Central African Republic, $712, US average $62,000.
There's a 100x disparity in averages. You don't get shared yacht enthusiast clubs at $62,000/year. High earners distort this a lot, and if you actually save a large percentage of your income in two-earner, high-earning households, you will accumulate a lot of wealth. Should they not be able to save it? Not be able to spend it after they've saved it?
Hence the "crabs in a bucket" mentality. It's OK for me to be way richer than others, but nobody can be way richer than me.
In what sense does the citizen of the Central African Republic share any economic interest with the American? Legal system and political system are entirely separate.
You seem to think that if some Americans are richer than sone Africans, then it’s fine for some Americans to be richer than other Americans. Conversely, if some Americans want to tax some other Americans, why aren’t they willing to surrender 90% of their wealth to the globally impoverished?
It’s not about guilt, and it’s only partly about fairness per se. It’s about what kind of society we want to live in. Unequal wealth is unequal power. Extremely unequal wealth is extremely unequal power. If you don’t believe me, you don’t have to stop with Citizens United. Consider the French Revolution.
Your examples consistently attribute (exaggerated) returns to virtue, never allowing for chance. Did Bill Gates foresee the PC revolution? Maybe, but so did a lot of other people. Was he smarter? To a degree, perhaps. But he was late to the Internet party, much less did he predict it. He couldn’t know how the courts would decide the rights to the WIMP model developed by xerox. He couldn’t know how the AT&T divestiture would work out. He couldn’t know how copyright would be extended in Microsoft’s favor. He couldn’t foresee the toothlessness of antitrust enforcement.
Could the worker taking a job in a Ford factory in 1980 be expected to predict the US trade policy that would foreclose his career? Did the college graduate joining a bank that year have any idea how important finance would become? One was whipsawed, the other saw a windfall. Where does that fit into your ant-and-grasshopper parable?
> In what sense does the citizen of the Central African Republic share any economic interest with the American?
"in my preferred world, no-one would be so rich"
I'm not sure if you're complaining that the "preferred world" includes ultra-poor non-americans or that it includes ultra-rich non-americans, or that the disparity of wealth and power is so huge between americans and africans, or you think that it would somehow be A-OK if only all americans had some particular limited inequality.
Legal and political systems may be largely separate, but economies are increasingly tied together. Globalization, foreign aid, military intervention, interfering in elections, and even separate political systems may become intertwined.
By no means do I think Bill Gates is an angel, or Henry Ford is without fault.
I do think that they are two good examples of people who got incredibly wealthy by capturing a very tiny fraction of the wealth they and their companies created for society.
Within one working life, by investing 10% of income, I can accumulate wealth of over 100 times annual income while someone who spends 100% of income ends up with 0 wealth.
What part of this are you going to make illegal?
Individual choices, even with absolutely equal starting conditions, yield unequal outcomes.
First of all: I'm not taking sides any way or the other. I was simply annoyed by your straw man ways of making an argument. The one where you claim that OP is being fine with having 1000x more money than this guy, but not 100x less than the other. OP never said or implied that in any way or form.
That said: if somebody wanted to implement something like this, nothing needs to be made illegal. It could easily be done with a more aggressive form of progressive taxation on income or on total assets (as exists in some European countries).
No strawman, just an observation that it is far easier to see the excesses of those far more wealthy than us than for us to see our own excesses compared to those far less wealthy. The 10X numbers were just categories, which were inferred based on the various items mentioned (yacht ownership vs yacht club, etc.)
Central African Republic, $712, US average $62,000.
There's a 100x disparity in averages. You don't get shared yacht enthusiast clubs at $62,000/year. High earners distort this a lot, and if you actually save a large percentage of your income in two-earner, high-earning households, you will accumulate a lot of wealth. Should they not be able to save it? Not be able to spend it after they've saved it?
Hence the "crabs in a bucket" mentality. It's OK for me to be way richer than others, but nobody can be way richer than me.