Not quite. All that Graham attempts to show in the essay is that rich people could, in principle, get rich without taking stuff from poor people. No-one really disputes that this is in principle possible. However, as Stiglitz points out in the book that Graham chooses to quote out of context, this doesn't appear to be how the rich have in fact got rich over the past decade or two.
I do not believe he said this, and it's a non sequitur
How many of his essays have you read? It's a fairly common theme in them.
> it's a non sequitur
The argument is pretty simple: people who are more productive are capable of creating more wealth; the best and most straightforward way (and the only one that's been shown to work consistently) to motivate them to exercise that capability is to allow them to get richer by creating more wealth; wealth creation is economic growth.
I doubt Steve Jobs would have created more wealth if he were allowed to pay 10% lower taxes. Do you?
Once again, how many of PG's essays have you read? This is like asking someone in your English literature class to show you an example of Shakespeare making a joke in one of his plays.
But ok, I'll play along. In the subject essay, PG describes himself as a "manufacturer of economic inequality". How is he manufacturing it? By teaching people how to get rich by creating wealth: "Not just by helping the 2400 founders YC has funded. I've also written essays encouraging people to increase economic inequality and giving them detailed instructions showing how."
So PG obviously is arguing that allowing people to get rich by creating wealth will increase economic inequality. How? By amplifying the variation in productivity between people. And there's no way to get rid of that without getting rid of wealth creation: "Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources."
As for the part where wealth creation is what fuels economic growth, do you really need a quote for that? I would have thought it was blindingly obvious. (In fact, I would say wealth creation is economic growth.)
> I doubt Steve Jobs would have created more wealth if he were allowed to pay 10% lower taxes.
I doubt Steve Jobs would have bothered to create much wealth at all if he hadn't thought he could get rich from it. Which is much more to the point.
The discussion is about marginal tax rates without stating it as such. He might not have been OK with a 95% MTR, but would he have done it with a 45? a 50? People could opine on what he would have or would not have done given that, but I think it's reasonable to say that many people would, and do (given that successful innovators and businesses exist in higher tax countries.) Higher marginal tax rates don't mean you don't get rich; they mean you don't get quite as rich, which is what much of the proposals are about.
No, it isn't. The discussion is about Graham's claim (which I agree with) that income inequality due to variations in productivity--i.e., allowing people to get rich in proportion to how much wealth they create--is an unavoidable consequence of economic growth, which means you can't get rid of it without getting rid of economic growth.
Graham makes a separate claim about tax rates, which is that the marginal tax rate has basically no effect at all on tax receipts as a percentage of GDP. This argument is based on nothing more than looking at the actual statistics since World War II, which do indeed show what he claims. But in itself, it says nothing about what, if any, effect marginal tax rates have on wealth creation.
This is a very hard case to make when Graham's money quote, at the start of the essay, is from a Nobel-Prize-winning economist saying, pretty much in so many words, that rich people get rich by taking stuff from poor people--which is exactly the claim Graham is arguing against.
> Nobody is suggesting that we “prevent people from getting rich” or “end all economic inequality”.
I think you're missing Graham's point. His point is not that people explicitly suggest these things, but that the discussion is framed so that they are implicit assumptions, so far in the background that nobody even thinks to question them. Judging countries by their Gini coefficient, and the criticism the US has gotten because its Gini coefficient is too high, is an obvious example. Everybody argues over what Gini coefficient is "too high" and requires action to correct; nobody even asks whether the Gini coefficient is the right thing to judge by.
> institute an unconditional basic income as an alternative to means-tested welfare programs
A key argument for which is that unconditional basic income would do better at reducing income inequality than means-tested welfare programs.
> allow every citizen/resident into a single-payer healthcare system
This I agree is pretty much irrelevant to reducing income inequality; it is aimed more at reducing the impact of income inequality on access to health care, without doing anything about the inequality itself.
> go back to the tax structure of the 1950s–70s
A key argument for which is reducing income inequality by taxing more of what rich people make. The point being that none of these measures ask why certain people have more income, which is a key piece of information. Graham's point is that if one person makes more than another because they're more productive, you don't want to "fix" that, because it's not a problem, it's what fuels economic growth. It's true that there are other ways for people to make more than others, which are not based on wealth creation, and Graham explicitly says he wants those to be shut down. But after you've shut them all down, you won't have "fixed" the "problem" of income inequality, because people's productivity will still vary, and the more technology advances, the more the variation will be amplified, so the more unequal incomes will be.