Posted on 09/19/2015 5:27:32 AM PDT by Kaslin
Bernie Sanders is angry. Who is he angry at? Rich people. Why rich people? That’s not clear.
At Liberty University, Sanders complained about a small number of people who have “huge yachts, and jet planes and tens of billions” while others “are struggling to feed their families.” In Madison Wisconsin, Sanders called for a “political revolution against greed.”
So what’s the connection between people who have “tens of billions” and people who are “struggling to feed their families”? For the most part it’s a positive one. In a capitalist system, people get rich by meeting other people’s needs. Because some people are rich, other people find it easier to feed their families.
Take the world’s richest man, Bill Gates. When I was a student at Columbia in the 1970s, I remember a friend showing me a fantastic hand held device. It could add, subtract, divide and multiply. And it only cost $400. Today, I can sit in bed with my lap top, which in 1970 dollars cost less than $400. I can buy and sell goods on eBay, conduct personal banking, purchase airline tickets, book hotel rooms and even work the New York Times crossword puzzle – in large part because of Bill Gates.
Take the world’s richest woman, JK Rowling. When she wrote the last Harry Potter book or helped on the last Harry Potter movie was she making anyone worse off? Was she taking food out of the mouths of babes? Or was she bringing entertainment and pleasure to millions of people?
Is Bill Gates greedy? There’s no evidence of that. He is giving all his money away in ways that are curing diseases that kill children all over the world. More generally, I have never met a truly creative person who was motivated by greed. But even if greed were the motivation, we need more of it – as long as it’s meeting our needs.
So what’s Sander’s complaint? Here are his own words:
"99 percent of all new income today (is) going to the top 1 percent.”
"Today the Walton family of Walmart own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of America."
When Sam Walton was alive, he was one of the world’s richest men. Yet he wore blue jeans and drove a pickup truck. No one in Bentonville, Arkansas even knew he was rich until they read about it in Forbes. Is Walmart making it harder or easier for people to feed their families? You be the judge.
Behind the rhetoric on the left, there is one persistent theme, always implicit, never explicit. Leftist rhetoric is designed to encourage people to believe that the reason they are poor are because other people are rich. And this kind of rhetoric is not confined to politicians who know nothing of basic economics. Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs and other well-known economists are just as guilty. They invariably imply that “all property is theft,” a staple of barn yard Marxism. Yet, on rigorous examination, this idea is silly. Most of the people on the Forbes 400 list are self-made or next generation of self-made billionaires.
Writing in the Dallas Morning News, Cullen Godfrey asks: why do we demonize billionaires?
They didn’t steal our money. They earned our money by providing us with the things that we want and that make our lives better. The Forbes 400 list includes names such as Oprah Winfrey, filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Phil Knight (Nike), Elon Musk (Tesla), Charles Schwab, Ralph Lauren and Michael Ilitch (Domino’s Pizza). Of course, there are those with inherited wealth, but the vast majority on the list are first-generation, self-made billionaires, and those with inherited wealth have, as a rule, been excellent stewards of their good fortune.
Like Jeremy Corbyn, the new Labour Party leader in Britain, Bernie Sanders is appealing to our worst instincts. His is not the message of compassion and love. His is the message of resentment, jealousy and hate.
What would he do? Tax capital. He hasn’t given us a figure, but if he goes along with the 90 percent income tax rate favored by Paul Krugman or the 80 percent rate proposed by Thomas Piketty, Bill Gates may never have been able to start Microsoft. Sam Walton may never have given us Sam’s Club.
As I wrote at Forbes earlier this week, the left is intellectually bankrupt. While appealing to our basest emotions, they have no real solutions to any real problems. In fact, their “solutions” would almost certainly make the poor more poor.
There is, however, a proposal from the right of the political spectrum: tax consumption rather than saving, investment and capital accumulation. As I wrote previously:
[W]hen Warren Buffett is consuming, he’s benefiting himself. When he’s saving and investing, he’s benefiting you and me. Every time Buffett forgoes personal consumption (a pricey dinner, a larger house, a huge yacht) and puts his money in the capital market instead, he’s doing an enormous favor for everyone else. A larger capital stock means higher productivity and that means everyone can have more income for the same amount of work. So it’s in our self-interest to have very low taxes on Buffett’s capital. In fact, capital taxes should be zero. That means no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends and profits — so long as the income is recycled back into the capital market. We should instead tax Buffett’s consumption. Tax him on what he takes out of the system, not what he puts into it. Tax him when he is benefiting himself, not when he is benefiting you and me.
“The BODs should prevent this, but they are all on the gravy train of big $ for little work and they all belong to the same elite club that covers for each other.”
Yea, that’s pretty much what I was getting at.
Yes, but regarding item 2, where in the US Constitution is the Federal Government authorized to set pay caps on corporate officials?
