One person should only be so rich.

Let them have all they want I say. They still won't have crap when it fails and the dollar is only good enough to wipe your butt with.
They should invest in some survival skills, at least then we won't eat them for dinner.

reply to post by ElectricUniverse

You pretty much described the current system and yes many agree that it could be better.

In an earlier post you mentioned Cuba. They are expanding their private sector and relaxing rules on private employment. Even they realize that a mixed economy works best. I have met cubans that don't bad mouth Cuba. Just like any other group. Some will complain while others will be happy.

The problem with too much wealth is too much power...


I don't think anyone wants to prevent these people from owning a 100 million dollar yahct...


They want to prevent these people from turning into TPTB simply because they have so much money...


And there lies the problem....

reply to post by v1rtu0s0

Is it that those with money weild too much power or that anyone weilds too much power?

If it is the former, capping wealth may help, though I doubt that too. If it is the latter, capping the wealth will not only not help, but will have the exact opposite of the desired result, since those with power have been granted more avenues to exercise it, monitoring and capping the wealth of individuals.

reply to post by ElectricUniverse


Lol, I seriously doubt that legislation capping wealth at $1 billion could ever be a slippery slope to reducing the poor even further.

How on earth do you derive that from there?

The point of such a law is to prevent precisely what you are talking about, the rich buying and controlling the government.

If a wealth cap were to be implemented along with another of my ideas, taxpayer allocation of their own taxes, it would never be an issue again.

I propose that since it is our money, and the taxpayer knows bet how to spend it, as the politicians say, then let us do so.

Establish tax payment/voting centers across the nation like post offices or libraries (by that I mean as ubiquitous), connected on secure and isolated hardwire networks. At tax time every program that the Congress has approved and passed shall be available in summary and complete text at the centers. conscientious taxpayers may then peruse them and decide which of each gets how much of their money, with established step sizes ($25, $50, $100, $1,000 etc) based on tax amount. The odd amounts left over go into the general fund, or are added to to reach the minimum step amount. The politicians would get to play with the general fund only. Lazy taxpayers could simply check it all into the general fund and say here, you deal with it.

In one fell swoop we could reclaim the power of the purse and drastically cut the power of the politicians to screw us over.

The problem with complex issues like these is that you need interlocking solutions to fix them, in this case a wealth cap [and budget reform. A couple of other changes are necessary to fully fix things, but those are beyond the scope of this discussion.

For a fuller discussion of the centers see this thread:

I'll bet I can get you to happily pay more than your fair share of taxes

reply to post by s12345


This is the worst idea I have ever heard. Man has the right to enjoy the fruits of his labor and no one has the right to take it away from him. We all are given the gift to aspire to achieve whatever we can imagine. Imagination has no limits. Only a fool would want to stop man from dreaming, achieving, building, sharing, growing-that is what you are saying when you say someone else is too rich. Absolutely absurd.

Absurd. What surprises me even more are all the stars this OP received. There must be a lot of people on ATS who are not confident in their own potential.

Originally posted by FlyersFan

Originally posted by s12345
I believe that there should be a limit on how much wealth one person could have:

I believe that it's none of your business how much money someone has or doesn't have.
I believe that a person has a right to keep what they earn, no matter how much or little it is.
I believe it's jealousy and theft to take from others simply because they have more than you.
I believe history has proven that socialism and communism do not work.
I believe that putting a limit on what a human can achieve or earn 'dumbs down' humanity.
I believe that you are pushing your version of morality on others ....
.... like what the pro-choicers claim the pro-lifers are doing.

This post is worth reading twice.

reply to post by Missing Blue Sky


Yes, because most of it is selfish and self-destructive drivel, an example of the thought process that has brought us to this unsustainable place.

What it doesn't say is I believe that a mature adult should know when to say when, and leave enough so that everyone gets a chance to earn a fair share.

Originally posted by Missing Blue Sky
reply to post by s12345

 

This is the worst idea I have ever heard. Man has the right to enjoy the fruits of his labor and no one has the right to take it away from him. We all are given the gift to aspire to achieve whatever we can imagine. Imagination has no limits. Only a fool would want to stop man from dreaming, achieving, building, sharing, growing-that is what you are saying when you say someone else is too rich. Absolutely absurd.

Absurd. What surprises me even more are all the stars this OP received. There must be a lot of people on ATS who are not confident in their own potential.

Because their is a finite amount of currency in circulation at any given time and all the money is trickling up at an alarming rate.

It is a no brainer for those that can think clearly and are not selfish enough to try and hog resources.

