Money Is Power and Billionaires Can Subvert Democracy

* GOLD-PLATED TOILETS

Jesus Christ, I think my autocorrect just invented a new niche sex fetish.

Yeah, yeah, yeah; and you’re not going to change that reality.
The only thing you can change are your personal life’s decisions.
First and foremost; get rid of your debt, asap, at all costs!
Debt is slavery; oh you think slavery was banned?
Never; it was just rejigged; slavery is alive and well in the U.S.A..
Forget about the billionaire class; irrelevant to your life.
If you can’t save money every month? Radically change your lifestyle; just do it!
It’s your choice, really, it is; I know most won’t do it (change)…
Pity really; freedom is just a choice/s away…

highrpm
November 28,
Focused on the wrong target; a distraction away from the real problem; personal choices…

>>The Internet exists because of the public sector. For decades, the American government bought >>the vast majority of all computers, if they had not, you would not have cheap modern >>electronics. Anyone who says otherwise is either a liar or doesn’t know the actual history.

I have read bits and pieces of this story over the past two decades, but I would like to read a book on this precise topic. Does anyone know of a good history of government support of the electronics industry, the computer industry, and the interconnection of computers and networks in what became the Internet?

I would like to push back a bit on your example. The intent of common core is to give students several different ways to think about numbers, effectively helping them to eventually “intuit” the answers of complex calculations and increase their ease with numerology. Although confusing and infuriating to those that never went through the program (parents), it definitely works and is so much better than what we did before. Something like this was long overdue in modern schooling; we were operating off 19th-century ideals. Yes, it might have been pushed by the Gates Foundation, but the quick adoption isn’t necessarily due to money. If all 50 states were still using gas lights in public buildings and a corporation pushed moving to electric, it wasn’t so quickly adopted due to their ‘outsized’ influence but the fact that the change was so overdue that any change could have catalyzed the change.

I do agree that corporations have WAY too much influence in the US govt and that “money talks and BS walks”. It’s just your example is not a great one IMHO. Look at fracking or FDA approvals of drugs instead, it’s not hard to locate massive purchase of govt decisions in the USA. Common core is the best (and most maligned) thing we’ve done for education in decades, it doesn’t need any more grief.

“What Republicans want is for that pressure to force democrats to take the blame for savage cuts to the welfare state. Tax cuts set up this very scenario.”

Of course, the Democrats – being entirely useless – would never, ever dream of raising taxes on the rich. (See Obama’s 2010 capitulation on W’s tax cuts that would have expired had he done nothing.)

@ Bill H

Emma is more about unbridled passion than careful calibration.

Charming, ain’t it?

“rich fucks” says it all for some people. (sigh)

Gates’ “desire to do good” is aimed at “doing what Gates thinks is good.” As the post points out, that usually has a hefty component of self-interest. On education — yes, we want science and math workers, well trained at government expense. We’ll put in the money determining how to do it, but somebody else pays for doing it. We say what we want. You pay for it. With common core, there may be significant overlap (I’ve heard pretty strong arguments both ways, as with most reform programs that depend heavily on what’s the alternative, how is it implemented, what result do you want, and so on.)

We (Gates thinking about himself and the society he believes in) also believe despite all evidence to the contrary that external incentives improve performance. We just haven’t figured out what the right incentives are. But I made my fortune because of a meritocracy that rewarded my efforts, so obviously the right way to run everything is to set it up as a meritocracy. Institute merit pay in the education system. When we do find the right incentives, we won’t get all the corruption in test scores and student expulsions and so on, so meanwhile let’s make teaching jobs accountable where “accountable” means “just as shitty as clerking in a big box store”, because accountability that we impose makes a good society.

great comment, nihil obstet; exactly right. (i’d also been taken aback by ian’s “Sometimes, as with the Gates in this case, they do so out of a desire to good.”and hugh’s noting that (in effect) bill gates knows fuck-all about education, as well. but he’s dedicated to the proposition that HE knows how to fix amerikan education. most of his charters come w/ his technocratic school boards, cuz: they know best how to make little drones for the global workforce, and wire every single person on the planet to maximize their bidness efficiency. math, science, and reading, standardized tests.

oh, yes, similar to arne duncan’s crap ‘race to the top’ and ‘no child left behind’ (in the coming ‘rapture’?). but here’s a bit of lovin’ on gates from a month ago (there’s much more, of course): ‘Laura Chapman on Bill Gates’ Hubris, Ignorance, and Folly’, diane ravitch, October 22, 2017

“A couple of days ago, Bill Gates said he has a new plan to reform education. As I pointed out in a post, Bill Gates is batting 0 for 3. He dropped $2 Billion into breaking up large high schools and turning them into small schools. He started in 2000, didn’t see a big jump in test scores, and backed out in 2008. Then, having decided that the answer to high test scores was to punish teachers whose student scores didn’t go up, he pushed value-added Assessment, partnering with Arne Duncan and Race to the Top. Thousands of educators were fired and many schools were closed based on Gates’s fancy. That lasted from 2008 until now, and it has been written into state law in many states, although it has distorted the purpose of education and created massive demoralization among teachers and a national teacher shortage. Then he funded the Common Core, in its entirety.

