May I presume to add what to me is an obvious 6th (and more general) reason? Wealth “disparity” only matters, to the extent those who rely on it as a wedge issue insist it does, in a system where the amount of wealth is fixed. But there is no fixed pie of “the wealth”; and the only way “the 1%” can keep their wealth from working for “the 99%” is either to find a mattress big enough to stuff it all into, or else move it entirely out of the country, in which case it doesn’t count toward this country’s “wealth” to begin with.
The complaint from the left, echoed stupidly by some on the right, that the “rich” need to put their money to work creating jobs, assumes that it is the obligation of money to create jobs. It isn’t. And the reason money moves offshore and isn’t being put to work here is because we have adopted such a dangerous notion, using the government to both institutionalize and to enforce it. That is, through heavy taxation, and obscene compliance regulation, we have taken to punishing wealth rather than creating incentives to put it to work growing our economy, and so growing employment, revenue, and wealth itself.
Hell, I know that, and I was a freakin’ English major. Which makes me wonder what in the hell Paul Krugman’s excuse is.
“Which makes me wonder what in the hell Paul Krugman’s excuse is.”
Oh, nothing to excuse. He simply, deliberately adopts the pose to push ideology he supports. I mean, he got his, right?
Go get them JOOOOOO banksters, and don’t begrudge him his McMansion or fancy car. He is on the side of the good.
Damndest thing, I don’t begrudge him anything he was voluntarily paid – could he sell his tripe for $1,000,000,000 a column – so be it. A pity he cannot extend such to his ideological opponents.
When you accept Paul Krugman is a fucking liar who is saying one thing and actively promoting another agenda, it all makes sense.
OT, and I don’t care:
Anderson Cooper?
ANDERSON COOPER??!
What, was Special Ed too busy or something? When are the Repubs gonna learn?
Some people — people like Krugman even — seem to think that the term macroeconomics refers to an intelligible scientific field of knowledge, likenable to the physical sciences, within which they can imagine distributions of wealth, which distributions in turn they deign to characterize as just and unjust. Others, just as knowledgeable, look at the field and admit there is simply no way to make macroeconomics intelligible as such, nevermind reaching an agreeable definition to embrace what is just and what is not just in a universal and therefore scientific sense. These latter term the ideas of the former a Pretense of Knowledge, or scientism.
What do you call a battery that has the same amount of charge on both poles? Dead.
A wealthy man’s riches have no use if there’s nobody willing to take his money. If everyone had the same amount, why would you work? Why would you produce? We can have no economy without disparities in wealth, so instead of sneering at it, they should start embracing it.
But that requires the most basic understanding of economics that is probably not taught in Political Gender Studies.
anderson will be fabulous i’m sure
We all know the “Zero Sum Game” is a laughable fallacy, but don’t tell that to the Left or the MBM (but I repeat myself) or you’ll be accused of “racism”…
[W]hat in the hell [is] Paul Krugman’s excuse[?]
Preening moral vanity and an inflated sense of his own worth?
I think it’s something even more insidious: Krugman advocates governmental micromanagement of the economy. Once the government gets fully into that game, they’re going to need an expert to take the controls. And who better than a Nobel prize winner who
pulledshilled for them from the get-go?I notice the (5) commenters at Jeff’s link are all “Liar, liar, pants on fire!”.
As long as anyone has more than someone else, there will always be fuckwits who claim the system has failed and must be torn down, or regulated to the point it grinds to a halt.
cnn unfair and unbalanced
Link
#9 – Good point, Slart – I suppose Kruggie would sigh, and then selflessly take on the burden of running other peoples’ lives… as he sees fit.
All of this government intrusion into the jobs industry just begs the creation of monsters like this one:
There’s more deliciousness in the article. From the news stories and my wife’s personal experience of head of HR and finance for a medium-sized contruction firm, they don’t actually find anyone any jobs. They didn’t do any filtering; they basically just funneled any and all applicants to prospective employers without regard to qualification, criminal conviction, etc. They did less than the unemployment agency. And for this, they paid the CEO $180k per year, and several of the executives over $100k.
The genius campaign that it took for the papers to get interested in WFCF was Sullivan’s ordering of Superman capes for the unemployed. Help FIGHT unemployment!
Speaking of service to the people, look who’s working at a personal injury law firm.
I busted out laughing when I saw him doing a commercial.