Progressive taxation is not stealing if you are being represented. The problem is we are not being represented enough because those with obscene wealth have made it a life long ambition spaning generations to control government as much as possible.

They are the worst control freaks you could ever meet! We are not talking about the millionares, as we are talking about the billionares and trillionares. What the hell can someone do with that money, even if they made 100% legitamately, which is rarely the case since they would throw you under the bus to get their way?

You obviously lack real world experience or have something to gain by supporting the ultra-wealthy.

reply to post by apacheman


You know when the progressives shoved the Income tax through congress they told us all it would ONLY pertain to a few super wealthy and that most Americans would never have to worry about it. I remember that every year about this time when I start working on the taxes. I dont really know what the qualifications are but I sure dont feel super wealthy.
You just cant seem to understand that wealth is not a finite resource. Your entire premise is wrong because the basic principle of your position is wrong. IF wealth were finite and limited then a cap would allow others access to the total. That would not make it RIGHT but it would produce the end result that you seem to envision. The fact that wealth is NOT finite and that this is simply a myth sold by socialist and progressives is the central flaw in your scheme. This has been hawked by progressives for 100+ years. Marx was just as wrong then as he is now. Sure we might find Cubans who are quite happy in Cuba right now. Just as we found Russians who were happy and Germans who were happy with their systems too. Didnt make them anymore right either.

You dont stop people from doing things wrong by setting up evil and tyranny. I point you to the war on some drugs as a prime example of how your government does things for your own good.

Originally posted by apacheman
Lol, I seriously doubt that legislation capping wealth at $1 billion could ever be a slippery slope to reducing the poor even further.

How on earth do you derive that from there?

Lol, because as soon as they hit the $1 billion cap, they will just move the money to where it is not under the $1 billion umbrella.

Thereby, reducing the amount of money moving in the USA, which will definitely impact the middle class and the poor.

If the US did ever legislate that the maximum wealth a person could obtain is $1 billion, I would expect to see a very large growth in the number of wealthy Canadians and Mexicans...

Originally posted by apacheman
reply to post by Missing Blue Sky

 

Yes, because most of it is selfish and self-destructive drivel, an example of the thought process that has brought us to this unsustainable place.

What it doesn't say is I believe that a mature adult should know when to say when, and leave enough so that everyone gets a chance to earn a fair share.

Most adults should know better?

A 2008 government survey reveals that approximately 47 percent of Americans "binge" drink, or drink heavily.

Nearly 1.5 million driving-while-intoxicated (DWI) arrests occur in the United States each year (NHTSA: Traffic Safety Facts, 2006)

Over two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese!

15 million adults (in the US and Canada) are chronic Gamblers.

About one in every seven American families reports that at some point in their lives they experienced debt problems serious enough to have caused them to file for bankruptcy or to use a credit consolidator. More than one out of three say their financial situation was “out of control” at some point in their lives.

It doesn't appear to me that "the rich" are doing anything other than what the rest of the population is doing(over indulging,gambling and being compulsive) they just do it on a bigger scale.

Originally posted by peck420

Originally posted by apacheman
Lol, I seriously doubt that legislation capping wealth at $1 billion could ever be a slippery slope to reducing the poor even further.

How on earth do you derive that from there?

Lol, because as soon as they hit the $1 billion cap, they will just move the money to where it is not under the $1 billion umbrella.

Thereby, reducing the amount of money moving in the USA, which will definitely impact the middle class and the poor.

If the US did ever legislate that the maximum wealth a person could obtain is $1 billion, I would expect to see a very large growth in the number of wealthy Canadians and Mexicans...

They don't even have to move it they just knock a zero off the currency and voila! the cost of a gallon of gas goes from $3 to 30 cents, a new car cost 2k instead of 20k and minimum wage gets reduced from $7 to 70 cents an hour and all billionaires become millionaires overnight.

Since the rich create the money they determine what the money is worth and they could easily deflate the value of the dollar to stay under this proposed wealth cap yet retain all the wealth they currently own.

reply to post by Dragoon01


Please demonstrate how currency is infinite, since you are labeling the finite theory wrong.

Fact of the matter is YOU are wrong.

The only two things that are infinite are the universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the former. by albert einstein.

It is NOT a myth by progressives. It is reality!

Originally posted by peck420

Originally posted by apacheman
Lol, I seriously doubt that legislation capping wealth at $1 billion could ever be a slippery slope to reducing the poor even further.

How on earth do you derive that from there?