It is his pedagogical Frankenstein, his personal belief that education should be completely standardized, from standards to curriculum to teacher education to teacher evaluation. Speaking to the National Board for Certified Teachers a few years ago, he praised standardization and talked about the beauty of standard electrical plugs. No matter where you live, you can plug in an appliance and it works! Clearly, that was his metaphor for education. What did he spend on the creation and promotion of the Common Core? No one knows for sure, but estimates range from $200 Million to $2 Billion.”

https://dianeravitch.net/2017/10/22/laura-chapman-on-bill-gates-hubris-ignorance-and-folly/

and of course, schools aren’t totally responsible for what or how kids learn. ever-burgeoning youth homelessness, poverty, segregation, hunger, teacher to student ratios, matter a hella lot, as well. what could bill and melinda’s mega-billions to help those issues? (i’ll address his philanthropy on ‘hunger’ separately. but in short, he’s a multi-billionaire megalomaniac with a Great Reputation for ‘philanthropy’. just as anybody! (especially him…)

Purchasing was absolutely part of the story of early computing. Back when gov was asking for security measures from the makers at the time, Novell anyone?, Gates was the one who said ‘I’ll do it’, and thus the X.509 protocol was born.

Gates was once notorious in that biz for gaming the system, using every possible advantage to replace superior products with his own often lesser ones. Yes, we now have commonality. But we also have rampant viruses. Apparently he’s making amends now to the system he so successfully defeated. History suggests that Melinda was persuaded by Bill’s cancer death bed mother, who’d been hounding him for years to “give back” already. So in reality, I think we have those two women to thank for all this. And both followed through with their educations, so there’s that.

I think history has already answered the question of ‘are things better when controlled by the few, or by the many’. Somewhere in the tax rates there’s a sweet spot, but what the Republican’s donors and their orange stooge are demanding sure as hell ain’t it.

@Bill H

Confusion is a diversion from your clear example of what building a family business means.

The commies can only steal wealth one time but their actions would also destroy people’s desire to build and prosper. Once that initial stolen money is redistributed, if it is redistributed, what will they do next?

@Stew

Those high marginal tax rates only applied to income over about $3.5 million in todays money and few if anyone actually paid them. They were an artifact of the depression and WW2 that no longer served any real purpose.

Now the commies want to use them as punishment for for anyone with any wealth and have demanded they start at the $250,000 income level. This is the same unadjusted number as applied in the earlier era.

Relying on big government to do Big Things is a statist delusion that should have died with the USSR.

“Emma is more about unbridled passion than careful calibration.”

So real chex, being an annoyance in casual conversation because you can’t win an argument in court?

Relying on big government to do Big Things is a statist delusion that should have died with the USSR.

No longer a fan of the Zuiderzee Works? Yes? No? Yes and No?

Relying on big government to do Big Things is a statist delusion that should have died with the USSR.

No longer a fan of the USA supporting Israel? Yes? No… What the hell do you know?

Peter

You must have had a commie calculating machine installed to replace your brain to parrot such BS as you do. The top 10% of earners in the US pay about 70% of FIT while the bottom 20% pays nothng but gets money back and they qualify for many government programs. They may pay some local taxes but it is a fraction of what affluent consumers pay.

Whoa boy. Like your boy Trump, you have a reality problem.

(Ahem) Here’s a hint. Federal income taxes make up a little less of 1/5th total taxation.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-much-poor-actually-pay-taxes-probably-think

Taking into account all taxes, almost every adult in the United States qualifies as a taxpayer. Overall, the tax system is moderately progressive; rich people pay a higher percentage than poor people, but almost everyone pays substantial amounts. At the very, very top of the income spectrum, however, taxes stop being progressive. Once you reach the top 0.1 percent, effective tax rates actually start going down. Each of the top 1,300 richest households in America made more than $62 million in 2012, but they pay a lower percentage in federal income taxes than upper-middle-class people. Still, almost every person — excluding multinational corporate “persons” — pays a substantial amount of their income into government coffers.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/03/20/new-evidence-poor-americans-pay-highest-taxes-and-get-little-safety-net

When ALL forms of taxes and income are considered, poor Americans pay higher tax rates than the richest 1%.

The analysis starts with state and local taxes, which are often ignored by apologists for big-income tax cuts. According to The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the state and local tax rate for the poorest 20 percent of individuals is DOUBLE that of the top 1 percent (10.9 percent vs. 5.4 percent). New data from Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman allows us to go further: When unrealized capital gains are included in the wealth-building of the richest 1%, the OVERALL tax rates plunge for the super-rich, causing the poorest Americans to pay the highest rates.

