Referencing Doc G's post below about the greedy bastard hedge fund manager....
You guys need to view this guy (and guys like him) in a different light.

If it were not for the occasional “poster child for capitalism” how would noobies and others be motivated to put their capital and fortunes at risk (often times losing it all). Or what would motivate these guys to work their 80 to 100 hour weeks to keep the wheels of capitalism turning?. . .  all in hopes of “winning life’s lottery” as Congressman Dick Gephardt (Democrat - Missouri) once phrased it.

You know… it’s only about 5% of the type A personalities that really keep things going. The rest of us (while some may work harder than others) are really just along for the ride.
Plus, no one talks about the countless "greedy" ones that lose it all. Unless of course they are the middle class ones that were stupid enough to put more than 5% into one single investment.

Think of this guy analogously to the guy that shreds and burns the U.S. flag. Not a very nice thing to do, but people have pledged their lives (and given same) to allow him to do it.

Without the FREEDOM to do as one wishes with THEIR OWN WEALTH, then how long would it be before too many others would lose their own motivations to “keep things going?

Decry him if you must, but at the same time you should fight for his right to be extravagant.

-- Modified on 8/15/2007 2:27:05 PM

You present a very clear argument. Thanks for giving me a better perspective from your side. The flag analogy was a home run for me personally.

FWIW, I don't begrudge him, GaGambler or anyone else the right to be extravagant. Hell, if you've seen pictures of me and my trike, extravagance isn't exactly foreign to the Doc either. But i just wish they would give a moment's thought to those who have nothing.

Many of us just think that these "life's lottery winners" don't contribute back near enough to the infrastructure of the society that they used to get wealthy.

Plus, not all, but most large corporations become exploitive in many ways to the environment, the fabric of society and the people who work for them.

When you say “winning life’s lottery”, how much is that? Does the ex CEO of FORD who presided over 6 months of the company's worst losses in history deserve to win "life's lottery" like he did? How much do these CEO's and Hedge Fund guys need for it be an incentive? $10mil? $15Mil? $50mil? $100mil? 500mil? Where does the "incentive" end and the obscene begin?

Ya know, not everybody is born with the "talent", "smarts", opportunity, means to a great education, etc that others have. Does that mean the rest of the people should simply say, what the hell, some people deserve more money than they could ever spend no matter how hard they tried while others deserve poverty, near poverty, without means to get proper health care or have to live their lives totally stressed out about how they are going to retire in dignity or pay for their child's college education?

I'll tell ya one thing -- Even among the upper mid class this over-the-top "greed" is stifling the economy. If people felt they would not lose their health insurance and did not have to worry about sending their child to a decent college, more people would become Entrepreneurs. Heck even company's like FORD would not have the $1,400 expense on each vehicle that goes to their employees health care! We'd be more competitive against the Japanese who HAVE nationalized health care and they are kicking FORDS ASS!

We're just saying there's a better "happy-medium" than what's going on now. That's all.

-- Modified on 8/15/2007 7:56:38 PM

If some "winner at life’s lotto" wants to cruise the boulevards in a 24 carrot gold Rolls Royce powered by a 500 cubic inch V-8 with a Whipple supercharger proudly poking through the hood sucking in vast amounts of atmosphere and fossil fuel; Have at it, they earned it.

 What torques me off is the unfair influence the mega wealthy have on our income tax structure and our political process. The pre amble of our Constitution says "We The People" not 'We The Shareholders'  

When the phrase "We the People" was coined, one indeed needed to be a "shareholder" of sorts. One needed to OWN LAND in order to VOTE.

It was a very liberal Democrat that coined the term and was meant to be divisive, suggesting that (as you apparently also believe) that the wealthy and successful did not earn it. Sure there are some with "old money" that inherited theirs, but most of the wealth is "new money" that well... I guess they just got lucky.

You say, "not everybody is born with the talent, smarts, opportunity, means to a great education, etc that others have." I beg to differ that you need those to become wealthy. I especially dispute your claim on the lack of OPPORTUNITY. Also, motivation and hard work are just as key to success.

You are typical of those full of envy and “whine”.

Don't be so dishonest with your "Nobody's begrudging wealth" statement. You only believe that as long as it's YOU that get's to decide how much wealth is OK.

All "I'm" saying is that for you guys that want to keep trying to level the playing field with egalitarian outcomes instead of opportunities, then you will have to live with the result that the new, more level playing field will be totally lower than otherwise.

-- Modified on 8/15/2007 10:38:03 PM

march into the wilderness and stake your own claim, and be a landholder.

And, you also had to be a white male.

After the revolution, the controlling authority for granting land (ownership) was the States (then eventually the Feds) who extended their authority to the Mississippi River.

