Originally posted by: BigDH01
Originally posted by: xj0hnx
Seems if we fix the degentrification, if you will, of our laborforce, wages should increase naturally closing the gap a tad. You're just never going to have complete equality in classes, not everybody can be the CEO, or VP. It's my opinion that the class system sets goals for people, which drives them to do better, competition. If there were no competition, if everyone were the same "class", where would the motivation be? What would anyone have to strive for? that's not just human nature, it's just nature. Somethings even mans posable thumbs can't change.
I don't think anyone is arguing that everyone should be in the same class or make the same wage, progressives just argue that at some point too much is too much and too little is too little. Money doesn't just buy consumables, it buys influence and power. A huge disparity between classes in wealth is also a huge disparity in power and self-determination.
This is not a new argument. I know many people here like to talk about the vision of the Founding Fathers, and if you read the entirety of their work, you get the impression they recognize what happens when a great disparity of wealth exists. This is partly shaped by their experience with Monarchy (which is basically just a system where a Monarch privately owns the land and rules the Kingdom) and also, especially in Jefferson's case, the condition of pre-Revolutionary France.
The problem also surfaces when one man can alter the market either by himself or via assets he controls. I'm going to throw out a complete hypothetical, but the average farm acre in Iowa is worth about $4,468. There are 36,014,080 acres in Iowa, giving an aggregate value of 160,910,909,440, or about 161 billion dollars. This may seem like a lot, but Bill Gates, according to Forbes, is worth about 40 billion dollars. Now, Bill Gates is earning a higher return on his money (Ricardian or H-O model, whichever you'd like to use) than the farmers, and thus his wealth will likely continue to grow faster than the wealth of the land.
Now, ignoring the fact that if Bill Gates tried to sell all of his stock he wouldn't get 40 billion in returns and that if he tried to buy a substantial portion of land, the price would increase (these are again, just matters of scale), what if 1/4 of the land in Iowa was for sale and Bill Gates purchased it all? And instead of farming, he decided to plow the crops to build a personal amusement park? This is his right, no? But this imposes a huge negative externality upon everyone else. Eliminating 1/4 of Iowa's corn supply would drastically alter the market, both in food staples and the price of fuel. Now, we might eventually recover from this shock, but many people would starve in the interim and it would take many resources to correct the problem (cut down forests, plant new crops). Or we'd have to reduce consumption and lower our standard of living.
Now, you might say that we'd simply grow new crops and the market would correct itself. True, this could happen, to an extent. But ultimately, we do live in a world of finite resources (extract the above example to a time when there is simply no more land left). Although people like to talk about the wealth pie as increasing, this is only true to an extent. The wealth pie really only represents the underlying resources and how they are distributed. If we are consuming all of the energy then the size of the wealth pie really does not matter, only the proportion you own. Is there a point where one individual or one group controls too much of the pie? Can they use this ownership to coerce you? You see where this is going. Must of us will always have someone ruling over us. Whether it be our representative government or a King, it does not matter.
I would prefer to have a strong government that can hopefully prevent fiefdoms, even if that means they confiscate the wealth of would-be Princes. I would rather be ruled by an agency that at least obstensibly represents the body politic.
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