Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Wealth redistribution

Wealth redistribution is evil and is happening today. My proof:

If you look at the graph, you'll notice that the top 5% of the population holds 72% of the financial wealth of the nation. This despite the fact that even if they were twice as productive as the rest of the population (a laughable assumption -- Paris Hilton, anybody? -- but one that I'm sure they'll pretend is true), they only produce 10% of the nation's real wealth -- the goods and services that make up the nation's economy. So where did the other 62% of their financial wealth come from? Redistribution, my friends. They redistributed it using the "invisible hand" that extracts wealth from your pocket and mine and puts it into *their* pockets, which they pretend is all fine and dandy because this "invisible hand" (called market power) is private force, not government force, and thus isn't evil.

But of course force is force. If some goon shoves a gun in my face in the park and demands all my money, I don't care whether he's got a badge showing he's a government employee or not, either way it's still force being used to extract money from me at gunpoint. If some goon tells me to grovel and lick his feet and give all my productive output to him or he will make sure that I get black marks on my official record that will guarantee that I live the rest of my scant days as a starving homeless hobo, that is just as much force as if the government seized the contents of my bank account and told me that every dime I made above simple subsistence was going to them from now on, but for some reason the former (what the Fortune 500 tells every single one of their employees and every single one of the small businessmen who are dependent on Fortune 500 suppliers) is considered "ok" by the top 5%, while the latter sends shivers of horror up their spine -- yet from the perspective of the bottom 95%, they are one and the same -- application of force to redistribute their wealth for the benefit of a few! Sprinkling magic free market fairy dust over it doesn't make it anything other than what it is: redistribution of wealth. All that sprinkling free market fairy dust over this extraction of wealth does is change who gets the wealth -- a small percent (the top 5%), vs. the 95%. Hmm, now I wonder why so many of the top 5% embrace free market ideology? Gosh darn gee willickers, Batman!

-- Badtux the Redistribution Penguin

4 comments:

  1. What worries me is how so many lower income folks seem to be buying the whole rhetoric that any kind of taxation on the wealthy is a plot to redistribute wealth in some kind of communist plot. They don't seem to realize that capitalism redistributes wealth just as well but in the opposite direction and away from them. It is insane but enough people buy into it that we are in danger of losing our entire safety net.

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  2. It's worse than you think. Check this - http://exiledonline.com/recovered-economic-history-everyone-but-an-idiot-knows-that-the-lower-classes-must-be-kept-poor-or-they-will-never-be-industrious/

    All my life I keep finding how completely I've been lied to, since birth, about what this place is and who my people are. Every time I think I've arrived at the bottom of the rabbit hole, I learn that it keeps going deeper.

    At least I know the outrage I seem unable to shake is not out of line. If anything, it's inadequate to the scale of the crimes against me and mine.

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  3. Dude, where's your free market fairy pic? It cracks me up every time :)

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  4. Most ignorant Americans believe they are just temporarily inconvenienced millionaires, and one day, they'll be in the top 1% too, so voting against their own self interests is natural.

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