Any place sufficiently westward in which there was no one to care or dispute your "wilderness claim", also afforded you no place to vote, nothing to vote on, i.e. no government.

Correctemundo on the white male bit, but of course that was just another vestige of "shareholdership".

staking claim to wilderness hard?  Even after they closed down the Homestead act, you could still file mining claims on federal land.

And of course the point is that the idea of "we the people" has changed a little bit over the years.  I would suggest that the changes from 'white' & 'male' are more significant than the issue of land ownership.

I'll bet I can still find cereal mfgrs selling a square inch of land in AK for 10 boxtops.

The fear: if it weren't for those 5% our whole society would crumble into the shitcan of history.  I'm glad we manage the economy so the right people are unemployed.  

By historical standards, this is pretty baseless.  After WW2, Germany had lost all their "type A personalities."  By the late 50s, it was an economic miracle.  

About conspicuous consumption being a motivator: I don't see how this is historically true, either.  The opposite can be argued: that conspicuous consumption has been used to oppress and intimidate.  The nobility and monarchies of Europe were very conspicuous consumers at the time, and you could bet the lower classes were not usually motivated and inspired by it.

Maybe CC is supposed to mean something else in our culture, but I doubt that it's the only conclusion people steeped in it will draw.  In human psychology, you can't count on a moral response all the time.  

That all being said, I've been glad for some conspicuous consumption, and I don't mind him bringing a castle over here.  I'd like to ask him, though, if he planned to do that before he got that rich, or if this is something he came up with  afterward.  It doesn't say Type A personality to me.  

-- Modified on 8/16/2007 9:15:27 AM

A significant portion of the population does not have health insurance.

We don't even have ONE bullet train which would help alleviate traffic on our major airports and be better for the environment -- yet Japan has how many? Europe how many? Why? We have no money in the U.S.? I wonder who has it all?

Your "incentive" for hard work (as you put it) to let the "hardest workers" horde all the wealth  while letting the rest of the planet die due to not enough "money" is not a very good proposition to me.

Take away ALL the Type A personalities (which did NOT happen in Germany. They didn’t ALL disappear) and give everyone that remains, economic freedom and people will flourish. Is miracle YOUR word? Maybe I should start arguing the “miracle” based on the LACK of Type ”A”s.

I never said that type “A”s were REQUIRED for success. It’s a distraction and leaving out the type A bit, actually strengthens my argument, that if given appropriate economic freedom ANYONE can become successful.

You must not know too many very successful people or else they are all “old” money ones.

Your argument against conspicuous consumption being a motivator is based on the feudal economic system. Give be a break. Again, REPEAT AFTER ME. E-C-O-N-O-M-I-C---F-R-E-E-D-O-M is the key. The point was, . . . take away or even reduce this guys right to consume HIS wealth as HE wishes and you are eroding the very same ECONOMIC FREEDOM that was fundamental to creating it. You claim to have no problem with his consumption but at the same time you are in favor of large tax increases that would diminish his capability to do so.

I personally think the psychology of the two very different views of his consumption go to one the roots of the differences between conservatism and liberalism.  Both may initially feel envy, but then one transforms it into motivation while the other can’t get past the resentment.

... of those tax dollars.

How many B2 bombers are still on order to the tune of $1 Billion each? Twelve? Fifteen? Thirty Seven? How about we make just one less B2 Bomber, and re-allocate that billion dollars to fund schiolarships for bright, but economically disadvantaged children? (my B2 numbers are simply examples usedto make my point).

How many billions of dollars are we allocating for our presidents glorious work in Iraq? Six hundred billionand counting? How much for the current vig? One hundred and Thirty Seven Billion? How about one hindred and thirty SIX billion, and use 1 Billion dollars to help support the medical needs of US Military Veterans being deprived of needed medical assistance.

This country's general mentality has become a textbook case of selfishness and greed.

We Can Do Better.

We CAN feed the world...But theres not enough profit in it.

We CAN heal the sick...but that would weaken the HMO bottom line.

We Can. But we as a nation have become far too bloated in our self-assessed superiority. We have become far too arrogant. Far too fat. Far too spoiled.

Get my point? Or do you need me to hit you over the head with a statistical baseball bat?

economics and politics being tied up - I doubt that you can truly separate the 2 for very far, for very long.

But "freedom" is not an obvious thing.  What sort of "freedom" are you talking about?  Freedom to pee in the street?

is that solving one problem creates another.

I guess I just gag at the most obvious stupidities.

I don't see the sense in niggling over B-2s when there's only a dozen people in the USA who don't see the stupidity of the position we've put ourselves in, even if half of them are still willing to trust the incoherent asshole they elected to fuck things up.

