Posted on 04/29/2013 12:05:43 PM PDT by Olog-hai
At MarketWatch this morning, Paul Farrell's hostility towards Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman and especially free-market capitalism boiled over. Farrell claims that capitalism “is destined to destroy the world, absent a historic paradigm shift.”
The problem he describes really has nothing to do with properly practiced free-market capitalism, but is instead a combination of rampant cronyism and the abandonment of capitalism’s (and society’s) Judeo-Christian moral underpinnings. But that’s a long discussion outside the scope of this post. This post is about the opening claim Farrell makes: “Billionaires control the vast majority of the world’s wealth.” No they don’t. …
If $87.5 trillion is 39.3 percent of global individual wealth, then the grand total must be $223 trillion ($87.5 trillion divided by .393). The identified wealth of Forbes’ 1,326 billionaires of $5.4 trillion is a mere 2.4 percent of that grand total. … Farrell claims that these 1,326 individuals “control the vast majority of the world’s wealth.” If so, it would be a pretty amazing feat to get from 2.4 percent to a reasonable “vast majority” control benchmark of, say, 70 percent. …
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbusters.org ...
Using facts and statistics will only further confuse the low-information-voter (or, rather, the zero-information-voter - since those who support the likes of Obozo, Reid, Pelosi, Schumer, Feinstein, Boxer, et al haven't the first clue on what is really happening to them BECAUSE of these liberal cretins).
Did he actually use the word JOOOOOOS, or was it just implied?
Glenn Beck had Rabbi Lapin on last Friday. The Rabbi gave a lovely disection of collectivism, and then showed unequivically that capitalism is morally superior to it. I’d love to make every young person in this country sit down and watch it. It was excellent!
Of interest to liberal angst about who controls what is the fact that in the US about 5% of the GDP is owned by non-profit foundations who only have to give away a small percent of their assets each year in order to retain their tax-exempt status.
One one to fix this is to boost the required payout to something above what a competent money manager can reliably earn, say 7 1/2%. That would force immortal foundations, like the Ford, Heinz and Soros operations to have mortality.
The truth is more that Trillionaires control the world, the same oligarchs who instituted the Federal Reserve private banking ponzi schemne which has put US trillions of dollars in debt. But of course that story will not be aired by the enemy (the media scum alphabet networks).
Net worth of the world appears to be a very indistinct concept. I’ve been banging around on the web and have seen numbers varying from $40T to $1000T, which is a pretty hefty margin of error!
There is the value of all the assets in the world, which if we’re figuring net worth should be offset by the value of all the debts owed, another number that appears to be pretty indistinct. This is greatly complicated by the fact that most debts constitute somebody else’s asset and therefore wealth.
Finally, there is a great deal of confusion between net worth of a country or the world, and GDP. GDP is the country’s (or world’s) income for a year. Not at all the same thing as its accumulated wealth.
If somebody has a definitive number with a rationally described method of determination, I’d like to see it.
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