are we free to amass any amount of money and do with it what we want?

Question

it seems to me that there is a limit to the amount one can contribute to society and that therefore one should not take out more than we put in by our work - otherwise we are stealing, and thereby creating injustice, overpay and underpay [which grows endlessly] creating righteous anger and violence which also escalates endlessly and thus makes us unsafe and in danger and having to go to war and having to fight and pay for crime [in money and person]

the social pool of wealth is filled by products of work, and so taking out more than we put in has to deprive others unjustly, ruining our own happiness with the danger, anger and resentment, the escalation of war [to extinction soon]

good liberty always stops short of depriving others of liberty

the market is no judge of how much we contribute, because the market pays for scarcity and other things which are not our contribution

[we now have pay from $1 to $1 billion for a fortnight's work]

do you think i am right, or wrong?

Answer 1

You are addressing 3 or more topics with this question.

The 3 important ones are.
Free market economies.
Societal moral norms.
Gov intereference with a given market economy.

In a truely free market, don't mistake the US economy for a free market anymore. The Gov has created a very rigid system of controls that strongly favors the interests of various groups including big corps and lawyers. As such the ability to compete with a monopoly once established is greatly hindered in the US economy. Hindered is really a major understatement. In a truely free market if an item is overpriced or overvalued compitition will take care of that item's overvalue.

In most nations at one time in their history including the US. Certain staples such as bread and milk are subsidized to keep the prices low. There are strong reasons for this. First almost everybody eats bread. Families rely on milk. So for people to eat well such items have needed to be cheap. It was a way of pacifying the masses. Well fed people are much easier to get along with you could say. Much less likely to make changes that might leave them less well fed.

The second issue with that is if people absolutely need something there will be many people providing that item. The more compitition the lower the cost of that particuler item. So essentials as well as non-essential but highly sought after items in a free market will be inexpensive. The more compitition generally the lower the cost of the item. Computers are a great example of how quickly the cost of an item can go down due to demand and compitition. The greater the demand for the raw materials to make an item the generally the cheaper those raw materials become. Unless there are real shortages in the raw materials that cannot be easily overcome with a substitute material or a new process to create those raw materials then the demand for the raw materials for an item will create a cheaper cost to obtain those raw materials which when bought in bulk becomes even less expensive. This creates a cycle until eventually the costs reach a practical bottom limit. Computers have nearly reached that practical limit with current technology but soon wearable computers will drop the costs of a computer even more. In 15-20 years you will be buying a state of the art computer for probably less than $100. Game consoles, music, computer software that is not Open Source, diapers, potato chips and so many other items availible in the US are availible only thru monopolies. So the prices are artificially elevated, inovation stagnated and support nearly non-existant. Even with a a 3 company monopoly on gaming consoles Microsoft is having to sell the X-box at a considerable loss to stay up with the price of the PS series from Sony. They can however. A new start up could not do that and stay in business. The 2 big diaper manufactuerers on a reguler basis run the compitition out of business because they can and do sell for a loss long enough to wipe out the compitition. So inovation is stagnated keeping the prices artificially high.

So the cost of an item is fixed to many variables. Taxes, whether or not it is provided by a monopoly or essential components are provided by a monopoly, the costs of the raw materials to produce it and demand. Plain and simple if not many people want something then as often as not the raw materials are not as in demand and the costs to produce the item is higher. So the cost will be higher. In terms of collectables and luxory items sometimes artificial scarcity is produced to give the product a higher demand and higher cost/profitability.

Most people in the US are essentially broke or deep in debt. There are exceptions. Bill Gates collects money just to collect money as an example. He doesn't reinvest it. Finally after Turner lambasted him for 2 years running Gates got into charity work. For some people money is a game. Gates is one of those people. Money itself is necessary. There are things people will do only for money or out of a Patriotic/religious spirit. Many necessary things have no real patriotic or religious significance. So without money they would be very difficult to accomplish.

