Occupy George

Which many have been able to grow or start due to Microsoft and Bill Gates.

Is it not, perhaps, the case that the situation was such that these jobs would have been created anyway? My complaint is this.

There are 400 rich people. There are jobs. You attribute a causal relationship.

I say, you could have killed every one of these 400 at birth, and we would still have the jobs (and to be clear I am not advocating doing that at all, I'm just making a hypothetical argument)

Now you might say that it is not these 400 individuals that matter, but that in any system with jobs, there would be 400 people at the top, and these people would have more wealth.

However, it is the "how much more wealth" that is the complaint. Not that there are 400 of them. The complaint is not that these specific 400 people are the problem. Nor that any such 400 would be the problem. The complaint is that a system that allows for the top 400 people to have such a disparate amount of wealth compared to the other 300 million is a fucked system.

To argue that without these 400 people, or any such 400 people, there would be higher unemployment is rubbish. That "we are better off because they existed".

Fuck you, frankly.

Indeed, its more likely that the richest 400 actively act to prevent individuals from gaining wealth and power that can threaten their own. As the feudal system collapsed, small businesses flourished. In order to maintain control, the ruling classes established laws requiring tradesmen to join guilds and pay fees. In the UK for example, guilds had to be recognized by the monarch.

In modern times, these guilds have been replaced by rules and regulations that have the same effect, but their justification is the same: "its in the public interest". Just as you couldn't buy cloth from a non-guild weaver in the 15th century - because it might not be good quality - so now you can't buy a car from Tesla unless Tesla pays millions of dollars for crash testing, or buys a design from an incumbent.

Similarly, patent lawyers. Accountants. That new iPhone app that records your heart rate? Want FDA approval for that? Want to be hit with a lawsuit for a covered medical device that you released without FDA approval? (because they are covered).

I'm not saying that a capitalist world run by a species that is happy to bomb its own offspring could be any different. I'm just saying don't fucking pretend that we owe them any praise. They get away with as much as they can just short of us rising up and killing them.

I think Jerry Pournelle said it best "They don’t really know what they want, but they really don’t want more of what they’re getting."

http://jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=2487

The paper argued that certain things - like the cost of housing (due to rising prices) and health care - were the cause of middle-class debt loads, and that consumption on frivolous items was actually down from the 1970s.

This is a plausible argument. The cost of housing, health care, and education has certainly skyrocketed. What Warren doesn't mention, though, is that all of these areas are heavily regulated and subsidized by the federal government - unlike all the areas where middle-class consumption has declined.

You might be able to persuade me that people are in fact spending responsibly, but you'll have a harder time persuading me that the solution to their problems is more regulations, or that the appropriate target of these protestors is anywhere outside Washington DC.

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