I guess if you think about it that way then everything is luck and we live in a deterministic world where none of your choices matter. That still wouldn’t support the argument in the OP meme though.
Except IQ is one of the largest predictors of wealth. as well as certain personality traits. (Openness, Consciousness and extraversion). Also this might shock you but as you move up in percentile income your average hours worked goes up
Obviously some people inherit wealth, people win the lottery, and there’s even a lot of evidence the correlations above start to fall apart at the very top end of the distribution implying some degree of luck. But to explain away every single person that’s rich is just someone who got lucky is not living in reality.
Capital is more like stored labour. The first ever capital was just a starp stick or spear. Someone spent labour and it resulted in a more productive way to hunt animals. This almost immediately would’ve resulted in inequality as the spear hunter caught more game. It’s not that the capital was taking anything from the labourer, it’s actually that capital and labour work really well together and humans are more productive with capital.
You’re also taking a snapshot of the most regulated industry in the US. Building high rises is illegal in huge swaths of urban areas. Before we say the free market isn’t providing an answer cab we actually try it? I’m talking removing exclusionary zoning, speeding up the permit process and reducing the power of local action committees, and reforming the broken heritage process that’s used by rich people to keep their areas from densifying.
Curious why you made the distinction about real personal income when it is also rising. I agree wealth inequality is rising but not that it is coming at the expense of real personal incomes.
The long-term trend is that the average person’s income is rising but we’ve seen recent declines due to high inflation. Can you expand on your line of thinking? I’m not sure I follow your reasoning.
Most households living below the poverty line have at least one unemployed person, so giving people jobs is pulling them out of poverty. Whether or not they are treated fairly at work and are satisfied with their working conditions is another story.
My parents never could’ve either but $500k household net worth only puts you in the top 20% of households so it’s not like they were exceptionally wealthy and we don’t know if they borrowed to invest or what exactly their specific situation was. Miguel Bezos was a Cuban refugee and then worked as an engineer for Exxon and Jackie Bezos was a secretary so i mean this is pretty middle class IMO.
That doesn’t mean that all billionaires clawed their way to the top as i mentioned above, or that we shouldn’t make progressive changes to the tax code. It’s just important that we separate truth from fiction to make educated decisions.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz grew up in a Brooklyn Housing project, George Soros survived the holocaust and worked waiting tables, David Murdock of Dole Foods was homeless. There’s tons of examples.
Here’s a fun article that ranks the whole Fortune 400 list. 80% of them inherited their wealth or at least grew up middle class.
Jeff Bezos actually scores high on the list because his Mom had him when he was 17, he flipped burgers in high school and by and large did not grow up rich.
You didn’t read the article you linked. In it Walter Block states that slavery violates the non-aggression-principle and is not permissible under libertarianism.
This is not at all a debate in libertarianism. Libertarians recognize the role of a limited small government to protect individual rights. Like please pull up one example of this debate going on in a libertarian space.
Libertarians don’t believe murder should be legal and crazy shit like that. Libertarians believe in a guaranteed freedoms like freedom of speech, economic liberalism and are often social progressives who believe in gay marriage and drug legalization.
The bill of rights was brought to you by libertarians.
Why don’t you just focus on your own money and I’ll focus on mine. I like my apple products, they work well and perform the tasks well that i need them to do.
The mass shootings are the symptom of a larger mental health problem. Here in Canada where we have much more gun control we recently memorialized one of our most deadly attacks, The Toronto van attack which killed 11 and wounded 15 (some critically). How is gun control going to help the fact that some people out there want to kill as many lives as possible?
Goddamn those time-travelling Venezuelans.
So where are you going in Australia?
“No idea mate. Figure I’ll sort it out when i get there.”
Well the labour theory of value is where ‘surplus value’ comes from and is the theoretical underpinning of a lot of your argument.
Why didn’t we work together? Maybe we were on different sides of the planet or didn’t enjoy working together for many reasons. The point wasn’t that we weren’t working together. This was a hypothetical scenario to demonstrate that in this specific scenario the excess profits were the result of deploying capital. Even in communist societies part of the output that is generated is not wholly due to labour but due to the allocation of capital by the communist regime. For example in the USSR the mechanization of labour resulted in standard of living increases because labour without capital is of very low value. Capital without labour is also of very low value. A factory without workers would not work very well at all either. It’s the combined utilization of all the factors of production (Total factor productivity) that determines how much income can be generated in the economy. The larger the TFP the higher the wages. Economies with free markets have higher total favor productivity as the individual production decisions are dispersed among many business owners and workers rather than centralized in the hands of a bureaucratic elite.