Well, good thing you figured that out so precisely, I suppose? Discussions really are more productive if you insist on painting them not just in black and white, but your black and white.
Zip up your pants, your entitlement is showing.
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Wait, what? Whoâs a dolt? Perkins for Godwinning himself, or are you arguing that Simon did so? Iâm not following here.
The most amazing thing to me is that someone can spend $300,000 on a watch and - if you check the website - itâs a piece of shit. Ugly as hell. Itâs got a face thatâs hard to read because all the guts are exposed, and I think itâs a manual winder. Thatâs like a Lexus you have to push start.
Iâve got a casio that updates itself when daylight saving comes and goes, never needs winding, is shockproof, waterproof, and retails for only $50. If it ever fails, I chuck it and buy a new one. So if Mr Perkins is so fucking smart, how come he spends $299,950 more on something thatâs worse than my casio, just so he can boast about it?
What a total dick.
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This is the basic tenant of libertarian/free market thought, and itâs entirely predicated on the concept that the poor have multiple, really good options available to them even in the face of monopolistic and politically influential corporate practices.
The theory goes: in a truly free market, private entities will do whatâs best for everyone because if they donât then everyone will get up and leave. But this is never how unregulated markets work. In real life, ANY institution - be it a government, a corporation, a church, it doesnât matter, if itâs a man made institution it falls under this rubric - will strive to gain advantages over its competition. If thatâs the goal, and someone has to win, this will eventually lead to consolidation of power, which will lead to an influential minority shaping the rest of the world as they see fit. Itâs about checks and balances aka regulation - without regulation, free markets create monopolies and exploit the citizenry for economic and political, every time. Without checks and balances, governments exploit their citizenry for political and economic gain, every time.
Whatâs the alternative to working for a shitty corporation in an unregulated free market? Unemployment, thatâs what. Sure, the employee can leave, but with no guarantee of employment elsewhere, certainly no guarantee of better employment, because there are no protections.
So the entire debate is about what these âchecks and balancesâ aka regulations aka laws will be about. Who do they protect, and to what extent? And laws are about protecting what we value and disincentivizing what we donât. Allowing someone to become 300 times richer than the average citizen is just as arbitrary as allowing average citizens to earn a minimum wage no matter what they do. Itâs no less arbitrary to decide that workers do not have to share in a companyâs growth, that indeed itâs okay for the company to un-employ the very workers that helped them grow. To decide that thereâs an executive tier that are legally protected from not sharing in a companyâs growth but below this tier anything goes. Nothing in the universe claims that only a handful of people involved in the company are the only ones deserving, and everyone else should be grateful they were ever given anything at all like a paycheck. These outlooks on how institutions should work and what protections we allow are ALL arbitrary, so we have to actively discuss them and select them.
We choose these things to strike a balance, that balance is whatever we choose it to be. But wealth does equal power and influence, and when laws begin to subsidize companies that are already profitable while gutting social safety net practices for those who are already below the poverty line, thatâs an obvious imbalance. When minimum wage stagnates far below the rate of inflation, while top tax rates decline, thatâs an arbitrary choice that reflects the outsized influence of the super-wealthy.
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Simon is involved in several organizations in Baltimore, check out the Ella Thompson Fund or the Baltimore Station.
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New Orleans, too. Itâs almost like @djhbaw1 just made some unfounded assumption about David Simon instead of actually checking his facts before posting.
Plus, the gaudy watch in question alone is worth three-fifths of the entire sum Simon was awarded (in installments) for that MacArthur genius grant he won in 2010. One of these guys has several orders of magnitude more money than the other.
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I think the gaudiness of the watch is beside the point. Brings to mind OJ Simpsonâs âugly ass shoesâ comment.
The line is whichever amount is enough to give every citizen of a country some basic security and dignity in their lifes. This doesn´t have to be accomplished solely through social welfare, but through paying more than basic living wages.
Yes, it is right to forcibly take it up to that point, or at least as right as screwing the vast majority of the population over for obscene personal gain is. But taking it forcibly wouldn´t even be necessary, just raise taxes appropriately.
And fuck charity, if the game wasn´t completely rigged to begin with, nobody would have to rely on handouts by Oprah or Gates.
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[quote=âDaedalus, post:11, topic:21378â]
The moment someone with a net worth of > $100 million is actually murdered by a mentally stable person whose net worth is < $500 and who declares the reason for the murder to be class-based, IâllâŚ[/quote]
âŚIâll start bulletproofing some motorbike gear and embrace the declaration of war.
QFT, emphasis added
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