact.

a reply to: Isurrender73

Your post is not based in reality and a real lack of understanding of how the market works. We do not have anything that resembles free market capitalism. The current problem is caused by governments providing aid to the 1%, and you want more government involvement? Unless you start actually arresting people on wall street AND the government nothing will change.

Call it whatever system you want, unless there is actual accountability from the dumbed down general public, those in power will continue to point fingers and prey on the weak and stupid public.

a reply to: Edumakated

Liberal minded people don't mind paying higher taxes that go to people they don't know, never will meet or may not be in moral agreement with. Well, on average this is the case.

originally posted by: Isurrender73
Who deserves to make the most money?

I'm not an uncontrolled free market person but from your list if we were going by necessity to society, plumbers are at the very top of the list and the gap between them and #2 is an order of magnitude.

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: Isurrender73
Who deserves to make the most money?

I'm not an uncontrolled free market person but from your list if we were going by necessity to society, plumbers are at the very top of the list and the gap between them and #2 is an order of magnitude.

I agree that is why I put water suppliers first. I broke water supply and plumbing up, as more of a progression from irrigation and fresh water supplies to indoor plumbing.

But in reality they are 1 and 1A. After water, food, clothing and basic shelter, everything else is luxury.

Which is why it amazes me that so many in this Age of Technology are without the basics when so many of us have many luxuries.

originally posted by: Isurrender73
And why should someone who is a specialist, just because it is scarce, not have a wealth cap?

Why should a boxer make 250,000 million when the boxing trainers at the local gym makes 50K?

Why should the Entertainer make millions while the high school educators of Music and the Arts make thousands.

Why not tax the entertainment industry and reinvest that money in our children? So that all children have access to sports and the various arts.

It has to do with a client base. The boxer has a client pool of their entire audience while the trainer at the local gym is only getting support from a couple thousand. The boxer makes far more money as a result despite getting a lower return per person.

Entertainers are the same way, the bigger the stage the more you're going to make.

As far as the tax idea goes, I'm all for more taxes they're currently much too low. However, half the politicians in Congress have signed no tax pledges that they're not going to budge on and for all that we already spend we seem to get some of the lowest returns of any nation, largely because those same people that put forth the idea of no tax pledges also run on the platform of making every government entity as dysfunctional as possible.

The problem with wealth caps in my mind is that a cap does nothing other than to curb personal success. If a person couldn't be paid over $250,000 for example then the corporation would simply hold on to that money, some of it would be paid out in perks such as the corporation covering your home, but other money would simply not enter circulation and it would instead be saved, such as you have now where Apple and many other corporations are holding onto billions that could otherwise be circulating through the hands of people. This in turn reduces spending, which reduces economic growth.

The much better fix is to increase the salary floor, typically minimum wage so that those at the bottom (which currently comprises half the working population, or more depending on where you want to place the cutoff) have more money to spend. They are the people least likely to save and most likely to spend. This keeps money flowing through the economy.

originally posted by: Edumakated
No you can't. If that were the case, then you wouldn't see so many companies crater after the CEO is changed. CEOs also need to understand how to pick their teams. It goes well beyond just numbers on a spreadsheet. Think about how Steve Jobs literally saved Apple Computer. Apple had damn near failed after Steve Jobs was fired and replaced with a former Pepsi CEO, John Sculley.

Leaders need to inspire. Make tough decisions. Pick up on nuances. If anyone could do it, anyone would be doing it. Companies, big and small, fail every single day because the leadership team is bad.

Steve Jobs could not make a good product. What Steve Jobs did was he figured out how to market a product, which goes back to one of the central issues with capitalism. The best product doesn't succeed and generate wealth for the creator. The most competitive product does, and there is often times a big difference between a quality product and a competitive product.

a reply to: Isurrender73

I give you a star for trying but I don't think you understand what's going on here

The rich have usurped the free market and made it work for them

Research bailouts and quantative easing done by western central banks

Free markets have not existed for some time now

originally posted by: Isurrender73
a reply to: Dragoon01

Killing is always good solution.

War over equality. We have been doing that for the last 4000 years. Been a truly great system of genocide. Good way to control population too.

End Sarcasm

The only equality your system would produce is failure.
You advocate a system that uses tyranny to suppress my ability to do better for myself and my family. I am responsible for my own life and that of my family. Your system would steal my time, my energy and the product of my labor. That theft robs my family and I of opportunity. You darn skippy I will kill to prevent that.

a reply to: Isurrender73

Someone will always end up on top and assume control of all power structures.

Funny, that's just what karl Marx and Lenin said about communism. They both admitted that the nature of it would require an elite at the top. They called it a "dictatorship of the proletariat".

originally posted by: queenofswords

Men like Leonardo Da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, The Wright brothers, Galileo Galilei, and Albert Einstein are the are the one's who advance mankind. Not business owners and bankers.

Their accomplishments would have been spit in the wind if someone, some company, some other hadn't invested in their discoveries and "made it happen".

You cannot compare apples and oranges. Why should an actor like Angelina Jolie make $20 million dollars for a single movie but a firefighter only $60,000 for the whole year? Apples and oranges and lots of other considerations, twists, and turns.

"You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it is still the truth that had to be said in the age of the Welfare State."

-Ludwig von Mises, letter to Ayn Rand praising Atlas Shrugged.

originally posted by: Edumakated

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
a reply to: Edumakated

The difference is, wealthy people only contribute donations/charity to those they philosophically and morally agree with.

huh? Most people only give or make donations to charities that they agree with... including the government! Did you even think about what you typed?

