Posted on 04/22/2003 9:23:52 PM PDT by Kwilliams
Here's part of a letter from a reader: "A hard-working, conscientious person can earn $10,000 a year in a fast-food restaurant. At the same time, movie stars and athletes, who make very little contribution to society, can earn in excess of $10,000,000 a year. A baseball player earns more with every swing of the bat than many people do in a year."
The reader's inference is that there's something unfair about income differences of such magnitude. It also reflects ignorance about the sources of income in a free society; that's music to the ears of political demagogues with an insatiable taste for command and control.
I think some of the ignorance and much of the demagoguery stems from the usage of the phrase "income distribution." It might make some people think income is distributed; in other words, there's a dealer of dollars. The reason that some people have few dollars while others have millions upon millions is that the dollar dealer is unjust.
An alternative vision might be that there's a pile of money intended for all of us. The reason why some are rich and some are poor is that the greedy rich got to the pile first and took their unfair share. Clearly, in either case, justice would require a re-dealing, or redistribution, of the dollars, where the government takes ill-gotten gains of the few and returns them to their rightful owners.
Most people, except a few congressmen, would view those explanations of the sources of income as nonsense. In a free society, for the most part, income is earned. It's earned by serving and pleasing one's fellow man.
Why is it that Michael Jordan earns $33 million a year and I don't even earn one-half of one percent of that? I can play basketball, but my problem is with my fellow man, who'd plunk down $200 to see Jordan play and wouldn't pay a dollar to see me play. I'm also willing to sell my name as endorsements for sneakers and sport clothing, but no one has approached me.
The bottom line explanation of Michael Jordan's income relative to mine lies in his capacity to please his fellow man. The person who takes exception to Jordan's salary or sees him, as my letter-writer does, as making "little contribution to society" is really disagreeing with decisions made by millions upon millions of independent decision-makers who decided to fork over their money to see Jordan play. The suggestion that Congress ought to take part of Jordan's earnings and give it to someone else is the same as arrogantly saying, "I know better who ought to receive those dollars."
Another part of the explanation for Jordan's high salary is simply a matter of supply and demand. If there were tens and tens of millions of people with Jordan's talents, you can rest assured he wouldn't be earning $33 million a year. And similarly you can bet that if people really valued hamburgers and there were only a few people with those skills, they'd be earning much more than they currently earn.
We might think of dollars as being "certificates of performance." The better I serve my fellow man, and the higher the value he places on that service, the more certificates of performance he gives me. The more certificates I earn, the greater my claim on the goods my fellow man produces. That's the morality of the market. In order for one to have a claim on what his fellow man produces, he must first serve him. Contrast that moral standard to Congress' standing offer, "Vote for me and I'll take what your fellow man produces and give it to you."
©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Walter, God bless you; I'll gladly pay $10 for a best of 3 one-on-one with you! Now, I am a little younger, not 60 yet; and I did quit the smokes years ago.
I think maybe we could get folks to buy tix to watch us geezers sweat and pant if we can I.D. a good cause to support. Open to suggestions!
Please let me know what you think of the book. I've been looking for a "simple" economics manual so I can duke it out with some "liberal arts-obsessed libber-friends" of mine in a language they understand. They've been feeding at the "steal from the rich" and give to the poor trough for decades and we never talk the same language.
Sorry to those librarians who feel they're highly educated but underpaid. THat's how the working world functions.
I don't know the exact answer myself, but I don't think this is a minor concern at all. Let me use another sports example to show.
Dave Winfield was baseball's first "Million Dollar Man" in (about) 1980. It's now 2003, and the top salary is, what, $35M/year? I think that's about with ARod makes, yes? Now, I haven't done the extremely rigorous analysis necessary to analyze what an equivalent 23-year translation would be, but just based on my scanning of possible factors (inflation, crowd sizes, advertising deals, media deals, etc), these current numbers aren't even close. Unless someone can present me with a good mathematical analysis to the contrary, current salaries are way beyond what we should expect to see if unrestrained market forces were the only determinant.
The problem here is that when this happens, people point at the free market as being the problem. We know that it isn't, and that it's the lack of one that is. But because these government-enforced unfairnesses continue (again, we're talking subsidies and other things created by the state, not any wealth-sharing BS), the philosophical foundation of the free market becomes undermined, and the problem deepens.
What I'd really like to see of conservatives is to see more time and energy spent on fighting against these state privileges. If we spent as much good time and energy on that as we (rightly) do fighting the left, I think we'd be in a much better position than we are now, and wouldn't have to worry about callers like the ones Walter mentions who, although their solution is wrong, and their biases off the mark, do still have a point.
And if you haven't already read it, I highly recommend "BIAS", by Bernie Goldberg. Its an easy read, dead on, and funny as a bonus. I thought it a bit expensive ($25 in paperback) so I got it from the library. Bernie sticks it to Dan Rather bigtime, and gets the rest of the liberal press pretty good. He makes a pretty good case that Television media news takes its lead from the NY Times.
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.