Lol, because as soon as they hit the $1 billion cap, they will just move the money to where it is not under the $1 billion umbrella.

Thereby, reducing the amount of money moving in the USA, which will definitely impact the middle class and the poor.

If the US did ever legislate that the maximum wealth a person could obtain is $1 billion, I would expect to see a very large growth in the number of wealthy Canadians and Mexicans...

Yet money has been leaving america for decades due to inhindered globalisation. When tariffs are low or non-existant companies have every incentive to leave and never come back. Who cares about a salary cap when we can't protect the american economy.

ALL HAIL to the american corporations. Obama orders you!

For a discussion of the dangers associated with unbridled wealth in the hands of those who are potentially sociopaths look at this thread:

Should screening for genetic sociopathy be mandatory for politicians and police?

Be forewarned, though that the management here at ATS has chosen to censor a few of my posts because I quoted articles I found on SOTT.net, labeling them LIES due to their sourcing. The material itself wasn't non-factual, it was merely the source they are apparently mad at.

I'm pretty mad that my material was butchered to serve whatever agenda ATS is pursuing against a rival website, especially since it was only one of several sites quoted.

Be that as it may, the discussion is still relevant, even if truncated and incomplete due to heavy-handed censorship.

The fact of the matter is that in the pursuit of ever more wealth, the super-wealthy are actively seeking sociopaths to run financial companies:

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled "The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis", Clive R Boddy identifies these people as psychopaths.

"They are," he says, "simply the 1 per cent of people who have no conscience or empathy." And he argues: "Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations, where they are able to influence the moral climate of the whole organisation and yield considerable power, have largely caused the [banking] crisis'.

And Mr Boddy is not alone. In Jon Ronson's widely acclaimed book The Psychopath Test, Professor Robert Hare told the author: "I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well. Serial killer psychopaths ruin families. Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies."

Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.

He then makes an astonishing confession: "At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles."

Here was one of the biggest investment banks in the world seeking psychopaths as recruits.

www.independent.co.uk... 2.html

If one person shouldn't only be so rich and a person can morally own any amount, then what about a dictatorship? These people are basically saying that one person owning everything is fine: that having a dictator id OK. It is a path that improved dictators.

Originally posted by daskakik

You pretty much described the current system and yes many agree that it could be better.

In an earlier post you mentioned Cuba. They are expanding their private sector and relaxing rules on private employment. Even they realize that a mixed economy works best. I have met cubans that don't bad mouth Cuba. Just like any other group. Some will complain while others will be happy.

The only Cubans that don't complain are those in the high ranks of the communist party, that's it...

The communist system has NEVER been good to Cubans or to ANYONE else on Earth since it was invented.

The only private sector that exists in Cuba are foreigners from Canada, and Europe having some businesses there.

If Cubans want to try to start a business, which they don't own the state does, they have to sell what the communist state says, and for how much they say it must be. Not to mention the taxes you have to pay for it.

Some of my family in Cuba tried to open up a small cafeteria at the back of their house, but they had to pay not only taxes to the government, but also had to pay to the government for having one of my cousins working for them. in short, it didn't last long because they couldn't keep up, and they couldn't find enough food, or coffee to sell.

Not to mention the fact that there are new "progressive taxes and tariffs" which the communist state implemented and which is making things cost twice what they used to cost. Cubans are a lot worse now than ever before.

Originally posted by apacheman

Lol, I seriously doubt that legislation capping wealth at $1 billion could ever be a slippery slope to reducing the poor even further.

How on earth do you derive that from there?
...

I bet some democrats thought the same about the Federal Reserve...

When you are setting regulations like what you want in general you are asking to put your nose in everyone's business because anyone could become a millionaire, or billionaire overnight, so "it has to be stopped"...

That's how it ALWAYS works...

You might want to claim, and you might believe, that it will only affect a few people but it won't.

What you want to install is quite simple a dictatorship in which YOU are the "benevolent dictator".

Don't you think a lot of people who were in your shoes" wanting to better the human condition" didn't become blind by power and in essence became dictators?...

reply to post by ElectricUniverse

So your going to tell me that the Cubans that I met that couldn't wait to get back to Cuba and that were not high ranking were not real? I understand that you are probably surrounded by anti-castro Cubans so that is all you see but there are others.

I don't know when your family tried opening their business but since Fidel admitted that the communist model in Cuba had failed things seem to be changing.

Cuba Encourages Capitalism While Marking the 58th Anniversary of the Start of Communism

Cuba Capitalism? Baby Steps