steven

How much wealth another has, will not affect your life. Unless of course, they sign your paycheck.

Jia

That’s just plain wrong I'm sorry to say. In our theoretically “free market” economy we compete with the rich for assets. That includes, for example, residential real estate. Over the past several decades THIS is the reason why residential real estate price inflation has been vastly greater than regular consumer goods. As the rich (or their proxies, the financial institutions that the rich own and control that issue mortgages) have begun since the 1980s to accumulate proportionally vastly greater wealth than the median working class person they have been looking for investments to make (the reason the stock market seems to be growing ever more entirely out of touch with the working class economy … because it is out of touch … the rich are the ones buying it and selling it and setting it’s prices) and assets to buy … like residential properties for example. So, therefore it’s THE PRICE THE RICH BUYERS / INVESTORS ARE WILLING TO PAY not only in competition with you, a wage earning working class person, but also in competition with OTHER RICH BUYERS / INVESTORS. The residential housing market is experiencing this phenomenon EVERYWHERE there has been neoliberal capitalism that has transitioned to the new “finance capitalist” services based model in the world’s so-called “advanced” capitalist democracies. The countries where more political control has been ceded to the rich banker class, and the richer the highest 1 or 2% have become, and the higher the residential housing prices have spiraled. So your message is just wrong. In a capitalist society, we compete for assets with everyone, including the super wealthy. You cannot outcompete them for assets. And since the value of their assets is based upon scarcity, they will fight you at every opportunity to prevent you from creating an abundance of an asset they purchased while scarce. They will fight to maintain artificial scarcity. Food gets thrown away. Clothes shipped to vast distant valley dump sites, and residential houses are prevented from being built by a variety of means. If the super rich are permitted to become as exceedingly wealthy as they are now in the USA and also gain complete control of the political system then you have no chance at all to compete against them at all for assets and critical resources. Your statement is one of the favorite little bits of false consciousness the phony intellectual rich bow-tied playboy toff followers of French anthropologist René Girard (“Mimetic Desire”) spew on and on with their “we must stop the politics of envy”. It’s utter bulls**t in a capitalist society. They know it, and they only prattle on about it in the vain hope all the shy working class intellectual boys who haven’t yet completely figured out their sexuality can be “turned” conservative if they think that the well dressed bow-tied Girard boys are kinda cute and maybe they’re on to something about needing to “transcend materialism and envy”. That’s some hilarious sh*t coming from the oak paneled home library crowd, young “sensitive intellectual” sons of men who have been comfortably members of the 1% for at least two or more generations already and sucking up more and more of the nations wealth, resources and assets for their next generation every day. It’s a class war. They know it is. You know it is. Wealth and assets IS life. And whether we like it or not we currently compete for assets with those that are wealthier than us. Vastly wealthier sometimes. If wealth of others is so unimportant then you won’t mind a 5% wealth tax imposed upon the those whose wealth exceeds say 10 million dollars, scaled up to 25% for anyone whose wealth exceeds 500 million dollars, and 50% on all the billionaires. Do I hear some words of protest? I hope not. See, I believe wealth distribution is very important to the proper function of a society and a sure fire way to destroy a well ordered civil, law-abiding, country-loving, entrepreneurial society and nation is to permit the kind of wealth and asset inequality we’ve permitted to occur since Reagan set the mechanism in motion in the 1980s. It’s long past time to remedy it, before the rich and their ideology and bitter brutal class war hidden by a cynical ugly and possibly soon to be violent culture war destroys what’s left that is good in the country.