Originally posted by Aggie Man
reply to post by jam321
The rich also increased their salaries while the poor & middle class saw very little increase, if any at all. The rich may have paid more taxes. However, during that same period, the rich got richer and everyone else got poorer.
If the wealth of the rich is not redistributed and they continue to get richer, while everyone else gets poorer, then eventually the rich will have ALL the money and there will be none left to buy their goods and services...THEN WHAT?
This isn't a very complicated issue. The people that are left with no purchasing power either die, live out their meager existences in slums, or "adjust", stop lazying around, and get to work. Look, you can't expect to have as much purchasing power as an IT technician or whatever, as a corporate executive of an IT consultancy firm, for example. People have to realize that even "hard" work and persistence won't get them as far as the ability to fully utilize every portion of your mental and physical faculties would.
People are rewarded for ingenuity and creativity in this society of ours, and to do so you really have to put yourself out there, and really make risks. Over one life time, that corporate executive has subjected himself to a degree of risk infinitely (this is not metaphorical; this is mathematically accurate) more so than the IT "worker", who has really engaged in nothing, other than maybe buying some stocks or bonds from his company here and there. The person that risked more for the good of the advancement of industry and progress should be rewarded more than the person that simply contributed their exhaustible physical faculties to that industry.
A possible solution? Replace all physical labor with capital equipment, such as automata and use them in conjunction with a cybernetic goods/services delivery system to transport finished products. So no one does any physical labor whatsoever. All the people will now have the time to invest their full mental faculties into a highly competitive and vigorous marketplace, where creativity and ingenuity are properly rewarded, and not biased towards those that contribute greater personal financial risk, entrepreneurs and investors, for example. This would immediately close the great fiscal divide that is so evident between long established social, racial and even cultural groups. People can't be born into money, or marry for riches. Blacks would not get worse education than whites. Hispanics would not have worse health insurance than the rest of us, etc. There are no inheritances. They would be irrelevant. Unless you could inherit the knowledge of your predecessors actual brains in the form of a CD or something, you would be no less entitled to wealth and fortune than any other person born in the same year as you. Obviously, intellectual rights to "knowledge" that was developed by your father, for example, would not be passed on to you, but would become the sole property of some global academic institution, which your father's business would have the rights to reproduce and profit from. The whole goal is that education as a life long process would allow anyone to accumulate whatever amount of wealth they choose to pursue. There would be no taxes in this resource based economy, where everything is provided instantaneously through the aforementioned robotic-cybernetic interface system. The human population would be spread much further than it is now. Dense cities would be irrelevant in such a world, where communications systems utilize the speed of light on a quantum level. Just like the Greek city states in the first millenia BCE, these communities would function as their own governments, with their own constitutions, and the interrelations of these communities would serve as the primary interests of a legislative body, which are then reviewed by a judicial body, on the basis of its equity to all communities involved in this extended cyber-city, which are then enforced by a collective military power by the executive branch. So by governing our own little municipalities, we in the long run govern the entire system. Pathway Governance, Hodocracy.
[edit on 28-10-2008 by cognoscente]
[edit on 28-10-2008 by cognoscente]