A barter economy tends to work well with a small group of people who have similer needs/goals and on a small scale. Barter becomes rather unworkable when you try to accomplish tasks on a large scale. The details of who gets what for what and how to distribute it and getting every individual to agree first to the deal, then second to carry out thier end becomes exponentially difficult the more people who are involved. So to build a 747 with barter is nearly impossible. Building a computer again would be nearly impossible. Research in particuler is extremely difficult to do in a barter system. A researcher has no product to barter really. Most researchers take other peoples work then add thier work too it. Eventually it adds up to usefull information in the hands of the right person. This person then invents the steam engine, the light bulb, a camera. All technologies built on hundreds of years of research. Most of it by people who never produced anything usefull as a product. What they learned however made future products possible. So in essence barter would elimanate technological growth. Technically you could trade food for a researchers efforts as an example. Realistically people would not be happy with that in the long run.

As for fairness. Actually a free market system is the fairest system of all. Yes there are examples where it is not working. This is mostly due to Goverment interference and monopolies. The CEO pay scale for example. The ONLY reason these huge corporations are able to get away with such insanity is that they have no viable compitition. If there were more than 3 companies in the US refining oil the gross inefficiency that I've seen at the oil companies could not succeed. Huge corporations breed waste and the lack of compitition means they never have to go in and find/remove that waste. Instead they can just lay off workers to make the stockholders happy. Simple easy solution which damages the companies competitiveness. However since they feel like they have no competitors they have no reason to do the more productive things like inovate.

As for individual contributions to society. Most people contribute far more away from work and do so for free than they ever think about doing as a job. Society functions mostly outside work. Jobs are the economic foundation for the society. However in the US society you see rich and poor playing in the same band together, on the same bowling team in a league, playing on the same softball team or taking the same karate classes. Many of these activities are possible because people donate time and resources to allow them to happen. The Church/Temple which helps the homeless. The social programs put on by non-profit organizations. The doctors who risk life and limb to put on free clinics in underserved areas. Little league coaches, seniors donating time to help people start a business. Religious functions, civic groups, clubs, organizations. So much of it done by volenteers. There is nobody out paying anybody in the SCA for example. Most people who help put on a Ren faire for example make just enough money to cover the costs of working there. Many day camps are essentially money losing propositions or heavily run by volenteers/people working for experience or grossly underpaid but doing it because they love doing it. For every job there are 20 social jobs you could call them which are really more important to the people doing them than their job. Being a parent one of the most common and most important. Few people get paid to be a parent. They do it out of love and duty. The internet itself would not be here except for so many people giving away thier hard work. Microsoft was the last company to adopt TCP/IP and did so grudgingly. It was the last piece of resistance to allow the Internet to be born as public access. The TCP/IP stack however was created by people then given away. The standards are maintained by non-profit orgs. So this post would not be possible if all people ever did was work at a job. People's constant devotion to non-paid tasks are what makes the world go around.

So wealth is a very very poor measurement of a person's contribution to society. It is often actually inverse to their contributions. However many have taken wealth and used it for great ends. The founding fathers of America for example. They risked it all to provide the funding that made the American revolution possible. Many philantropists are why we have many things we take for granted today. Schools for example. Public education in particuler. Many hospitals came about through donations. Many of our ancestors lived to concieve us only because of free hospitals. We take our easy access to health care today for granted. In many nations the only health care availible for most people is what is provided by Western volenteers. So again another example. If our doctors were not well paid, many would not have the money or incentive to go treat the poor for free.

As for injustice. That is rather ironic actually. The poor in the US have a better standard of living than the wealthy in many nations. The reasons for this are many. Few have to do with interaction with other nations. Jealousy is a human emotion. One that we are born with and one that is very hard to control. School uniforms are for example an abysmal failure. Why? Well there are always ways to identify yourself as a group or to flaunt an economic status. Kids were getting mugged for clothing for example. So they made everybody wear the same thing. So kids started getting mugged for shoes, for jewlry. Take that away and they'll get mugged for portable music players. Take that way and they'll get mugged for the contents of thier pockets. Take that way and they'll get mugged just for being the wrong group. All this "leveling" has done was to distance us from our humanity. It did not improve safety one bit. Niether would economic leveling bring about justice. It would increase injustice. It would make sure everybody suffered. Kind of counter productive in my opinion. The concept is to REMOVE suffering not spread it around.

