"It is wrong to say God made rich and poor; He made only male and female, and He gave them the earth for their inheritance." -- Thomas Paine, On Agrarian Justice
http://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html
The Social Security system Paine advocated was more targeted to 21 year olds and was designed to offer everyone opportunity at the height of their lives. While he also theorized keeping the elderly from poverty, it was not the core idea of his plan.
Yes, and Jesus said[1] "ye have the poor always with you."
Likewise, there will always be crime, and disease, and suffering.
But do you agree that extreme inequality is a bad outcome? That putting more and more wealth and power into the hands of fewer and fewer monopolists and oligopolists is toxic to democracy and freedom?
If so, then working to reduce extreme inequality is a noble cause just like reducing crime, disease and suffering is worthwhile.
Even if these maladies will always be with us.
Inequality has increased, but the net standard of living has increased as well. Objectively, everyone is better off. Of course, some people may feel poorer because now they see the mcmansion on the hill and wonder why they don't live in that level of luxury (which didn't even exist before).
Most economists seem to credit capitalism with the extreme advancements in quality of life, even for the poorest citizens, in first world economies. Sometimes the problem isn't inequality but envy and jealousy - I believe the Bible speaks to these two emotions as well.
It's also challenging to just look at consumption and assume everyone is the same. Consumption levels might be stable, but the lower income brackets may be taking on more debt to finance that consumption.
Additionally, as Pikketty points out, a lot of the spending/benefit gap between higher and lower incomes has emerged in categories like education and healthcare, which is not as easy to track by looking at people's houses or a consumption based standard of living.
So what did you do so special that you get a 5-fold increase in your living area and what did others do so wrong that they got a 2-fold increase only?
Sometimes the problem isn't inequality but envy and jealousy - I believe the Bible speaks to these two emotions as well.
The part that grinds on the human psyche is just a plain old sense of fairness and justice. Why muddy it up with religion?
Furthermore, relative gains matter because they say something an individual's economic standing in society. Your average person's quality of life might have improved significantly compared to a generation ago, but so has that of everyone else, with whom one is in economic competition. It's great than an iPad of 2014 is many, many times more powerful and costs less than a Mac of 1984, but having a Mac in 1984 gave you a significant economic edge, whereas owning an iPad today just means that you're not poor. Notwithstanding the enormous technical superiority of the current device, its economic utility depends on how well you can leverage it in today's economy, not of an earlier one where such a device would have been miraculous and allowed you to take over a small country.
I'm not a Christian anymore so I care less than I once would have, but your biblical interpretation is goofy. (It may still be common?) The context of that statement by Jesus was that he had just gotten a nice rubdown with an expensive oil, and people criticized the nice lady who gave him the rubdown for wasting money that could have been given to a soup kitchen. Jesus told them not to sweat it because he only had so much time left in which to receive rubdowns, while the homeless dudes weren't going anywhere. The very next sentence in the text says, "but you will not always have me."
We have seen again and again that policies, programs and revolutions aimed at "reducing inequality" succeed only in increasing the misery of all and especially the poor who suffer the most from any absolute declines.
Those who perpetrate such evil on mankind always seem take their failure well, resting easy on the nobility of their intentions. In their own minds, their moral rightness excuses their mathematical error. They believe output to be an independent variable, immune from effect by their policies. But far from immune, it is hypersensitive.
We have known for a very very long time that the type of order that causes the prosperity of mankind to shoot skyward, enriching all in absolute terms, can also, to our moral horror, enrich some more than others. Our graphs an charts usually fail to show that it also greatly increases mobility; hardly anyone stays poor across generations. The only thing that can keep people poor are programs designed to reduce inequality.
Of course, there are certain policies that do create inequalities which could be unwound without shrinking output. To name a couple: debasement of money by central banks, corporatism (cronyism + bailouts). These simply transfer wealth from poor to rich without creating any value.
The Bushes and Clintons did not derive political power from wealth. Likewise, their great political power does not bestow upon them great wealth (though they certainly are wealthy, they're not in the same universe of, say, Donald Sterling).
And those with wealth, such as the much discussed Koch brothers? Their influence on policy seems to be near zero. Bill Gates had his company dragged through the mud several times.
