Forum Post: There's no more pie, the 1% ate it all.
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 19, 2011, 11:48 a.m. EST by stray
(219)
from Philadelphia, PA
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
The biggest lie being perpetrated by the 1% right now is that the market doesn't function in a zero-sum manner, that EVERYONE can have a piece of the pie if they just "work hard" or something.
It ends up being the fundamental disagreement between liberal and conservative, or OWS vs anti-OWS, or Tea Party, or however you want to see it. I just don't get how people can buy this. Economics, as a science, AT ITS CORE deals with the allocation of LIMITED resources. Everything is a limited resource. Even money is limited. No matter how you want to view it, more for the 1% means less for everyone else.
I don't know, I feel like I'm going crazy trying to defend a position which should be blatantly self-evident. Do people just WANT to believe so they can wake up in the morning? Are people just terrified to challenge the alpha dogs in the 1%? Maybe they think the 1% just knows better? Maybe feudalism is comforting, to some? I really don't get it.
The Cake is a lie. Just like the 1% who ate it.
bumpity
Not true. To quote PJ O'Rourke In The Wealth of Nations, Smith's logic did a number of interesting things. By proving how it was that productivity was increased, by proving that, he disproved the idea that bettering the condition of one person necessarily worsens the condition of somebody else an idea that is still dearly held by Marxists and also by everybody's little brother. Wealth is not a pizza, where, if I have too many slices, you have to eat the Domino's box. Wealth is not zero-sum.
Source would have been nice. Finally found it on the Cato institute site. Yay for right wing propaganda.
"Now, by showing that there is no set amount of wealth, Smith also disproved the idea that a nation has a certain fixed horde of treasure, a king's ransom of gold, silver and jewels. Smith proved that the wealth of a nation has to be measured by its volume of trades in goods and services. In other words, it has to be measured by what goes on in the royal castle's kitchens and stables, not by what is locked up in the royal castle's vaults."
Actually, by justifying the vast majority of "wealth" in the hands of the 1% you're stockpiling in those royal castle vaults and completely reinforcing my point.
Strangling the middle class HAS strangled the volume of trades. If, in the long run, there's only one beneficiary of a transaction involving goods/services the market itself has failed at its job of allocating the limited resources available to us.
Its an amazing fallacy... you're literally trying to have it both ways. As long as you're trying to struggling to give value to that stockpiled wealth, you're destroying the system more and more.
Yes wealth isn't finite, it can grow.
But even if it grows. Who gets how much?
The problem isn't necessarily the zero-sum nature of the economic system -- but really the fact that we have this growth mentality.
The only thing that is 100% non-sustainable it is growth. Growth in the population, growth of jobs, growth of wealth, growth of profits ... none of it can be sustained indefinitely. It deals with the simple concept of exponential math.
If we would realize this simple fact -- we would have a lot less of corporate America doing the wrong thing to the American people to keep their profits moving forward. Eventually it ends. Eventually it maxes out.
That actually makes sense... under the fantasy land of perfect competition the market itself caps profits, and I can see why that would be appealing, but that just ignores the actual reality that the corporate structure has created.
Exactly.
So, what we have is cost restructuring and exporting of jobs to subsidize the diminishing ability to obtain more profits in a near maxed out market.
I've often wondered - is staying pat so damn bad? I mean, would a company that is making a profit year after year suddenly become irrelevant if their profits didn't go up?
No - of course not. But what WOULD happen is the gambling on the stock market would all but cease. That's not a good thing, so we push for these estimates to keep the betting going.
At the end of the day - the growth mentality is the scariest thing this country faces. This mentality leads to greed and corruption because we have to keep growing at any cost. So, the marxist thought that everything becomes for sale eventually becomes true - whether it's our jobs our regulations or our very environment. Everything gets a price tag to people with the growth mentality.
Capitalism is a wonderful mechanism, but it needs monitoring despite the free market people. There is no such thing as a truly unfettered market and whenever there has been the abuse is rampant.
Well time to move to Mars.
Even if we moved to Mars - the sustainability of this move is not indefinite. It just gives us more time.
A brilliant explanation can be found in this series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=SP6A1FD147A45EF50D