(…)

Rich Americans Benefit as Much as the Poor from the Safety Net

Piketty and Saez and Zucman calculate government transfers to three groups: the richest 10%, the middle 40%, and the poorest 50%. Each group is evaluated for total transfers, including Social Security, as a percent of average national income.

Surprisingly, the middle 40% receives more government assistance than the bottom 50%, with a benefit equivalent to 23 percent of national income (see Figure S.13).

More surprisingly, the richest 10% as a group receives almost as much government assistance as the poorest 50%.

So the rich are society’s real welfare queens, the real “moochers”. Who’d have thunk it?

@Stew

Depending on commie NPR for your info is pathetic but expected. Here in NM state income tax is based on your FIT return and if you pay nothing to the feds you pay nothing to the state. In fact the state will make you take money from them. I tried to refuse this state gift and could only donate it to a game and fish fund. There is no food or drug tax here so the poor must be paying a lot of tobacco, gas and booz tax to make their contribution to the system.

The fed tax bite is what we were discussing and who pays most of it or none of it. Allowing people to keep more of their earnings is not welfare and they are already paying for much of the poor’s welfare through the states with their taxes.

@Stewart and Willy:

All of your arguments against Peter, of course, assume that he is an actual right-wing Real Amurkan, rather than a Russian bot, or an unemployed Lower Slobbovian eking out a living on Putin’s money from some Internet cafe in Lower Slobbovia.

Though indeed, so far I haven’t noticed him posting in the stilted quasi-English of the more obvious Pottsylvanian ringers.

Its command of the language, Ivory, has improved dramatically over the past few weeks. Yes, “it”.

Not the only one around here.

do remember that bill gates’ net worth is now $88 billion; fortunes are made on the back of everyday people, as others have pointed out so well. but as for his great desire to cure global hunger:

the gates and rockefeller foundations teamed up in 2006 to bio-wreck the globe, then zeroed in on africa..i mean…’feed africa’ by improving agriculture there with better seeds (genetically modified) and pesticides, as well as factory ag mono-crops, even though there were many objections by sovereign food movements all over africa. gates bought 500,000 shares of monsanto in aid off that effort.
https://twitter.com/Colin_Todhunter/status/935062396296609792
his twitter feed would be funny if he weren’t so serious. as w/ a photo of an african woman tending her gmo cassava crop…while peering into her smart phone, “where she can check weather predictions, market prices, etc.”
he’s also given millions in aid of global bio-piracy to “…the CGIAR system — and through its funding, it is accelerating the transfer of research and seeds to corporations, facilitating intellectual property piracy and seed monopolies created through intellectual property laws and seed regulations.

“Besides taking control of the seeds of farmers in CGIAR seed banks, Mr Gates (along with the Rockefeller Foundation) is investing heavily in collecting seeds from across the world and storing them in a facility in Svalbard in the Arctic — the “doomsday vault”.

Mr Gates is also funding Diversity Seek (DivSeek), a global initiative to take patents on the seed collections through genomic mapping. Seven million crop accessions are in public seed banks. DivSeek could allow five corporations to own this diversity.”

https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/great-seed-piracy

but in a press release from microsoft oct. 17, 2017:

“Taking the next step forward in meeting the mission-critical and data needs of our U.S. Government customers, we are announcing expansion plans to make Azure Government Secret available to support government agencies and partners who have Secret classified data. Azure Government Secret will deliver multi-tenant cloud infrastructure and cloud capabilities to U.S. Federal Civilian, Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and U.S. Government partners working within Secret enclaves. Customers with Secret requirements can expect to gain access to new technologies at scale, including services such as cognitive capabilities, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics.”

well it worked great for amazon, didn’t it? tripled their stock price jig-quick, and wooot! they can partner with the war and intelligence machines!

sorry, Tal Hartsfeld, the answer is that capitalism is a meritocratic system! rewards go to the best grifters. (smile)

Without aggressive government action defining and enforcing so-called “intellectual property” and corporate governance mechanisms, Bill Gates and his ilk would have to work for a living. The property rights fetishists pretend that the political and social structures that privilege some people over others are natural and right. They are neither.

The capitalist’s objective is money for nothing, exploiting and profiting from other people’s labor, not their own.The myth of the sole proprietor working and slaving for year upon year to build a fortune all by his or her self is just that. A myth. A useful, but by no means pious, fiction.

That multimillion dollar farm or factory or more likely stocks, bonds and options that will be assessed a modest tax at the death of the capitalist *if any tax is assessed at all* was built and sustained by a lot more people than the entrepreneur. It was ultimately the result of an entire society’s provisions and efforts.

An estate tax is the least a society should require of those who have benefited so much.

Lions don’t have freezers.

