Capitalism Doesn’t Work, Mr. Gates?

Quote from Humpy:


You get a big birthday cake.
Do you just give the 2 or 3 of the fattest kids 90% of the cake and a few crumbs to the rest ? No of course you don't you give each child a slice. Well the economy is no different.
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"Well the economy is no different."


The economy is a piece of cake that has to be shared? So far, no entitlement based economy has worked.

What if someone wants or needs a larger piece of cake. What do you do when there is no more cake to share. It will run out, or there just won't be enough to sustain everyone, but everyone gets an equal share of nothing.

What has proven to work better, is an economy that allows an individual that wants a bigger piece of cake to work harder for it or take more risk.

Then the whiners see that someone has a bigger piece, and think that they are entitled to an equal amount, but cannot see all the effort put into it.
 
Quote from Humpy:

Just to get it all in a perspective that everyone can understand and learn from.
Your child has his tenth birthday. Being a doting Dad you decide to have his 20 friends around for a party. You get a big birthday cake.
Do you just give the 2 or 3 of the fattest kids 90% of the cake and a few crumbs to the rest ? No of course you don't you give each child a slice. Well the economy is no different. Share the benefits around. Don't be like 101+ dictators who grabbed too big a share for themselves and ended up with nothing.
Did the Visi-goths march and fight 2,000 miles to Rome for their amusement. No.
The Romans were quite happy to give them every ounce of precious metal, jewels and anything else of value just to save their city and themselves from destruction.

The moral of the true story being - share it around fairly before it is taken by force !
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The difference in the economy is that you don't get free cakes - someone has to spend time, effort, and money making them for you. They aren't going to do that for free and give it away - otherwise communism would have worked just fine. In the real world, if you give away cakes, then they run out and then no one gets any (hence huge queues for basic staples under communist countries - try getting butter or a car in Cuba vs USA, Europe or Japan).

Western economies, last time I checked, did in fact redistribute wealth quite significantly. Most taxes are paid by the top 5% of earners. The bottom half pay almost nothing in net tax, compared to the benefits they receive from the state. The west has a welfare state, so people can be supported in times of distress when they are in genuine need.

Try finding a functioning welfare state in 3rd world socialist command economies. If you get sick there, and you are poor, then you die or end up f*cked for life. Diarrhoea is one of the biggest killers in the world due to lack of basic healthcare in poor countries. If they followed capitalism, they would get comparatively rich within 2-3 decades like the Eastern Europeans, Singapore, Botswana etc. Then they could afford to look after the deserving poor, rather than leaving them to rot or beg in the streets just to survive.

Capitalist countries are far better for dirt poor people than socialist countries. That's why people want to migrate from the 3rd world to the first, not the other way round.
 
Quote from Humpy:

Just to get it all in a perspective that everyone can understand and learn from.
Your child has his tenth birthday. Being a doting Dad you decide to have his 20 friends around for a party. You get a big birthday cake.
Do you just give the 2 or 3 of the fattest kids 90% of the cake and a few crumbs to the rest ? No of course you don't you give each child a slice. Well the economy is no different. Share the benefits around. Don't be like 101+ dictators who grabbed too big a share for themselves and ended up with nothing.
Did the Visi-goths march and fight 2,000 miles to Rome for their amusement. No.
The Romans were quite happy to give them every ounce of precious metal, jewels and anything else of value just to save their city and themselves from destruction.

The moral of the true story being - share it around fairly before it is taken by force !
More...
What if the fat kids do all the work?
 
Gates is a hypocrite. He deplored less people being interested in computer science while he was doing everything possible to important cheap asian engineers.
He's in the charity business now.
 
Quote from loik:

What if the fat kids do all the work?
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The fat kids should be doing all the work. They come from families that have a bit more to eat because the parents work harder to obtain more treats. Working harder and having more is not fair to the lazy, skinny kids with the lazy parents.

When the fat kids arrive at the Marxist birthday party, they must be punished because they have more at home. They must be made to work harder to even get any cake, and brought down to the level of the lazy, scrawny kids, with an equal sized piece of cake.

Shortly with enough Marxist parties like that, everyone will be equally scrawny, hungry and lazy, but they will receive equal portions even if there is nothing.

Eventually the formerly fat kids and parents will turn scrawny and will get tired of doing all the work for an equal amount of cake. They will have lost the incentive to produce more for the lazy, poor kids and parents. What will the poor, lazy kids do when there are no more rich kids to steal from?
 