GWB's great grandfather was a wealthy industrialist that was business partners with one of the wealthiest people in the country, E.H. Harriman (Director of Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, and Wells Fargo). GWB's grandfather, Prescott, made his fortune as VP and Partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, a bank that eventually would employ Prescott's son George HW Bush, as well as Alan Greenspan and several other senators and cabinet members. BBH spun out a division that was ultimately Drexel Burnham Lambert -- the 5th largest I-Bank in the country until Michael Milken blew it up. HW Bush's maternal grandfather started an investment bank that was eventually sold to Merrill Lynch, and was also a director at Harriman brothers. HW's maternal grandfather was president of McCall's (publisher of Popular Mechanics, Redbook, and McCalls before selling them to Hearst).
George HW Bush's business career started at an oil equipment company, Dresser Industries a subsidiary of BBH, where his father had been Director for 20 years. Dresser formed a spin-out JV with Ingersol-Rand and still operates as Dresser-Rand (Mkt Cap: $4.5B). Dresser Industries would go on to be purchased by Halliburton via a Dick Cheney-negotiated deal for ~$8 billion. Some years later, HW Bush would co-found Zapata Petroleum Corporation (with a recently retired CIA agent) and Zapata Offshore (funded largely by Phillip Graham, the owner of WaPo), which he would lead until 1966. Zapata Petroleum became Pennzoil (worth an estimated $4.2B in 1998). Zapata Offshore would eventually rebrand as Harbinger Group (Mkt Cap: $2.4B).
Zapata has a great history if anyone's in the mood for some conspiracy theories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbinger_Group.
Tl;dr:
* Most of their SEC and disclosure records from the 1960's were accidentally destroyed just after HW Bush was appointed to be VP.
* Zapata owned off-shore rigs that served as bases of operations for anti-Castro missions
* The CIA's official codenames for the three boats used in the Bay of Pigs invasion were was actually 'Barbara', 'Houston', and 'Zapata'.
* Within 24 Hours of JFK's assassination, before he had ever ran for office, HW Bush is mentioned by name in a memo prepared by J. Edgar Hoover.
* Bill Liedtke, co-founder of Zapata Petroleum, and then-current Chairman of Pennzoil, personally flew nearly $1M of money laundered through a Mexican bank, to DC to beat the impending campaign finance disclosure midnight deadline on behalf of Richard Nixon. $89,000 of that money ended up in the bank account of one of the Watergate burglars.
George W. Bush, much like Donald Sterling, owned a Major Sports Franchise, though granted it was with an ownership group that only netted him tens of millions when it was sold. I'll ignore all the earlier failures GWB saw when he was backed by US and Saudi billionaires (William Draper, Lewis Leherman, Salem bin Laden, Khalid bin Mahfouz).
So I guess being scions to a family that's spawned multiple billion dollar businesses with activities in banking, venture capital, machinery, railroads, oil and gas, and airlines and being family friends with billionaies had nothing to do with their political power?
It lists $80MM for Clinton.
If the Koch brothers weren't getting a return on their political contributions, I highly doubt they would continue to do so. After the recession there was a big push for wall st regulation, higher taxes on the 1%, and increases in welfare program funding, and yet nothing meaningful came from it despite popular support. My guess is the Koch brothers consider that a success.
"...it's almost impossible to quantify whether the Koch brothers or Soros dominate this political realm. That said, both the Kochs and Soros have spent incredible riches in this area with no sign of stopping."
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/09/opensecrets-battle--...
In the latter case that's pretty clearly true, at least as to their own wealth (as the Clintons weren't particularly wealthy independently of their political success), in the former case, not so much.
I don't agree that the Koch's influence on policy is near-zero, though nor do I think they have the entire GOP in their pocket as the Democrats like to imagine. They're not stupid, they expect a return on their political investment. I'm guessing they've done OK out of subsidies, if nothing else.
I don't mean to be partisan here, you couold say the same thing about various union groups.
Since inequality does not intrinsically harm anyone (unlike crime and disease), we can only evaluate the nobility of reducing inequality by it's consequences. So what, pray tell, are the intrinsically harmful consequences of inequality?
The definition of poverty also shifts ... in North America today everyone has a tv, and probably a computer, all of which could be considered luxury goods at points in the past - no one lives today like the poor of a hundred years ago, but we still have people who we consider poor, and who consider themselves poor.
But does it always need to grow without bound? Is it the same in all countries - and if not, why not? And how does welfare for the worst off change with different amounts of inequality?
I took a class from a famous economics professor who had emigrated from the former Soviet Union after its collapse. He made the point one day that there have always been rich and poor - and always will be. In America, the predominant distinction is capital wealth - dollars. In the USSR, it was political power; if you had political power, you had private planes, villas, and servants. At the end of the day, the inequality is always present.
Link: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141218/tyler-cowen/ca...