It is amazing to me how quickly you can shut someone up when they are on a social Darwinism tear with that simple statement. No matter how successful a predator is, no matter how many offspring it has sired, in the end the young get almost nothing from their parents but their genetic inheritance.

Can’t claim to be much of a social Darwinism fan to be honest. But if we are going to have all the rest of it we should certainly make sure that each generation has to earn their right to the spoils they claim. At the very least it would allow us to separate the predators from the parasites.

Will

@CP

The Chinese must love how the US commies think and want to act. Forcing the sale of these family busness to skim some tax for the state will open up new buying opportunities for Chinese capitalists especially in our ag sector.

The Chinese already own our largest pork processor along with hunderds of their farms. They are investing billions to gain control of the ag business they need to supply their people’s growing demand for meat.

Careful Ten and Ivory, we could get another visit from the snowflake police. It called me an “orientalist” once… but wait, did it just post an orientalist comment? Was it bait for the orientalist police?

An excellent book is Walter Isaacson, 2014, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Isaacson wrote it after he wrote his biography of Steve Jobs, and writes in the Introduction that he realized it was crazy so many people believed the “free enterprise” myth after realize the beginnings of electronics and computers come entirely out of the government/military research programs of World War 2.

Here is my own timeline, which is very incomplete. This timeline is not from Isaacson, but other books. There is a list of references after. This is part of a book I am working on to detail how almost EVERY major technological, industrial, and agricultural development in USA was originally supported by some government program or other. Sponsors or contacts in publishing would be very, very welcome.

Govt Support of Computers TIMELINE
TIMELINE

1932 – Vannevar Bush becomes Dean of the MIT School of Engineering

1938 – Vannevar Bush becomes president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington
June 27, 1940 – President Roosevelt creates National Defense Research Committee on advice of Vannevar Bush; makes Bush chairman
Under the chairmanship of Bush the NDRC created new laboratories, including the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which aided the development of radar, and the Underwater Sound Laboratory at New London, Connecticut, which developed sonar.
Manhattan Project.

June 28, 1941 – President Roosevelt creates Office of Scientific Research and Development on advice of Vannevar Bush; makes James B. Conant, President of Harvard University, chairman

June 5, 1943 – Army Ordnance Corps, Research and Development Command contracts University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering to design and build Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. Code name “Project PX”.
Moore School also built the Electronic Discreet Variable Computer (EDVAC), which used a stored program and sequential processing.

1944 – Fairchild Aviation changes name to Fairchild Camera and Instrument, aerial cameras for the military, and many other things

July 1945 – Army Signal Corps’ Project 414A (becomes Nike Ajax, first operational anti-aircraft missile system) contracted to Bell Laboratories conceives of computerized command and control for USA air defense.

1946 – Frederick Terman returns from MIT Radiation Lab to Stanford University as Dean of Engineering.

1946 – Jay Forrester at the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory (funded by the Office of Naval Research) convinces DoD to expand Whirlwind flight simulator program to the design of a real-time general-purpose digital computer that could serve functions other than flight simulation.
Magnetic core memories developed for Whirlwind (see Flamm p14-15)

1946 – Engineering Research Associates [ERA), was formed in St. Paul, Minn. By engineers from
he Naval Communications Supplemental Activity, which had been involved in developing computers in support of the Navy’s work in cryptology. 6 “With ERA,” summarizes the National Research Council (NRC), “the Navy effectively privatized its wartime cryptography and was able to maintain civilian expertise through the radical postwar demobilization” [1999, p. 9]. Ruttan P93-94

July 8, 1946 thru August 30, 1946 – Moore School lectures on “Theory and Technique for the Design of Electronic Digital Computers” sponsored and funded by the Office of Naval Research and Army Ordnance Dept.
,

January 1950 – George E. Valley, Jr., an MIT physics professor and chairman of the Air Defense System Engineering Committee, visits MIT Servomechanism Laboratory, conceives of Whirlwind as the basis for develop a computer-based air defense system. Major funding of Whirlwind shifts from ONR to the Air Force, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory takes over. IBM decides to work on project.
http://www.technologyreview.com/article/406855/the-flight-simulator-that-wasnt/

April 1950 – Standard Eastern Automatic Computer completed by the National Bureau of Standards;
first electronic digital von Neumann-type stored-program computer; source of a number of important technical innovations, including solid-state logic. new input-output mechanisms, an early example both of time sharing and the interconnection of two computers (the SEAC and the DYSEAC) in 1954, the development of marginal checking, new memory mechanisms, and a graphical display. Its development was supported by both the Navy and the Army. [Ruttan p93n5; Flamm 1988, pp. 68-75]
http://museum.nist.gov/panels/seac/CONTRI~1.HTM

December 1950 – ERA’s first major computer system, the Atlas, was delivered to Navy [Ruttan P93-94]

Early 1951 – IBM begins Defense Calculator project, designed for commercial use, based on letters of intent from government agencies and defense-related firms. Renamed the IBM 701. March 1953, first installation of an IBM 701 at Atomic Energy Commission’s Los Alamos Laboratory. [Ruttan P94]

1951 Silicon Valley was started as Stanford Industrial Park (later Stanford Research Park) The first tenant was Varian Associates, founded by Stanford University alumni to build military radar components.

