I was about to reply to this post and decided to make a new thread:
Capitalism is not as good as you think if it comes to the point where 1% of the population owns 90% of the money. It's hard to find examples of honest trade, rather more and more poverty and slave labour while the fat pigs get fatter.
I keep reading this complaint about the "top 1%" controlling too much. How do we know this distribution is suboptimal? I personally have difficulties imagining an efficient human-controlled society where the "top 1%" does
not manage large amounts of resources.
You substitute "control" & "manage" for the word in your quote, "own." That's the cause of your misunderstanding.
A factory boss manages scores of people, he controls them, though he doesn't own them. I think the objection in your quote is to 1% owning so much, not simply controlling it. Have i helped?
Distributing large-scale resource management to over 70M individuals (1% of the planet's population) is not currently possible and managing resources in a non-capitalistic fashion leads to systemic degeneration. Most people currently alive are not educated enough for such a broad asset distribution to work.
What is it you wish to distribute to 1% of the world's population?
The economy is not a cake that must be divided. We eat food cultivated, planned, farmed, transported and stored via markets that optimize through Capitalism.
You say "optimised," others say trashed beyond repair -- loaded words are loaded.
Wrecking the markets to try eat the dollars is not much of a plan.
I agree, not much of a plan. Why propose it if even you find it lacking? Eating dollars is sillier than burning them. I understand there are pricey drinks made with gold flecks, my guess is minced goldleaf. So it's not that rich folks don't try
There are many problems for which more and less distributed solutions exist, with a different resulting wealth distribution and no simple answer on which is better. Take financial security: how much money should people hoard personally, how much should they pay to insurance? Insurance will give the insurance's manager tremendous power, hoarding will leave more to the middle class instead. But are they better off with the hoarded amount instead of insurance? Tail risks are bad, and you don't want to be the uninsured hospital patient who runs out of cash.
You're mixing thing up again. When you pay insurance premiums, your insurance guy doesn't pocket the money. He controls it, his firm might invest or loan it, but there's no concentration of wealth -- the money's not his.
As far as insurance being a good or a bad idea? That's debatable, though has nothing to do with the 1%.
But more importantly, why is asset equality a goal? So people have no richer people to be jealous about?
It's not a goal, really. Some people just feel queasy when they have everything & others have nothing. Latent religiosity maybe? Or their folks taught them it's nice to share. Some are just afraid that the poor might start sharpening pitchforks if the disparity got too great, so sharing becomes a cowardly act.
And the poor are just jelly. You know how those people are.
The problem of poor people is how well they can get out of poverty, not how the high-level part of society distributes wealth. Any redistribution in just Europe or the USA that decreases overall efficiency would just starve more people in poor countries. I don't remember seeing protest banners reading "We speak for the 1.29 billion", the people below the poverty line who are likely to die from lack of food and medicine. Is it not hypocrisy to call some exact distribution near the top "unfair" while neglecting over a BILLION people elsewhere?
Absolutely.
"Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." And "cast the first stone," and all that stuff. 99-percenters are just as rotten as 1-percenters. And some are whinier.
A note on "slave labour" in the quoted post: Capitalistic slave labour in the West should be impossible by definition. Capitalism is roughly free voluntary human action; if a worker has no free choice of the best willing employer, this is not Capitalism. If he has that choice, he is not a slave worker. The only way to get classical slavery in Capitalism is to explicitly allow it. Poverty and slavery are not strongly connected: there could be a world with slavery but no poverty, as there could be a world with poverty but no slavery. It's not useful to mix up those two as they are totally different issues.
I'll save your footnote for later