Quote from FightTheFuture:

The fat kids should be doing all the work. They come from families that have a bit more to eat because the parents work harder to obtain more treats. Working harder and having more is not fair to the lazy, skinny kids with the lazy parents.

When the fat kids arrive at the Marxist birthday party, they must be punished because they have more at home. They must be made to work harder to even get any cake, and brought down to the level of the lazy, scrawny kids, with an equal sized piece of cake.

Shortly with enough Marxist parties like that, everyone will be equally scrawny, hungry and lazy, but they will receive equal portions even if there is nothing.

Eventually the formerly fat kids and parents will turn scrawny and will get tired of doing all the work for an equal amount of cake. They will have lost the incentive to produce more for the lazy, poor kids and parents. What will the poor, lazy kids do when there are no more rich kids to steal from?
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I'm confused.... would your metaphor characterize Paris Hilton as a "fat kid"?

By the way, the super rich (and I agree that is a loaded term - is it someone worth 100 million, a billion...?) should pay a higher amount in taxation.

Defense and Infrastructure/Transportation spending is one of the largest expenditures our government makes.

An aircraft carrier 3,000 miles away from the US protects more of the wealthy elite's incomes and wealth than the average joes'. (Funny how the aircraft carrier is disproportianately staffed by avergae joes and not elites.)

A highway from Florida to Maine makes Bill Gates more money than it does for someone that lives in Kansas.

The government spends billions protecting oil in the Middle East - the CEO of Exxon Mobil makes 100s of millions, the avergare Joe saves 300 bucks a month on gas.

See where I'm going with this?

As for social programs - wages are my predominant form of income - a hedgefund manager paying capital gains doesn't pay what i do into Social Security.

Yet when the government needs $$ - it borrows from the Social Security fund that average joes contribute to.

My point is that people are oversimplifying Capitalism.

And don't forget the Inflation Tax - factor that into a salary of up to 250K and it is a HUGE chunk - and I'm not talking about the government reported #s on inflation - the ones that omit the cost of buying, not renting a home, food, and fuel.

The infliation tax occurs when the federal reserve has to bail out, oh, lets see here - LTCM, Current Banking crisis, RTC of the 80s, soon to be CDS crisis, etc....

Spare me your sanctimonious crap about the wealthy being bled dry.

When counting payroll taxes, inflation, global wage arbitrage (a government assisted policy) etc... The averge Joe is left with JACK SQUAT.

In the past 7 years, the US government has added 3.5 Trillion to the national debt - the average Joe has lost his 401K savings during the 2001 Market Crash caused by lying conflicted bank analysts and is now losing his homes value.

All the while, the top 1% of America - the people you cry for, have had stupendous wealth gains.

Is it because they are that smart? Or is it because they now own the referee?

So much for our "Capitalist System" It was bought and sold long ago.
 
Quote from Misthos:

Yet when the government needs $$ - it borrows from the Social Security fund that average joes contribute to.



The infliation tax occurs when the federal reserve has to bail out, oh, lets see here - LTCM, Current Banking crisis, RTC of the 80s, soon to be CDS crisis, etc....


When counting payroll taxes, inflation, global wage arbitrage (a government assisted policy) etc...


So much for our "Capitalist System" It was bought and sold long ago.
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That's socialism for you. Why people want more of it.....
 
Ya know whose got all our money? ...its Oprah. Anyone notice how she puts herself on the cover of every issue of her magazine? She must have all the money. I think eventually we won't have to ask China to underwrite our debt, we can ask Oprah for it. I don't think she'll like the defense budget part though but its obvious she likes cake. No need to worry about money though, Israels gonna get us all killed.
 
It seems the USA has an in-built death wish. They lost the Vietnam war to a people barely out of the stone age. If North Vietnam had had a navy they could have surrendered on Capitol Hill. But they had no navy to carry the fight to the Americas only a few fishing boats.
Oh well we will try and destroy ourselves later. Up comes Iraq - the perfect opportunity. Bush junior is just the loony to do it. Well at an estimated cost of $3 trillion he has just about bankrupted the US. His estimate initially of the Iraq adventure was 40-60 billion dollars of your hard earned money. Positive results nil. But getting closer to self destruction.
My bet is the next disaster will be in Africa. George W is already poking his nose in. Obama is just the guy to get involved. Not one half decent government in the whole of Africa. The leaders of other African nations stood to applaud that dreadful man Mugabe. The trade is 2 ways. A bit of their useless governments for a dose of USA do-gooding.
Oh dear oh dear
 
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