October 28, 1953 – Air Force decides to build Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense project based on MIT Lincoln Laboratory and IBM Whirlwind. Uses largest computers ever built, IBM’s AN/FSQ-7, based on IBM 701.

1950-1952 – Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense project “was a driving force behind the commercial development of the American computer industry and has been deemed the most important learning experience in computer history.” (Ruttan, p96; and prev.)
March 1953 – first installation of an IBM 701, at Atomic Energy Commission’s Los Alamos Laboratory. [Ruttan P94]

1957 – eight engineers from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory convince Fairchild to create Fairchild Semiconductor. Two of these eight, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, founded Intel in 1968.

1960s – “Using money from NASA and the U.S. Air Force, Doug Engelbart invented the mouse and hypertext-based collaboration tools in the mid-1960s, while at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International).

1988 – “Toward a National Research Network” submitted to Congress by a group chaired by UCLA professor of computer science Leonard Kleinrock, one of the creators of the ARPANET,

December 9, 1991 – High Performance Computing Act of 1991

Ruttan, Vernon W., Is War Necessary for Economic Growth? Military Procurement and Technology Development. New York City: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Flamm, Kenneth, Creating the Computer: Government, Industry and High Technology, Washington DC, Brookings Institution Press, 1988.

Riordan, Michael, and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age, New York, NY, W. W. Norton & Co., 1998.

Smith, Merritt Roe, editor, Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1985.

Ceruzzi, Paul E., A History of Modern Computing, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2003.

Another thing to think about: the vast majority of engineers, mathematicians, and scientists who developed the first computers were trained at the public colleges and universities which were established by the Land Grant acts in the 1800s during and after the Civil War.

The Chinese must love how the US commies think and want to act

Sweet googly moogly. I found this quote online:

“We will never simply copy the system of Western countries or introduce a system of multiple parties holding office in rotation; although China’s state organs have different responsibilities, they all adhere to the line, principles and policies of the party.”

I think the party Mr. Bangguo is referring to, is the commie one.

Maybe their commies are better than our commies?

Joe builds a business. He works all of his life creating that business and making it successful. When his son, Bob, turns eighteen he joins his father in the business and works along with him, and the business grows to have a net worth of $55 million. It still belongs to Joe because it is a proprietorship. Joe dies when Bob is 38 years old, and the government takes the business due to the 100% estate tax. Bob, who has worked for twenty years to help grow the business, has nothing.

Couple of points:

1) It is not fair for Bill to work for deferred compensation and then escape taxes on it when it is later “paid” in the form of the business transfer. The right thing to do would be for Joe to pay Bill, either in cash or as a transfer of equity, over the course of those 20 years. Bill would pay taxes on this transfer just as if it was going to a stranger. Of course, as Bill’s father, Joe would be perfectly free to spend money on Joe’s education and training, giving him a leg up that way, and of course, Joe would be free to choose Bill as the person to take over his business.

2) I think that a 100% estate tax on dollar #1 is harsh, but on the other hand, it is also not fair for Bob to start from $55 million by virtue of heredity. The estate tax is in place to prevent the accumulation of generational wealth. I don’t have a problem with some money passing down, but what makes our economy work is the availability of opportunities. Joe managed to corner quite a few of those opportunities with his business – his finite life is what allows others a chance to play the game. His death is a necessary “reset” in the economy, freeing up opportunities for others.

Corporations crowd out opportunities in the same way; they have potentially infinite lifespans, though they are not immortal – they can atrophy and die. The presence of Wal-Mart is preventing tens of thousands of other general merchandise players from ever playing in that game, and has done so nationally for the past 30 years, and regionally for the past 50 years – with no end in sight.

In a meritocracy, we should be doing everything we can to break up businesses upon the death of their owners.

This all stems from the basic point of this blog post: wealth = power over other people. That is the problem we need to solve.

Money has three uses:

1) Necessity. People need to eat, be sheltered, etc.

2) Luxury. People like to have nice things.

3) Power. People want to control others.

We need taxation that allows #1 easily, allows #2 easily at first, and slows as you approach #3, and then fully prevents #3.

I don’t care if Bill Gates has a really nice mansion – hey, he earned that. I do care, however, when he decides to create a large honey pot that attracts scientific research professionals to work on the problems that he feels are important as opposed to problems that society feels are important. Maybe Gates wants to cure Crohn’s disease, so he spends his billions on that, and people work on his problem instead of working on problems like cancer or Alzheimers. Gates enormous wealth distorts society.

