I Wish This Was A Joke

[Davka]

You asked, "So you're saying most of the resources at their disposal are of no practical use to them, while millions starve for want of them?".

Bill Gates doesn't have Wharehouses full of stuff that he can buy. The only resources that are exclusively at his disposal are the ones he already owns.....like his house and toilet paper. Those other resources....well they are at the disposal of everyone else too. They are already in the market....making people other than Bill Gates better off.

If you honestly don't believe that Gates has billions of dollars at his disposal, or that those dollars are somehow "not resources," then you are a moron.

---

We're not talking about ONE RICH PERSON's stuff, we're talking about HALF THE STUFF IN THE FUCKING WORLD!!!!!

And frankly, I don't need any more stuff. But there are a whole lot of people who do.

Negative Davka, rich people do not have half the stuff in the fucking world. That is my point. Rich people have half the fucking 0s in the ledgers of the world. You can't eat a 0. You can't drink a 0. You can't drive a 0.

If those zeros are transferred to someone else's ledger, that someone else can go to the store and buy food. They can buy beer. They can buy a car.

Just because most money is numbers in computers these days doesn't mean it's not "real." I buy stuff with zeros all the time. I rarely use cash - most everything is plastic, allowing zeros to be transferred from my bank's computer to the store's bank's computer.

[Heywood]

If you honestly don't believe that Gates has billions of dollars at his disposal, or that those dollars are somehow "not resources," then you are a moron.

If those zeros are transferred to someone else's ledger, that someone else can go to the store and buy food. They can buy beer. They can buy a car.

Just because most money is numbers in computers these days doesn't mean it's not "real." I buy stuff with zeros all the time. I rarely use cash - most everything is plastic, allowing zeros to be transferred from my bank's computer to the store's bank's computer.

Yeah....dummy....if you borrow money from a bank you might be using some of Bill Gates billions of dollars. If he isn't using those dollars, and you aren't using those dollars.....someone else is. And if Bill Gates has taken those billions of dollars out of circulation by stuffing them under his mattress, well that just makes all the other dollars in circulation worth a little bit more while his are out of circulation. It would be like he gave everyone in the world a small interest free loan which is called when he pulls those dollars out from under his mattress and puts them back into circulation. There is absolutely nothing Bill can do that prevents other people from using his monetary resources when he isn't using them. He only has control over real wealth like cars, homes, etc that he hordes. Guess what....he doesn't horde enough real stuff to make a difference in the lives of everyone else.

Money is just a tool humans use to exchange goods and services. If the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation buys a water well drilling rig and sends it from Kansas to sub sarahan africa....more water wells will be produced in Africa but less water wells will be produced in Kansas. The Africans are better off at the expense of the Kansans. On the whole is the world really better off?

Wanting to take Bill Gate's money and give it to the people you choose is simply you deciding that things would be better if resources were allocated based on your whim or opinion instead of letting the market allocate resources. Taking money away from Bill Gates does not magically produce more stuff. It is only a "resource" in the sense that it a tool used to facilitate barter.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Actually, if the bank has loaned his money out, they still have to give it back to him when he demands it. It is still his money, because money is fungible. If I borrow a ten-spot from you, I don't have to clear my debt using the same ten-dollar bill.

This is why your point is not convincing.

Money represents the power to buy something. Controlling half the world's money means controlling half the world's purchasing power, and that is power whether or not you choose to recognize it.

[Heywood]

Actually, if the bank has loaned his money out, they still have to give it back to him when he demands it. It is still his money, because money is fungible. If I borrow a ten-spot from you, I don't have to clear my debt using the same ten-dollar bill.

This is why your point is not convincing.

Money represents the power to buy something. Controlling half the world's money means controlling half the world's purchasing power, and that is power whether or not you choose to recognize it.

Power is one thing, real wealth is another. I thought we were talking about wealth but if you want to talk about power for a minute that is fine. The rich have always had the power....nothing new here. Some of you guys are talking like the rich are hording all the stuff which makes life pleasant(like food, shelter, and clothing) and another Bastille Day is coming. Such claims are utter bull shit peddled by soothsayers in an attempt to influence your vote. The fact that you allow yourself to be manipulated so easily gives people more power over you than numbers in a ledger ever have.

Let me ask you this: Do you think the rich are wielding more power today than they were 100 years ago?

[Chad32]

instead of a fair example of how the mother-fuckers think.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-...NDczMDM0S0

Richest One Per Cent Disappointed to Possess Only Half of World’s Wealth

“Quite frankly, a lot of us thought that by buying politicians, rewriting tax laws, and hiding money overseas, we were getting it done,” said Dorrinson, who owns the hedge fund Garrote Capital. “If, at the end of the day, all we control is a measly half of the world’s wealth, clearly we need to do more—much more.”