There will ALWAYS be some cause du jour that could use more money. ALWAYS. No system under the sun will ever eliminate that situation. There will always be wars, famine, poverty, drug addicts, homeless, etc because all of these things are a result of man being fallible. You could give every person on the planet $1 million and in within a week, we will be back in the same spot.

Do you think the founders were Nationalist or Globalists and do you think in terms of Free Markets, they were speaking of markets in our country or global markets?

Do you think the founding fathers would agree with Opening our markets to let Communist China have their way in our economy, while China closes their markets to our business via tariffs and is also a place where workers have no rights?

I do not think that is what they had in mind. They were talking about the best interests of this country, not a globalist utopia where all Americans except the wealthy elite relished in it.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The only free and uncontrolled market is the black market. The USA among many other parts of the world have known little freedom in the markets. The freest time in the USA (economically speaking) was the time prior to the 1850's and post civil war to the turn of the 20th century. The time period that really built and defined this country.

Since the 1970's the USA has been on a slippery slope to self destruction and it has nothing to do with uncontrolled markets. More like an uncontrolled Government.

Freedom is good for inventors. If an inventor has a bunch of government loop holes and taxes to go through it will take more time and money for the inventor to get his product on the market.

However OP I do agree that CEO wages are rediculous and we need to look out for our fellow man.

a reply to: jacobe001

The founders were very aware of the effects of weaker and stronger currency, it played out right in their back yards as each colony had it's own money and each was worth a different amount. Some weren't worth the paper they were printed on while others were very trusted. Then you had country pay and credit. Essentially, there were about 30 mediums of exchange between each colonies money, each colonies country pay (effectively barter), sterling, pieces of eight, and a couple others.

After seeing these effects, one of their first actions was to standardize the currency. The founding fathers today, seeing our interconnectedness would highly favor a one world currency, but they would likely favor a bit of protectionism to protect against being undercut by different economic zones.

If you're curious about colonial currency, here's a good read and it's not too long
eh.net...

Personally, I find it interesting at how adept they were at converting one pay scale to another. I've seen it on trips to Mexico, Europe, and Canada too, people can convert foreign currency quite quickly. And then I think about the US and most struggle to do simple multiplication/division.

If you read the system you can get a good feel for what we would have in the event of a currency collapse too. It wouldn't take very long for the bankers to open up some books and go to this system. It actualy played out on the world stage somewhat recently with the player run banking system in EvE Online as well.

a reply to: Edumakated

Floyd Mayweather makes $250 million boxing because there is only one Floyd Mayweather. A televised fight of his may generate $1 billion in revenues for the fight promoter. A Floyd fight generates thousands of jobs and value for everyone from the peanut guy to cops directing traffic to casino workers to TV producers.

That was for one fight. That was opportunistic and a one time payoff.

Look at the olympics-sure jobs are created for the host nation, but the host nation only has three weeks to break even. What happens to those jobs (not to mentions the thousands of volunteers) after the closing ceremony? those folk need new jobs.

Events like the Mayweather fight or the Olympics are a quick fix. Then there is FIFA who have generated revenue but have been "generous" in their "wealth distribution". Did south African economy take a turn for the better after the World Cup? It's hard to say.

originally posted by: Isurrender73

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

originally posted by: Isurrender73
Men like Leonardo Da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, The Wright brothers, Galileo Galilei, and Albert Einstein are the are the one's who advance mankind. Not business owners and bankers.

Tesla, Bell, Edison, Jobs and the Wright Brothers were all business owners. Where do you get your information from?

I get my information from history books.

Tesla ended up broke, Edison reinvested all his money to continue inventing.

And I will let Jobs speak for himself

“I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”
- Steve Jobs

You will have to try harder than that.

He never did it for the money?? You must be smoking some strong stuff to believe that. Jobs was one of the most ruthless employers in high tech. He squeezed every penny out of those who were defenseless - namely, the Chinese employees. Of course, he always looked good on the home front. But underneath it all, he was a ruthless, money hungry SOB.

"The dark side of Apple and perhaps a reflection of Jobs’ leadership style are the labor conditions in Apple’s Foxconn manufacturing plants in China. In reaction to a spate of worker suicides where fourteen died in 2010, a report by twenty Chinese universities described Foxconn factories as labor camps(link is external) and detailed widespread worker abuse and illegal overtime. In response to the suicides, Foxconn installed suicide-prevention netting at some facilities, and it promised to offer substantially higher wages at its Shenzhen production bases.Workers were also forced to sign a legally binding document guaranteeing that they and their descendants would not sue the company as a result of unexpected death, self-injury, or suicide. In January 2012, 150 workers in Wuhan(link is external) threatened to commit mass suicide because of worsening work conditions. The employees had asked for a raise but were told they could either quit with compensation or keep their jobs with no raise. The employees quit, but did not receive their compensation.

If Jobs was such a great leader, who oversaw in detail virtually all aspects of Apple’s business, how could he either be unaware of the situation with Foxconn or allowed it to happen in the first place?"

www.psychologytoday.com...

a reply to: Isurrender73

It's a moot point. You're either going to have uncontrolled freedom for citizens or uncontrolled government. Either way, things are going to get out of control. Because the fact of the matter is that control doesn't really exist. Give human beings long enough under any circumstances and some right unpleasant stuff will happen. It's just life.