Other wealthy people spend their money affecting the political discourse, making our government do the things they want instead of what the voters want. They control our lives this way.

We apparently cling fast to the morality of wealth. We’re fine with Gates having a big house because he earned it. As opposed to the child care worker on the edge of homelessness because she hasn’t earned anything. Bezos earned wealth by offering a way to avoid sales taxes. The workers in his warehouses earn $11/hour in brutal conditions. The Waltons earned fortunes as Walmart’s orientation of new employees included how to apply for food stamps and Medicaid.

Rich people earn. Upper middle class people hard-earn, as I know because they all complain about how government is taking away their hard-earned money. Nobody else earns. And the people who pick tomatoes don’t dictate policy to legislators.

Maybe we ought to think about what an economic system ought to do rather than just worshiping the money collectors.

I’m so enamored of absolutists that I stole the ideas from Bertrand Russell and Buckminster Fuller. I especially like Russell on work, starting

What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

I can recognize that managing and planning are valuable roles (at least I hope they are — otherwise I wasted a whole lot of my work life) without believing that the manager and planner is really earning more than the child care worker, although I admit I’d rather child care workers run businesses than business people have direct responsibility for the welfare and safety of children. But the notion that managers and planners have earned more is a brick in the religion of wealth.

Governments with their own currency do not live hand to mouth. That is a lie that is perpetrated by the rich and their lackeys, so that voters think that those governments have to go hat in hand to the rich to get money, and that programs like Medicare, Social Security, and food stamps are causing us to live beyond our means. Meanwhile, the government subsidizes the rich and corporations. Lincoln and Congress exposed that lie by not borrowing money alone to finance the Civil War, but issued greenback dollars to finance the rest. Now all of our dollars are greenbacks. This should be part of the core curriculum in the US.

Gates is supporting thorium reactors? Far out!

(He’s not. I checked.)

@WD

I’m not a Bezos booster but he has shown that supply side economics can be a powerful business driver. He built this product sales service and people have swarmed to it to spend their money. The tax breaks he got are part of the bidding process and local governments are willing to offer them to bring these jobs and the commerce that comes with them.

I don’t know what my little town offered but we have a Facebook campus being built. It’s a seven year construction project with 300 permanent jobs, not huge but needed.

A few months ago Trump announced a cooperative agreement between the gov, business, schools and apprentiship programs to quickly train 5 million people for unfilled skilled jobs waiting for qualified applicants. This would offer interested people a chance for a career not an Amazon or Walmart job.

A system which produces billionaires is also one in which there will be massive wealth inequality. If you have a system in which you have high marginal tax rates and estate taxes. You keep wealth inequality within acceptable ranges and the possibility of a billionaire becomes remote. The easiest way to look at this is that we live within a finite society with finite resources. Resources are not static in that work and innovation can increase some faster than others are used up. Billionaires and large wealth inequality represent a misallocation of society’s resources because they choke off resources from socially useful productive activities and funnel them into non-productive ones.

The idea that the rich are “job creators” is a myth, yet another iteration of supply side economics. The current tax bill illustrates this. It has nothing to do with creating jobs or bettering the lives of ordinary Americans and everything to do with a pay off to the rich from the politicians they own.

My thanks also to Tony Wikrent for his comments. If you have the information easily available, could you comment on government support of development, the effect of intellectual property, and innovation. The argument for copyrights and patents is that no one will innovate without them. I see them as squelching innovation by stopping further development of any idea. They act simply as monopolies protecting and privileging the rich. My sense is that the government support of scientific development with all results in the public domain has a far superior record of achievement than private development with all results restricted by intellectual property laws.

I am in sympathy with many of the critiques of our system as practiced; I am hard line about punishing any cheating or corruption, and always will be. But I cannot accept the implicit assertion by some here that the uneducated, untrained worker contributes as much to the success and increase in value of a business as a smart, attentive manager, or a highly trained technician.

It childish to think that way, IMO.

Would any of you want me to perform your heart transplant surgery, equipped with only my psychology and law degrees?

If not, why not?

It is very easy to rhetorically dismiss the value of a skillset one does not possess. (sigh)

@WD

Thanks for the info, I heard about this through the grapevine. The deal must involve the state but that $30 billion number seems too high and Amazon will have to pay for this financing over time. The gross reciepts tax rebate and the training money are direct but not huge subsidies.

The long term growth from these deals seems to produce benefits for everyone even with the initial incentives and we need the jobs and commerce.

realitychecker: “It is very easy to rhetorically dismiss the value of a skillset one does not possess. (sigh)”

Good point. And one that Bill Gates should take to heart, and quit thinking that he knows how to improve education.