This sounds like an article from The Onion. These people do not know how economics work. Do they honestly think their money would be worth anything if they owned 99% of it, or something? The more people that have money, the better off everyone is. You don't need to be a trillionaire to consider yourself successful.

[The Grand Nudger]

True Wealth™ eh Heywood? Color me unimpressed.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Power is one thing, real wealth is another. I thought we were talking about wealth but if you want to talk about power for a minute that is fine. The rich have always had the power....nothing new here. Some of you guys are talking like the rich are hording all the stuff which makes life pleasant(like food, shelter, and clothing) and another Bastille Day is coming. Such claims are utter bull shit peddled by soothsayers in an attempt to influence your vote. The fact that you allow yourself to be manipulated so easily gives people more power over you than numbers in a ledger ever have.

Let me ask you this: Do you think the rich are wielding more power today than they were 100 years ago?

Please address the crux of my post, thanks.

[Mister Agenda]

Negative Davka, rich people do not have half the stuff in the fucking world. That is my point. Rich people have half the fucking 0s in the ledgers of the world. You can't eat a 0. You can't drink a 0. You can't drive a 0.

The main thing that rich people have that poor people lack is assets. Not only do they own a lot of stuff, a lot of the stuff they own makes them more money. They own companies. They own firms. They own real estate. They own LOTS of 'stuff', and most of it is not in the form of electrons floating in a money market account that will never be 'actualized'. You're grossly mischaracterizing the holdings of rich people, though I agree they don't literally own 'half the world's stuff'.

The money has already been printed, so it's not increasing the money supply. It's only .01% of the population, so it's not drastically affecting the market for stuff. And it's in the form of a trust fund that doesn't put all that money out in one year, but over a lifetime, helping with the big expenses that very poor people usually can't meet but that middle class people can take for granted: good health insurance, a college education or trade school, home ownership, and some cash flow in tough times. Stuff middle class people usually get a lot of help with from their parents. Stuff that the .01% will now be able to pass on to their kids.

Where is that money? Sitting in a vault?

Maybe you should have learned that before you started pontificating on the matter. The 'money-value' of a rich person's fortune is an estimate of the value of all their holdings. Proportionately little of it is 'in vaults'. It will mostly be in investments of one kind or another.

If it is than it really isn't part of the money supply until Bill puts into circulation.

Invested money is already 'in circulation'.

If its out in circulation already because banks loaned it out to people then Bill doesn't really have it.

Money that is loaned out is almost the definition of money that's circulating.

Its already been distributed. People other than Bill are already using it to exchange goods and services.

If only it were possible for a banking institution to have reserves or sell some of it's debt to other institutions in order to raise cash when people want their money back. What a world that would be.

In order to make peoples lives better you have give them real stuff.

You seem to understand in theory that you can get real stuff with money, but for some reason you lose your grip on the idea at some point when you're lecturing.

How does moving money from one person's ledger to another person's ledger magically result in the addition of new stuff in the world?

Straw man, much? No one is saying the net wealth of the world is increased by redistributing it. I've explicitly said it would be tricky to do without destroying some wealth in the process.

By taking away buying power from Bill Gates and giving it to someone else? Bill already did that by putting his money in a bank or investing it on other businesses.

This is an example of you changing the subject to the straw man you want to argue against instead of what we've actually been discussing. You've suddenly made 'increasing the net wealth of the world' an objective, but that was never the aim implied in this discussion. The discussion is about whether the richest people in the world have the resources to lift the poorest people in the world out of poverty, and you're twisting your mind into a pretzel trying to find ways to avoid admitting that they do.

If you want to make people better off at the expense of Bill Gates, what you have to do is take away his stuff.

Yes, but we don't have to take away his houses, cars, and boats. What we would want would be his assets, to put them to work for other people. I'm not saying that would be fair. I'm just saying what effect it would have, if administered with reasonable care.

Bill Gates doesn't have enough stuff to divvy up among everyone such that it improves their lives in a meaningful way.

No one is saying divide it among everyone except you, and that's only so you can make it sound more impractical than it actually is. The thought experiment, and the only point of doing redistribution in the first place is to make poor people better off, not everyone. And a quarter million dollars each to the 300,00 poorest households in America is life-changing money, especially if it is managed carefully.

And you wouldn't be dividing it by 300 million. I wouldn't even give any of it to Americans, personally, but if I were, I would give it to the bottom .01% (about 300,000 people), and that's about a quarter of a million each, life-changing and life-securing money. Enough to ensure good health care, good education, and a secure retirement.

The problem with this thinking is it assumes that there is this vast supply of healthcare and education that is simply not being utilized because poor people don't have any money.

Yeah, .01% of the population being able to afford as much of those things as a middle class person will almost certainly wreck the economy. Where's that jerking off emoticon?

