21st Century Sanction of the Victim

Posted by conscious1978 10 years, 2 months ago to Business
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Break out the antacids....

I just saw this guy (Nick Hanauer) on Fox Business saying that the "rich" need to 'give' more to the government, so the government can invest in the middle class.

The contradictions, mixed premises, and anti-concepts in his new form of capitalism are painful to hear. It's the kind of message that goes a long way in corrupting how we know what we know and who owns your life.

SOURCE URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gO4DKVpa8


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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 10 years, 2 months ago
    I listened to the first minutes and read the text. He identifies are real problem and describes it a melodramatic in way. The text says he says minimum wage is the answer. That's proven not solve this problem.

    The cause IMHO is automation and IT. It's realizing the dream of producing more than people dreamed possible with less work. The problem is the wealth it creates is concentrated.

    I don't have a solution, but part of it will be people using automation and IT creatively to help other people. When automation replaces a job transcribing medical tapes, the transcriptionist needs to look at all the technology out there and think "how can I use this and my knowledge to give people what they want and/or solve their problems." That's hard to do. It's tempting to turn to facile solutions as this guy seems to. There will be more facile proposals in the next few decades as the trends continue.
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    • Posted by khalling 10 years, 2 months ago
      The problem is not automation or IT. In fact, tech advances not only create wealth, tehy spread it around. Brand new industries mushroom with the snap of your fingers and thousands of jobs are created overnight. What encourages those industries to happen? strong intellectual property rights and venture capital. However, our regulations through laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley, have venture capital in a choke-hold. In 2000, we had hundreds of tech companies that went public. In 2014, maybe there will be 8. When the housing bubble happened? It was because big money had nothing in tech to invest in. db estimates you have to have 1/2 a billion in sales in order to justify going public, because of the costs to comply with SOX. The Dodd-Frank fiasco in compliance? only Big Banks can comply, little banks have been shutting their doors steadily since its passage.
      Because the tech industry is severely ham-strung by dumb rules and even dumber weakening of the patent system, the printing of money is killing off the middle class-not minimum wage. In fact, unions enforcing rules and bene packages keeping unskilled labor wages at absurd levels has broken the backs of how many companies and how many bail-outs?
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      • Posted by CircuitGuy 10 years, 2 months ago
        I agree with the entire first paragraph, except I can't confirm the numbers. I was never saying automation or IT were the problem. I'm saying they create value in a way that will tempt some people to seek facile solutions. They're not in themselves bad, but some people react in a socialistic way.
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years, 4 months ago
    He definitely suffers from the guilt of success. He feels obligated to pay penance for doing well. Poor man.

    Here is an argument I still hear regularly, and it always makes me cringe: "I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff, do I?" Well, yes you do. Unless you bury your millions under your mattress. You are investing it! You are supporting businesses and industry, which provides jobs and the ability to produce, helping "society" in ways far and above what an average middle class worker can do.

    And another thing, people keep pointing to the 1% versus the lower percentage poor. The 1% keeps getting richer! Correct me if I'm wrong, Statisticians, but aren't the outer extremes always..... extreme? Of course the top 1% is going to get richer, and the bottom relatively poorer. That's mathematically inevitable. The more pertinent question is if the overall quality of life for the poor is improving. I suggest it is. People that we call living in "poverty" are light years better than how most of the "poor" live across the globe or in previous centuries. Trickle down does work. The more wealth we create, the better off everyone is.
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