So conceptually I disagree completely. I think the efforts would produce more results if we sought more liberty. More chances for advancement. More opportunity. That comes with more freedom. That comes with removing barriers and breaking down monopolies. That comes with removing the Gov's hands from the economy except to break up monopolies. Most of all that comes from within ourselves. For every notorious act of greed and grand theft on the corporate scale there are thousands of people who had the same opportunity and who thought it wrong to do so. Most injustice is perpetrated by the lack of moral responsibility taken by the perpetrators. No law can change that. Only societal mores and beliefs. Whether they come from upbringing, social pressure, religion or example it doesn't matter. If you want justice you have to start in your own back yard. You have to yourself be as just a person as you can be. Then your neighbor, and his neighbor and the neighbor after that. That is our only safegaurd against corruption and greed and all the worst that humans are capable of. No law can stop such activities. No rules, regulations or economic systems. If people have a want and a need they are going to scratch it any way they can which does not violate thier belief system. The more flawed the societies belief system the more injustice will be done.

Our value to society has nothing to do with our wealth. Our wealth should have everything to do with our merit at what we do, but unfortunately due to Gov interference and monopolies this is not the case. Justice is produced by a just society and nothing else can bring it, grow it, dispense it or otherwise influence it. We can create a more just society. Such a simple solution yet so hard to do.

Answer 2

I agree with your sense of justice, but totally disagree with your sense of economics.

Throught all of your posts you cite numbers which are never properly footnoted. You tend to use odd units of measurments such as income per family (income per capita is the standard measurement) and pay for 2 weeks work when annual or hourly income is the standard..

You countinuously fail to distinguish wages from capital gains. It isn't Bill Gates which is making these ridiculous abouts of money, it is Bill Gates' capital which is doing the work. Think of it like renting a house; your house is doing the work and you manage it a bit.

You may have a point with some golden parachute CEO packagese, but those types of payoffs are the exception and aren't nearly enough to make a difference in poverty levels internationally. Most of your huge income numbers come from payment on capital. Your alternative is giving government firm ownership or taxing capital to the point where people won't invest. Either way you kill capitalism and the enterpenuership.

The best solution for capitalist countries are reasonable minimum wages and a fair social net (although there are some unemployment issues and macro economic backlash if too large). Quality education is the best way to level the economic playing field and better the whole economy. While this isn't punishing rich people, it indirectly pressures them without totally killing their incentives.

To take this to an international solution is beyond what is reasonably possible. The western world can't maintain peace in Afganistan and Iraq, let along deal with genocide in Sudan. Countries like France and the US talk a big game, but regularly shirk when comes to doing what is required. As long as warlords dominate the middle east, africa and south america it will be impossible to make any type of economic transfer to those countries.

I hate the fact that children starved today, but the structure to regularly feed every child and adult isn't there. Even if we could feed everyone, it is a huge distance before many people are productive members of the world economy who can pull their own weight.

Answer 3

I have always thought that the market values things in terms of how necessary or useful they are, but in an inverse relationship. That is to say, the more important something is, the cheaper it is monetarily. Some examples:
Air - very important, and, of course ( for the time being ) FREE!
Water - also very important, and cheap or free.
Bread or rice - important, too, and very inexpensive
Gold-plated statue of my cat Lizzy - not very useful in the broad scheme of things, therefore, VERY EXPENSIVE

in this way the market does, as you say, reward scarcity, but if you use my inversion of values you can see that things like SUV's, expensive foreign wars, marketing campaigns, PR, Ivy league educations, designer medications, and space travel are really quite worthless

on the other hand, sound judgement, happiness and a good attitude, fruits and vegetables in my garden, the sunrise, and my annoying little sister are really beyond estimation.

not to say that these things don't come with a cost, but it's a price that's hard to measure in terms of $$.