The argument then goes that if you give poor people money, demand for healthcare and education will increase, so more of it will be produced.

That's basic economics. A lot of people seem to want to focus on supply side or demand side, but both sides are always in play.

The world produces things for people.

People produce things for people.

Would it be fair to say that you would like to see the world to produce less things for Bill Gates of the world and more things for the Joe Dirts of the world?

Would it be fair to say that you can't consider a thought experiment impersonally? What I would personally like to see is no one living in grinding poverty. I'm not married to one particular idea on how to accomplish that. And Bill Gates, to his credit, is doing more to redistribute his wealth than I would ever consider having imposed on him.

Now suppose the world stopped producing things for the Bill Gates of the world and diverted all that production capacity to producing things for the Joe Dirts of the world. Would the Joe Dirts be substantially better off? I don't think they would.

That's the kind of bind into which someone stuck in binary thinking gets. People poor by American standards don't need that much more in the way of things. They generally are not starving or naked. They need good health coverage, a decent place to live, some education opportunities, and a secure retirement. There's no need to divert all the production capacity from the Bill Gates to the 'Joe Dirts' in order to accomplish this.

Your plan doesn't even divert all the worlds production capacity away from benefiting the Bill Gates and toward benefiting the Joe Dirts.

Gee, could it be because diverting all the world's production capacity is not the point or the goal?

It only diverts a very small fraction of it. I just don't see your plan being all that effective.

Maybe because in your estimation, if the fortune of Bill Gates was evenly distributed among all Americans, each person would only get enough to buy a square of toilet paper, when it would actually be a couple hundred dollars apiece. If your math is that bad (off by about four orders of magnitude), how can you expect to understand a point that uses arithmetic?

[Davka]

If you honestly don't believe that Gates has billions of dollars at his disposal, or that those dollars are somehow "not resources," then you are a moron.

If those zeros are transferred to someone else's ledger, that someone else can go to the store and buy food. They can buy beer. They can buy a car.

Just because most money is numbers in computers these days doesn't mean it's not "real." I buy stuff with zeros all the time. I rarely use cash - most everything is plastic, allowing zeros to be transferred from my bank's computer to the store's bank's computer.

Yeah....dummy....if you borrow money from a bank you might be using some of Bill Gates billions of dollars. If he isn't using those dollars, and you aren't using those dollars.....someone else is. And if Bill Gates has taken those billions of dollars out of circulation by stuffing them under his mattress, well that just makes all the other dollars in circulation worth a little bit more while his are out of circulation. It would be like he gave everyone in the world a small interest free loan which is called when he pulls those dollars out from under his mattress and puts them back into circulation. There is absolutely nothing Bill can do that prevents other people from using his monetary resources when he isn't using them. He only has control over real wealth like cars, homes, etc that he hordes. Guess what....he doesn't horde enough real stuff to make a difference in the lives of everyone else.

Money is just a tool humans use to exchange goods and services. If the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation buys a water well drilling rig and sends it from Kansas to sub sarahan africa....more water wells will be produced in Africa but less water wells will be produced in Kansas. The Africans are better off at the expense of the Kansans. On the whole is the world really better off?

Wanting to take Bill Gate's money and give it to the people you choose is simply you deciding that things would be better if resources were allocated based on your whim or opinion instead of letting the market allocate resources. Taking money away from Bill Gates does not magically produce more stuff. It is only a "resource" in the sense that it a tool used to facilitate barter.

Your comprehension of how money works is equal to your comprehension of how reality works.

---

Actually, if the bank has loaned his money out, they still have to give it back to him when he demands it. It is still his money, because money is fungible. If I borrow a ten-spot from you, I don't have to clear my debt using the same ten-dollar bill.

This is why your point is not convincing.

Money represents the power to buy something. Controlling half the world's money means controlling half the world's purchasing power, and that is power whether or not you choose to recognize it.

Power is one thing, real wealth is another. I thought we were talking about wealth but if you want to talk about power for a minute that is fine. The rich have always had the power....nothing new here. Some of you guys are talking like the rich are hording all the stuff which makes life pleasant(like food, shelter, and clothing) and another Bastille Day is coming. Such claims are utter bull shit peddled by soothsayers in an attempt to influence your vote. The fact that you allow yourself to be manipulated so easily gives people more power over you than numbers in a ledger ever have.

Let me ask you this: Do you think the rich are wielding more power today than they were 100 years ago?

Wealth = power.

---

This sounds like an article from The Onion.

That's because it's satire.

[Mister Agenda]

Yeah....dummy....if you borrow money from a bank you might be using some of Bill Gates billions of dollars. If he isn't using those dollars, and you aren't using those dollars.....someone else is. And if Bill Gates has taken those billions of dollars out of circulation by stuffing them under his mattress, well that just makes all the other dollars in circulation worth a little bit more while his are out of circulation.