HMOs.  Don't get me started.  I used to think, why get the govt involved in something the private sector can do?  Now, I'm tending to the view that the HMOs do NOT do it that well, and even the govt couldn't fuck it up worse, and maybe it'd get some basic services to people who need them.

I just dunno Doc.  We got people here arguing that because some wars are necessary, that makes any war good.   Why do I think these fellas experience is limited to fucking video games?

Well, I'm going to see about solar power on my units this pm.

I was using the hmo and b2 as examples to illustrate my point.

Perhaps a better example would be Crusader, a 42 ton Howitzer on wheels built by a division of the Carlyle Group. An obsolete weapon the Pentagon didn't want, but a $12 billion dollar contract was allocated and disbursed, anyway.
(I'm not even going to get into the Bush family connection here.)

Sickening to see how skewed our priorities as a nation have become.

Where do I join you in the soup line?

Let's see...An incentive for hard work would be a system where those that worked harder reap more benefits. Nah, that will never work.

How much is overpayment for these "hard workers"?

-- Modified on 8/16/2007 6:56:17 PM

price controls too?

I thought it was arguable.  

It's hard to argue that the leadership of Germany (after the War, West Germany) didn't take a serious hit.  Their government and industrial leaders were dead, in prison, or in Argentina.  Their scientists like Einstein and Von Braun were expatriated.  I'll admit, it wasn't so much aimed at type A personalities, but it's a reasonable conjecture to say there was a dearth of them.  

West Germany's recovery in the 50s and 60s was remarkable.  More remarkable, in fact, than the Reich's economic recovery before the war.  

You know, I pointed out that it was a different economic system.  So, might more conspicuous consumption indicate that what we're developing into here more resembles a feudal system?  I try to bring up things that you maybe haven't thought of.

As for the successful people I've known, there was one person I knew who did much better than his neighbors did.  Now he wasn't too extravagant, but the small amount of extravagance he allowed inspired his neighbors more to vandalism than inspired them to become as rich.  

Hence, the more extravagant the consumption, the more society is probably going to have to spend to protect it.  Extravagance requires protection, hence either private funds or tax money.  Usually both.  The wealthy will tend to pass that on to the general public as much as possible.  

Hence, you can't really have extravagance without more taxes.  Nothing invites theft and vandalism like a Porsche.  

Wealth can only be defined by the social system in which it is created and enjoyed.  Therefore, it's relational. Which brings me to the point that the rich only have wealth because the general population (or the powers within society) mostly agree that it's better that they have it. Either they made it by social contracts and rules which most people agree are better kept than scrapped.  Or that the person has proved himself a national treasure, like say, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.    

And since it's relational it's better to tax the rich, because wealth is also power and all powers should have checks and balances to preserve other individual freedoms.

Ultimately, with such a discrepancy between the rich and the middle, sometime you'll see some extravagant consumption that will convince you of this.

And if you don't know my answer based on my above responses...well nevermind.

which came out in elaborations above is simply this.

If we take away or reduce their right to spend their own wealth, then they will be inclined to produce less of it. Which in the end will hurt all of us.

Too many people, like Stamina4hrs (and maybe you, I don't know) think capitalism economics is a zero sum game. Of course it isn't.

If a CEO makes too much money, it is totally between Him vs the Board of Directors and the Stock Holders. It's nobody elses direct business. Of course that company's customers can have an indirect say, but that would be very unusual.

BTW, No credit's due to the Marshall Plan?

see below

But most of the time, it's pretty close.  I mean, what is the concept of market share, anyway?  You might be gaining share in a growing market, so it's not exactly zero sum we're talking about here.  

Promoters of it like to talk of an "expanding pie." The problem is, if growth of the "pie" is three percent, and one sector gains five, then for the others sharing the platter, it might as well be zero sum.  

Conservatives never talk about the economic growth compared to the proportion of the share the wealthy are gaining.  This isn't just the new growth that's added to their share; it's the new growth and then some that was once the other peoples. You think capitalism is a tool for wealth.  IMHO, it's probably the wealthy using capitalism as a tool for spoils.  I think we've reached a point where they are taking more wealth than they are making.  

The Marshall Plan got Europe started, of course. I show that I hate America when I forget praise our glorious nation. Why did I think I could ever talk about Germany in the 50s and 60s without mentioning the Marshall Plan in the 40s?  

It's like we can't forget to talk about the Constitutional Convention without saying: "What about France?  Don't the French get any credit?  Would the Founding Father's have ever written the Constitution if it weren't for France?"  

Of course, we all hate the French so we always forget.

that is, about the way you think.