The sound of silence
- Thread starter nitro
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Won't be any different here when we are forced to face reality... and that being "we can't afford our social programs and the size of our government"... in a few years, we'll be the same as Greece today.
One of the biggest complaints against the Obama administration (not my criticism mind you) is that he is a pegged a distributist:
People intuitively understand the cumulative nature of wealth. It says that basically the rich get richer. But the way they get richer is what is terrifying, it is multiplicative in effect, not additive (which is what power laws mean but the masses don't understand this.)
Like a cancer, eventually most of the wealth of the world will be in the hands of a very very few consuming all resources with ever expanding nodes of influence (e.g., look at GS basically taking over of critical US government roles and infiltrating media that forms public opinion). An extremely dangerous situation, intuitively the world is finally coming to terms that unless they take matters into their own hands, it will eventually be too late and the reactions will be nuclear weapons, not riots in the streets.
People intuitively understand the cumulative nature of wealth. It says that basically the rich get richer. But the way they get richer is what is terrifying, it is multiplicative in effect, not additive (which is what power laws mean but the masses don't understand this.)
Like a cancer, eventually most of the wealth of the world will be in the hands of a very very few consuming all resources with ever expanding nodes of influence (e.g., look at GS basically taking over of critical US government roles and infiltrating media that forms public opinion). An extremely dangerous situation, intuitively the world is finally coming to terms that unless they take matters into their own hands, it will eventually be too late and the reactions will be nuclear weapons, not riots in the streets.
Not just "pegged", he openly admits it. Campaigned upon it.
Interesting, but this is possibile, IMHO, only when richness is unrelated to creation of wealth.
If you divide the economic system in two part, creation and distribution of wealth, you may come to different conclusion.
You create more wealth when you find a new way to produce the same good with less resources, or produce a new, improved product/service. The difference between real value before and after your innovation is the value of creation (i.e. if you find a way to produce a car which run 1000 miles per liter with all other attributes costant, you just made the average owner richier of as many $$ he can save any year. If you sell your car at a premium price capable to drain 50% of that total save, you become extremely rich, but you just distributed 50% of wealth creation to others. New wealth created is less than you take away from the system, so your richness is well gained. On the contrary, if your premium price take away 101% or more of gain, you are making others less rich than before. Two levels to be seen here, level of wealth creation and wealth distribution.).
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IMHO, if you start to think at creation and distribution, you may find who is "stealing" from others -using power, violence, force, whatever- and who is simply gaining what he worth.
Just a win-win situation (a piece of new cake ("creation cake") distributed to all, even if unequally) or a win-lose situation (when someone have to lose a piece of his piece of cake to give it to someone else).
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Your inference is true only when you assume a costant sum of wealth, IMHO. But there are a not so little parts of economy that are not. Of course, speaking of trading, it is often a zero-sum game and you're right, but there are externalities, too (think of a clever company that use their share gain to finance new projects, for example).
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What do you think?
great post