I would be hesitant to call someone a dummy when my reply is a non sequitur, but that's just me.

It would be like he gave everyone in the world a small interest free loan which is called when he pulls those dollars out from under his mattress and puts them back into circulation. There is absolutely nothing Bill can do that prevents other people from using his monetary resources when he isn't using them.

So take some of his zeroes away from him and see what happens. His money being in circulation obliterates your point rather than supporting it.

He only has control over real wealth like cars, homes, etc that he hordes. Guess what....he doesn't horde enough real stuff to make a difference in the lives of everyone else.

His foundation has brought resources to bear against health problems in impoverished countries comparable to the efforts of the World Health Organization. Millions of people will live longer, healthier lives thanks to his fortune. And that's not taking into account the green revolution he is helping to fund in Africa, or the efforts he's making to help American students be prepared for college.

And your fixation on dividing his stuff up 'among everyone' continues to so bizarrely miss the point as to constitute deliberate obtuseness.

Money is just a tool humans use to exchange goods and services.

No shit, Sherlock. That's what we're trying to drum through YOUR thick skull.

If the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation buys a water well drilling rig and sends it from Kansas to sub sarahan africa....more water wells will be produced in Africa but less water wells will be produced in Kansas.

Because Kansans can't afford to dig wells? Because Bill Gate's money comes out of their pockets? Are you on drugs? Bill Gates won't be able to produce as many wells in Kansas. But he's not digging wells in Kansas now anyway, he's floating on MicroSoft stock.

The Africans are better off at the expense of the Kansans. On the whole is the world really better off?

The whole world does not need to be fucking better off. The worst off need to be better off. How in the world can this be too complicated for you?

Wanting to take Bill Gate's money and give it to the people you choose is simply you deciding that things would be better if resources were allocated based on your whim or opinion instead of letting the market allocate resources.

Personalizing the thought experiment again, I see. The argument isn't that this is necessarily the best way to make poor people better off, it's that the resources are there. You've been arguing the resources are not there, and apparently you are dimly aware of having lost that argument, so now you want to bring ethics into it, as though anyone was seriously proposing sending in jack-booted accountants to take away all Bill's assets.

Taking money away from Bill Gates does not magically produce more stuff.

No kidding. It only moves it around. If you can't argue with what we're actually saying instead of what you're making up to put in our mouths as we go along, maybe your thoughts aren't worth the electrons you're wasting posting them.

It is only a "resource" in the sense that it a tool used to facilitate barter.

I really hate to call people morons, but you're tempting me. Give me all the zeroes in your net worth and we'll see who has more resources then. And by the way, barter is when you don't use money.

---

Actually, if the bank has loaned his money out, they still have to give it back to him when he demands it. It is still his money, because money is fungible. If I borrow a ten-spot from you, I don't have to clear my debt using the same ten-dollar bill.

This is why your point is not convincing.

Money represents the power to buy something. Controlling half the world's money means controlling half the world's purchasing power, and that is power whether or not you choose to recognize it.

Power is one thing, real wealth is another. I thought we were talking about wealth but if you want to talk about power for a minute that is fine. The rich have always had the power....nothing new here.

And what do they use to buy that power? Apparently all their money is worthless unless it's tangible property in their possession, so there seems to be a contradiction between you recognizing their source of power, which they, for the most part, buy with their money, and you going on and on about only 'stuff' mattering.

Some of you guys are talking like the rich are hording all the stuff which makes life pleasant(like food, shelter, and clothing) and another Bastille Day is coming.

No, we're not. You're projecting that position on to us, because you're too fucking intellectually lazy to address what we're really saying.

Such claims are utter bull shit peddled by soothsayers in an attempt to influence your vote.

I can think of no incidence ever where that thinking has influenced any vote of mine in the slightest degree.

The fact that you allow yourself to be manipulated so easily gives people more power over you than numbers in a ledger ever have.

The fact that you think you understand economics although all you can do is parrot Misesian talking points makes you the one who has been successfully manipulated. And the fact that you can't even understand what our actual position is, because it's not what's under discussion, what's under discussion is whether the wealth of the world's richest people is sufficient to effect real progress for the poorest people, and since it is, you want to talk about something else. We haven't even started talking about what we should really be doing.

Let me ask you this: Do you think the rich are wielding more power today than they were 100 years ago?

Another subject change. No. Rich people were very powerful a hundred years ago, as well.

If you were honest, you would admit that the developed world's top .01% richest people have sufficent resources that if their fortunes were intelligently and carefully redistributed, it would be enough to change the situation of the 10% poorest people in the world for the better dramatically. THEN, you can talk about the ethics of it. Because if you're not honest enough to concede a fucking point, you're in no position to be taken seriously on ethical matters in the first place.