RE: I Wish This Was A Joke
January 21, 2015 at 8:19 am
(This post was last modified: January 21, 2015 at 8:20 am by Cato.)
(January 21, 2015 at 4:04 am)Heywood Wrote: Money and numbers in a ledger do not make people better off....real stuff does. Here is a thought experiment. Imagine Gilligans Island. Mr and Mrs Howell have suit cases full of money. Lets say they have 99% of all the money on the island(by your thinking they have 99% of the wealth). Now suppose those suitcases of money are opened up and the money is all divided equally among the 7 castaways. Are the castaways now going to be better off? Nope.
Suppose a pallet containing food, generators, tools, furniture, medicine, ky jelly, etc washed up on shore. Now would the castaways be much better off? Yes they would because real wealth is stuff....not money or 0s in a ledger.
If you want to improve the lives of poor people. You need to produce more stuff.
Now, I am all for re-distributing money. I advocated more than most here I think. I'm just not stupid enough to fall for the claim that the richest people own most of the wealth when they do not.
Tortured language and willful ignorance; or, perhaps, intentional deception. You act as if it's difficult to convert money or 0s in a ledger into real goods (stuff). You also have to ignore that money is the market's method of choice for wealth distribution, not stuff. The Gilligan's Island example is pathetic. Money is simply a means of exchange and would serve little purpose in any environment with seven people and limited resources. This line of reasoning is a non-starter as a means of comparison to a global market.
How exactly are the downtrodden expected to magically create more stuff? This is the solution you seem to suggest, right? They own no land, have no capital, and lack access to natural resources. Again, where precisely do you think more stuff is going to come from?