@RC

I think Gates and Buffet plan to give away their wealth before they die so it can be used without destroying the companies it’s based on. Gates has paid huge amounts of tax already and whenever he sells stock he pays more so why promote confiscation for the bloated inefficent State.

I may not support all his projects but helping to bring African ag into the 21st century and backing better organized education at home don’t seem too evil.

@ Peter

The dead always want to control their money long past their time, but I don’t see where that is a particular benefit to society as a general proposition.

Nor do I see where it can be a good thing for children to inherit billions of dollars they did not earn.

Gates isn’t a devil, nor an angel; his history is checkered, to say the least. Same with Buffet.

My understanding is that only about 100 families a year face the have-to-sell-the-family-farm type situation–do you know otherwise?

I don’t believe that Bezos attained his wealth via corruption or anything nefarious (though the lack of sales tax when he first started skewed things a bit). Kudos to him for being at the right place at the right time and for doing a good job. However you can’t deny that Bezos’ wealth has come at the direct expense of economic opportunities for many other people – primarily the people who work in retail sales, and also the people who might have once directly competed with him with smaller companies. He has crowded out many others – try to start up an internet retail business these days, if you don’t join forces with Amazon you will likely get nowhere.

That removal of opportunity might have been mitigated if Bezos didn’t extract $100 billion from the operation. If that $100 billion remained with consumers, our economy would look different. I realize Bezos doesn’t have the $100 billion in a vault like Scrooge McDuck; however he – a single person – is deciding what direction the collective power of the planet should march towards to pursue that $100 billion.

That’s the problem. Bezos is disproportionately powerful. But people seem OK with that because in the church of capitalism, there is a belief that the successful should control everything, that we should just step aside and let them do their thing, democracy be damned.

The secondary problem is that by Amazon being so large, it distorts the geographic fabric of our country. This is the genesis of Trumpism – instead of 100,000 small retailers spread more or less evenly across the country, we have 40,000 Amazon employees in Seattle, a bunch more at 16 or so fulfillment centers, and a marginal number of extra delivery workers across the country.

Take this situation, rinse, repeat for all the large corporations that have grown unrestrained, and you wind up with a few global cities where all the jobs are, and the rest of the country gasping for opportunities that cannot materialize.

You also wind up with what amounts to a monoculture – a few large players in every sector, too large to take risks, yet powerful en0ugh to stop almost any entrant that might want to do things differently. Instead of thousands of petri dishes out there, you have 3 or 4 of them, and a non-trivial part of their energy is focused on stopping competition before it starts.

Why would anyone need to sell the family farm to facilitate an estate tax payment?

Let’s say that I have a family farm worth $50 million, and I die, leaving it to my child.

My child doesn’t have the $10 million or so that he would owe – but he doesn’t have to sell the farm. He only needs to mortgage it. Given that it is worth $50 million, it shouldn’t be too hard to get a mortgage on 20% of the equity.

Yes, this results in higher operating costs, but this fact allows others to start up and compete in the farming arena. It’s all part of the economic process. Without that tax, the $50 million farm owner can easily fend off anyone starting from scratch.

Word.

@ Peter

I would support an exception of some sort for these small family farms situations (but see NP’s good points above).

But I can’t accept the logic of your point that the estate tax payers are also a small percentage. You are yoking a few who might owe hundreds of billions for services received from the community, with a few who might owe a few millions based on their own personal investments in time and capital. Too dissimilar to be persuasive, IMO.

Accumulators of huge fortunes usually used community resources to get there, so it seems fair to say they owe some part back to the community, even if we debate about how big a part.

If they can show they truly did it “all on their own,” then I would support exempting them from the estate tax. But that would be a very small percentage, as well.

@RC

I’m glad to see you’re planning a soft Stalinism this time and the Kulaks will be spared. The big capitalist pigs will recieve no mercy even if they already pay huge amounts of tax to fund the community that aided their success.

Statists, commies, collectivists seem to have one goal in life, to spend other peoples money. I might agree with some of this confiscation if there was evidence that the money would be put to productive use but all the welfare state has produced is more demand for welfare. The war on poverty was lost and the cost was huge so another approach is needed besides feeding a failed beast.

(“powerful and from” should be “powerful from”)

Interesting to find here reactions arguing “it’s their money, they should do what they want with it.”

Actually, it’s not their money. A few years ago, Ian posted an excellent riposte with a title along that line: “It’s Not Really Your Money” I think it was. I hope he updates it to address the discussion here, and repost it.

For my part, I would refer readers back to the timeline of computer development I posted up-thread a couple days ago. Then, point out what should be obvious: people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would have NOTHING, absolutely effing nothing, were it not for what the U.S. government did in the 1930s through 1960s that resulted in the creation of computers and the internet. Bezos, Gates, Theil, and every single other chest-pounding libertarian CEO of Silicon Valley literally owe everything they have to the United States of America. Without those government programs and that government support — and without the tens of thousands of kids that were educated at public land grand universities — there would be no computers, no software, no internet, no transistors, no semiconductors, no Silicon Valley, no Silicon Valley fortunes, no Microsoft, no Intel, no Apple, no PayPal, no Amazon.