The New Left: Envy, Resentment and Hate”?? New??
Liberals are the most hate-filled, mean-spirited, envious, resentful, close-minded, violent, murdering, censoring, book-burning, ignorant, uneducated, unskilled, childish, prejudiced, racist, women-hating, man-hating, perverted, thieving, American-hating, Christian-hating, muslim-loving, communist, vulgar, dirty, smelly, regressive, restrictive, prohibitive, bed-wetting, and scared little idiots God has ever created.
What business is it of mine or anyone else's what the CEO of a corporation earns? The reason they get those high salaries is because they are hired to make the company profitable. If they don't deliver, the company ditches them and gets someone else. And the company has to offer a high enough salary to attract the best talent they can find.
It's not a matter of knowing the technical aspects of running a company. It's a matter of having the particular skill set that enables a person to look at the whole picture and put together a winning course of action. Not many people have that skill; hence, the high salaries.
It's a lot like sports. Sure, you can go to any high school or college and find good football players. They would probably be thrilled at being offered a $500,000 per year contract--a fraction of the price of a good major league player. But are they the best of the best? Probably not. So the major league football teams pay extraordinary salaries to attract the best of the best--because merely being skilled isn't enough.
Top salaries run high in business and sports for the same reasons.
How about paying the CEO a percentage of profits or gross income? Maybe something like $300K Plus 1/10 of 1% of the profits.
If a company does well then he/she/they make 20 million. If it does poorly they get less. It is not the amount they make that bothers me if they run the company well it is the so called golden parachutes
Nothing newe here this has been the driving force behind democrat voters for as long as I can remember.
I don’t know if that’s the case at all. I would be inclined to let the owners of the company decide how much to pay their employees.
That’s basically how stock options work, and many CEOs are paid this way.
Bernie, you said: “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.”
So let me get this straight, Bernie . . . you're going to set up an agency or a czar to determine how many kinds of deodorant, and how much of it, can be permitted by law?
Will you do the same with toilet paper? I mean look how many brands of toilet paper there are. Shall we just set up a monopoly of one company, or better yet, a government monopoly, to produce exactly the right amount of toilet paper, or otherwise limit the amount of toilet paper that gets produced?
Are you going to hire Michael Gruber to be the guy who figures out the correct amount of toilet paper that people should be allowed to use? He's smart. He teaches at MIT. So why shouldn't we put him in charge of figuring out exactly how much of everything should or shouldn't be produced for the American people?
Have you been to socialist Venezuela lately, Bernie? They seem to have solved the problem of too many toilet paper brands. Because right now there is no toilet paper to be had at all in socialist Venezuela."
So tell me Bernie, what exactly will you do to feed starving children by reducing the amount of toilet paper we have in this country? And by the way, when you close all the toilet paper companies, how will the people who used to work at them feed their own starving children?
Bernie? . . . .
That reminds of two of my friends. We all worked for the same company, but they worked in the factory while a pushed paper in an office. They made a quite a bit more money than me...because their jobs were more important/skilled than what I did. But they complained constantly about rich people. You see rich people stole all their money and never paid taxes.
Think that's sounds crazy? That's what my friends and a lot of other people I knew thought. Somebody had a dollar more than they did....AND THAT WASN'T FAIR!!!!!
Those have been the Dems rallying points for many, many decades.
I have a stepdaughter who's a lawyer and doing very well. She loves Sanders. Why? He wants to make things "fair."
Since my stepdaughter can be a little vindictive and keep her children (my grandkids) away from people who offend her, I have to watch my mouth.
But I sincerely want to tell her she's crazy for supporting someone who would literally take the food out of her and family's mouths.
What business is it of government to tell private businesses what they pay their employees? Cite me the clause in the constitution that allows the gov. to do that.
Did he actually say that?
So a rabid socialists was invited to Liberty University a very conservative Christian college. Sanders is antithetical to everything they believe. But did they protest, did they cat call him? did they run on stage and take his microphone away? Did they have signs and people shouting him down? did they throw a pie in his face? did they boycott his speech? Why are all the answers to my questions no?
The Christians and most Republicans love truth, we are not afraid to hear other points of view, we hear them everyday on every tv channel and newspaper, why are the Democrats so afraid of an opposing view? Are they not secure in their ideology?
another excellent point!
When I’m a shareholder in a company, nothing makes me more angry than seeing the CEO and his cronies jacking up their salaries while the share price plummets (and no dividends). When questioned there is always some crap answer, like “well, we’ve got to pay well to retain the best people to turn this around” but the turnaround never happens. The BOD and executive officers continue to use the company as if it were their personal ATM and the shareholders are screwed. (Kinda reminds me of Congress, the President, and the Cabinet, yes?)
re previous post:
That is probably why people like Sanders are so angry about it. Less gravy for them to steal!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.