Income Inequality is Good for the Economy

Twain's and Dudley's "The Gilded Age" should be required reading in every high school in America.

 

Set aside Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, then--you still didn't address my main point: people dislike those that collect (economic) rents. Mr. Conrad also refuses to address that. CEOs, bankers and consultants also all take advantage of various market failures--collective action problems, "too big to fail" financing", principle-agent issues--that allow them to enrich themselves as the expense of all others. Further, although he criticizes lawyers, many of the elites he associates with--consultants and bankers--took the safe path from college or graduate school, too.

 

This is where my boycotts and careful shopping come in. If more people made an effort to not buy goods made in China, stores would start trying to find other suppliers. Sometimes, my beliefs come in conflict and then I have to make a choice. For example, AT&T gives most of its contributions to the Republican Party. But they continue to sign union contracts and keep their union employees. So I stick with them rather than going to another phone company. I think the biggest solution to income inequality is to continue to have strong unions because it's the only way people have decent wages and benefits.

 

I refuse to use anything made on an assembly line. It put skilled craftsmen out of business, and economic progress like that just can't be stood for.

 

Oh, I see. So those generous clothing manufacturers and retailers are just giving us what we want.

They would have continued to employ American workers, but then their products would cost too much (commie unions), and nobody would have bought them. So, instead, they sacrificed and took their plants to countries where they could pay the labor in wood chips, produce the goods cheaper and make more money by selling the products back home.

And, ultimately, it doesn't matter that some Americans lost their jobs. They can just get menial work (while they're waiting to achieve) and still afford the quality merchandise because, after all, it is cheaper.

Everybody wins!

 

"We propose, on the contrary, to extend governmental power in order to secure the liberty of the wage- workers, of the men and women who toil in industry, to save the liberty of the oppressed from the oppressor. Mr. Wilson stands for the liberty of the oppressor to oppress; we stand for the limitation of his liberty thus to oppress those who are weaker than himself."

Theodore Roosevelt, September 1912.

 

The solution is to create better jobs for them. Not to decry improved economic efficiency. Jobs being lost to improved technology and more efficient methods of production is a good thing. A failure to create innovations that replace those jobs is not.

 

No, that is where you are wrong. It scares me to death that America stopped producing things decades ago just to boost the stock price of companies.

When this country collapses, and it will, history has shown that every empire collapses sooner or later, it will be greed that did us in.

 

America produces more than ever.

 

What exactly are we producing?

 

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=American+Industrial+Output

 

Right, but exploiting cheap labor isn't really an innovation; it's just taking advantage of countries that have lesser economies or lower work standards.

Genius.