This has been tried in the Soviet Union. Everybody gets poor except the distributors. However I do see most of that system in place in America today. Now all they have to do is follow this Reich for the final solution.
I’d be interested in seeing some intelligent discussion of what the man actually said.
Look it is intensely obvious that productivity is increasing. Productivity can be defined as the amount of human effort needed to produce goods and services, also known as stuff. As productivity increases, there is more stuff per person. Wealth of the society and of most though not always all individuals goes up.
But continue that curve. By definition, at some point infinite stuff will be produced with zero human input. Or, if that’s taking the curve too far, at some point a great deal of stuff will be produced with very little human input. IOW, there will be little economic demand for whatever input most people are capable of providing.
300 years ago most human input to the economy was via their muscles. Even ships often moved by muscle power. People of low intelligence were just as much in demand for such jobs as the world’s greatest genius. The Industrial Revolution came along and human muscle power became increasingly irrelevant. Productivity and wealth soared, after thousands of years of stagnation.
Today most people work at desks, with their minds. The problem is that those jobs are increasingly being done by computers and robots. This process of course still creates new jobs, but with very few exceptions the new jobs require intelligence quite a ways over on the right side of the Bell Curve. No Lefties Need Apply. This is not an issue of education or training. The taxi-driver laid off because the new taxi is driven by a computer will simply not build a new career writing apps for Android.
The process for a couple hundred years now is that new and better types of jobs are created faster than the old ones are destroyed. Net, net society comes out ahead.
But that’s a historical pattern, not a law of nature.
I’d like to discuss options for handling things if Reich is right, in his prediction if not his prescription.
Is there any way to run a world in which there is very little economic demand for services most people are capable of providing other than redistribution by the government?
Instead of ranting about the iniquities of redistritubion, with which I agree, BTW, what are the alternatives?
First, Get Shorty’s Wealth.
the only man to whom reichhhh measures up is yassar arafat and he is dead
he also misses the point that Kodak cameras were expensive, people used to have to save up for a year to get a cheap one.
Robert Reich.
Yuk !!
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Wealth redistribution: the government decides who the company is going to give money to, ie. to idiots voting for government.
It is straight up fascism
Robert, instead of yammering about wealth redistribution all the time, you’d have much more credibility and appear to be much less of a hypocrite if you’d step up to the plate and lead by example by, say, giving away 90% of your wealth. I’m sure that would still leave you plenty and still better off than people who live below the poverty level. Until you do that, I’m afraid it appears that you are just another “progressive” hypocrite who wants to give away OTHER peoples’ money.
A free market is actually a pretty rare thing - the black market comes closest, but even it is shaped by the efforts of the government to shut it down. It isn't and never has been a choice between free and planned markets, but simply to what degree the market can be controlled for the benefit of those who intend to ride it without participating, before that control kills it.
Certainly some interference is present even in what is otherwise considered a "free" market - the Founders intended to, and did for awhile, run an entire federal government on imposts.
There is an interesting study of the overall issue by Bertrand de Jouvenal entitled The Ethics of Redistribution. Highly recommended.
When Robert and his wife start redistributing *their* money maybe I’ll read what he is writing. Maybe he should sell is expensive seats at symphony.
His seats used to be in front of mine at symphony. It was for seeing the orchestra.
As Robert Reich cheers for socialism, I’ll be cheering for the Second Amendment. FedGov has no legal authority to redistribute wealth, but those who produce wealth have the legal authority to prevent theft - whether retail or wholesale.
Wow. Not surprised, but now they are calling for outright communism.
And then there is the problem of the American underclass. Those people lack the IQ and desire to improve themselves. What to do with their growing numbers is already a huge problem and will be larger in the future.
So I’m going to invest a lot of sweat and money to start a business just for the “privilege” of turning over all of my gains for redistribution.......yeah sign me up. /s
I quick search on the Internet tells me Robert Reich has a net work of $4 million.
Alas Babylon!’s net worth is underwater, at about -$250,000 (mortgage).
Therefore, I am all in favor of redistributing Robert Reich’s wealth to Alas Babylon!
Fork it over, Shorty!
Just thought of an example Reich could have used but didn’t.
50 years ago the world’s largest and most valuable company was GM. I don’t know how many people they employed, directly and indirectly, around the world, but it was doubtless tens if not hundreds of thousands.
Today the world’s most valuable company is Apple. Much more valuable than GM ever was.
Apple employees thousands, rather than tens or hundreds of thousands. Those who work directly for Apple do very well indeed, those who work for their contractors much less so.
The point is simply in the ratio between number of employees and creation of wealth.
The real problem is government regulations that kill entrepreneurialism, hiring and risk taking. You could have the dawn of a million businesses if it weren’t bloody hell to get started.
every govt worker has a good wage, sometimes GREAT wages for simple work, the best of benefits, never can get fired for anything and then can retire and collect nearly their entire salary plus can get dibs on other govt jobs so they can eventually double dip their outrageous pensions....
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Redistribution is what got us into trouble in the first place.
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Ah yes. Redistribute what Reich and his masters tell you...just not theirs.