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Originally Posted by midcan5  More proof America is becoming a third world nation due to republican voodoo economics. A hard question: Is it moral (not legal) to make that much money?
"Piketty and Saez’s top bracket comprises 0.01 percent of U.S. taxpayers. There are 14,400 of them, earning an average of $12,775,000, with total earnings of $184 billion. The minimum annual income in this group is more than $5 million, so it seems reasonable to suppose that they could, without much hardship, give away a third of their annual income, an average of $4.3 million each, for a total of around $61 billion. That would still leave each of them with an annual income of at least $3.3 million.
Next comes the rest of the top 0.1 percent (excluding the category just described, as I shall do henceforth). There are 129,600 in this group, with an average income of just over $2 million and a minimum income of $1.1 million. If they were each to give a quarter of their income, that would yield about $65 billion, and leave each of them with at least $846,000 annually."
What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You? Peter Singer
"What is a human life worth? You may not want to put a price tag on a it. But if we really had to, most of us would agree that the value of a human life would be in the millions. Consistent with the foundations of our democracy and our frequently professed belief in the inherent dignity of human beings, we would also agree that all humans are created equal, at least to the extent of denying that differences of sex, ethnicity, nationality and place of residence change the value of a human life." What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?, by Peter Singer | Is your morality really all that virtuous if it must be forced upon others at gunpoint? Quote: |
Originally Posted by Peter Singer The target we should be setting for ourselves is not halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, and without enough to eat, but ensuring that no one, or virtually no one, needs to live in such degrading conditions. | This is a ridiculous goal, and inherently unjust; the better goal is, "The target we should be setting for ourselves is not halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, and without enough to eat, but ensuring that no one, or virtually no one, is forced through the threat or application of coercive violence to live in such degrading conditions."
If people end up living in extreme poverty, and without enough to eat, due to their inherent lack of individual merit, or value to others, so much so that other will not voluntarly relieve them, then I'm fine with them dying from extreme poverty, and and lack of enough to eat--because the patently obvious reality is, we are not *actually* created equal.
__________________ "It is self-evident that no number of men, by conspiring, and calling themselves a government, can acquire any rights whatever over other men, or other men's property, which they had not before, as individuals. And whenever any number of men, calling themselves a government, do anything to another man, or to his property, which they had no right to do as individuals, they thereby declare themselves trespassers, robbers, or murderers, according to the nature of their acts." -Lysander Spooner
"Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves." - William Pitt |