Some libertarian here ranted that “the welfare state has created nothing.” I wonder if he or she thinks the welfare state was not the one in the 1930s through 1960s that funded the basic research, then specific research to create transistors and micro-electronics (one thing I left out of the timeline was the Army Signal Corps research in the 1930s which resulted in the “walkie-talkie” of World War 2, including working transistors. Was NASA somehow not part of the welfare state? Perhaps all the spin-offs of NASA such as modern medical monitoring equipment do not really exist because “the welfare state” could not possibly have created them? (The ideology must be kept pure–shades of the doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist!) Perhaps all those spinoffs are just figments of the fevered imaginations of those terrible statists who want to “spend other peoples money”?

I hope that cretinous numbskull has enough balls to actually reply to this, because I truly want to figure out if such thinking is the result of a selfish ego obstructing the processes of reason, or just simple ignorance of scientific and technological history. Libertarianism is a myth-based ideology that must deny some basic historical realities else it collapses completely. What are the mental contortions that must be performed to deny so much reality in order to cling so stubbornly to such a flawed ideology?

It is has been gratifying to see libertarians flipping out over the recent revelations about how explicitly “public choice” economist James M. Buchanan disliked and denigrated democratic government. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/07/big-money-rules/

And here is a detailed explanation of how that Hapsburg toady Friedrich von Hayek’s economic ideas are hostile to participatory democracy. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273083004_Is_Neoliberalism_a_Liberalism_or_a_Stranger_Kind_of_Bird_On_Hayek_and_Our_Discontents

@Tony W

The more I hear this type of argument about the industry generating government the weaker it seems. The governement did what it’s suppose to do and with computers that was to insure military needs were met to protect the country. Even with that investment computers were rather clunky big hot machines until Noyce perfected the totally integrated circuit and Moore’s law started driving this universally critical industry.

Arpanet took advantage of these new powerful computers and using existing private technology developed the protocols to improve military communications. Information sharing between universities doing military and other research was improved. To think that only ARPA could or would develop this system is silly, all the pieces were already coming together. The growth of the PC drove the growth of the internet and businesses turned it into a tax and profit generating gold mine repaying any infrastructure and reasearch costs of the government.

Peter is ignorant of basic U.S. economic history. But then, after nearly three quarters of a century of Mont Pelerin Society’s neoliberalism ascending to complete dominance of the economics professions, almost everyone is.

I will only offer an excerpt from the work of first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who created the Constitutional and administrative framework in which the US economy grew, and point out that 1) the Constitutional mandate to promote the General Welfare (which neoliberals like von Hayek insist is the slippery slope to “statism”) is the crowning achievement of the political and scientific Enlightenments; and 2) government support for the development of computers, then the DELIBERATE attempt ti disseminate the new technology into the rest of the economy through the Moore School Lectures, are examples of what Hamilton and Washington intended.

In his Report on Manufactures, Communicated to the House of Representatives, December 5, 1791, Hamilton wrote: “To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted.” And: “Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practise, that the simplest and most obvious improvements, in the most ordinary occupations, are adopted with hesitation, reluctance, and by slow gradations…. To produce the desirable changes as early as may be expedient may therefore require the incitement and patronage of government… it is of importance that the confidence of cautious, sagacious capitalists, both citizens and foreigners, should be excited. And to inspire this description of persons with confidence, it is essential that they should be made to see in any project which is new—and for that reason alone, if for no other, precarious—the prospect of such a degree of countenance and support from government, as may be capable of overcoming the obstacles inseparable from first experiments.”

@Alta

Dreams of productive state factories may create pleasure and fantasies in the commie mind but we have seen the results of that failed ideology. The state has the duty to promote, protect and even regulate the productive power of capitalism but it should never own it.

The next post just up states honestly that the collectivists such as you are not after the money with their tax plan but control and power for the state. We also know that more state control and power means less liberty and freedom. This is why he commies will fail again.

I agree with you about companies like Comcast and possibly the drug giants but they could be regulated as utilities.

The BS about luck and taxes is some form of collectivist psychobabble. If you desire to take more wealth from the successful no matter their beginnings in our progressive taxing system you support consfication for the state which is the basis of the totalitarian state.

Thanks for bringing factual history to this discussion, Tony. As for Peter, he’s given up on telling plausible lies and is now just trolling.

Finger-pointing? I’m not the one calling everyone who disagrees with me a commie. Too funny. And sad as well.

Bob should have demanded more pay and a retirement plan those 30 some years of hard work with father Joe. That’s what the rest of us are expected to get by with or try. Why not business owner children?

@ Watermelon

Family values, much?/s