[…] “5 reasons why income inequality is a myth — and Occupy Wall Street is wrong”Jeff G.Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:07:54 GMT LD_AddCustomAttr("AdOpt", "1"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Origin", "other"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_bg", "ffffff"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_text", "333333"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_link", "0066cc"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_border", "5581C0"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_url", "114477"); LD_AddCustomAttr("LangId", "1"); LD_AddSlot("LD_ROS_300-WEB"); LD_GetBids(); Like this:LikeBe the first to like this post. […]
you know who drives a really nice car?
wall street romney
Krugs hasn’t watched very many Evil Overlord movies, has he?
There is an ongoing argument with Krugman at Cafe Hayek on these and similar questions: Truth-seeking and ideology, with a new installment too, Making the World a Better Place
Civilizations die when the emphasis shifts from creating wealth to redistributing it. We stop baking pies as part of the fairness strategy of making sure no one has any more than anyone else.
What they really seem not to understand is the way wealth will be redistributed after they’ve managed to pull down the pillars of the Republic. Here’s a hint: it’ll have a lot more to do with your target shooting score than your LSAT.
it’ll have a lot more to do with your target shooting score than your LSAT
And yet these are the very people who trust credentials more than their own lying eyes. And who fail to understand that it’s the smart people who built the ovens and the camps and the gulags, not the morons.
Federalist 63:
Time to go back to what Evan Sayet said back in the day, that because in the Leftist’s mind, success cannot possibly be linked to behavior (THAT WOULD BE JUDGMENTAL!), if someone gets more than another, it must be the result of perfidy or theft.
The old Soviet Union had jobs for everyone, but hardly anyone did any work. We’re creeping (well, these days, galloping) closer to that status ourselves.
“Which makes me wonder what in the hell Paul Krugman’s excuse is.”
I would suspect that alcohol is involved. With his excuse.
I’ve successfully explained this to people before by using the percentage of the wealthiest American’s wealth to the overall GDP. That number keeps going down.
No one on this list gets anywhere near Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, or Ford. Rockefeller was worth about 1.5% of the entire GDP in his day. To do that today you’d need to be worth $225B. Or, about the current top seven combined.
The overall pie is seriously kicking the ass of the fabulously wealthy.
They should consider organizing a protest.
Transformation.
#26.
That’s a variation on the thing that drives the left to raise taxes is not to increase government revenue, which it usually doesn’t, but to increase the percentage of the economy that government has control over. They will take a smaller pie as long as they get a bigger slice. Progressives, the New Age Robber Barons.
Interesting way to look at it, Geoff. Never thought of your inverse observation when making that point before.
(Yeah, that means I’m stealing it.)
Another, possibly unoriginal, thought.
Since the least income, no matter what unit of measure is used, is zero. There will always be some subset whose average income is equal to one in those units. The upper bound on income is unlimited and goes higher as the economy gets larger.
Income inequality is always expressed as a ratio between the lowest group and the highest. Therefore income inequality always can be expressed as growing wider as an economy gets larger.
What is not expressed is that the set whose income can be averaged as equal to one, in any given unit, becomes smaller and smaller as the economy becomes larger.
I can’t get enough of this momentary lapse of narrative:
“The black community is experiencing a great recession. That’s what we’re experiencing,” Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) told MSNBC. “And all of the growth in the past 30 years, we see it slipping away. From home ownership, the middle class; it’s slipping away from our hands.”
Why is it that we only lay claim to financial wealth?
Some people, in the course of living their lives, focus on personal achievements that, by their nature, generate tangible income – independent business operators, corporate cogs, professionals, performers, etc.
Others exercise the liberty afforded by a free society and direct their energies elsewhere – surfing big waves, skiing the Himalayas, contemplating eternity in a monastery, becoming an expert game tracker. Most do so in quiet, if penurious, anonymity, accumulating little in the way of money, but instead a vast wealth of personal experience, growth, and self satisfaction.
It is only if and when such people choose to capitalize their experiences and expertise do they also begin to see financial rewards, and only then do we start to tax them.
Why wait? If the OWS crowd is really about social and economic justice then certainly those people must be forced to cede something back to society? Perhaps they should be compelled to give back some of their time, effort, knowledge, and experiences to the rest of us who are not so well endowed in their chosen avocations.
Why shouldn’t a middle class shlub like me have an opportunity to learn heli-skiing gratis from some alpine god? Why can’t I enlist the agency of some vast ‘non-profit’ to lobby for my pet peeve, if only for a little while? Why do they get to walk away from the burdens of supporting society? Why do the ‘artistic’ and never do well types of the world get to be the only true free riders?
Obviously, the answer is that they are not remotely interested in justice of any sort; they are nakedly interested in dictating the terms of the economic system to suit their own desires.
In Soviet Russia, taxes pay you!