Breaking Down The 'Income Inequality' Extremists

[Edgetho]

A big part of obama's "Statists of The Union" dictum will center around this topic. You can expect his OFA minions to invade (Mau-Mau, actually.... Read: Tom Wolfe) our beloved message board with all sorts of misdirections and outright falsifications.

These people need to be understood. If you don't understand your enemy, it makes it difficult to defeat him.

And yes, I didn't use the word 'opponent' on purpose.

Believe me when I tell you, WE are not their opponents in their minds. They're fighting a War and we're trying to make nice with them. Well, except for me.

The 3 Types of "Income Inequality" Religious Extremists

With disturbing regularity, pundits great and meager decry a familiar and reviled foe of progress known as "income inequality."

Under the rubric that income inequality is inherently evil, unfair, or overly capitalistic, three distinct sub-sects of this odd religion have emerged.

The "Wall Street Needs More Regulation" Tribe:
Tyler Cowan of George Mason University is emblematic of this group. Cowan is concerned with the growing disparity of wealth between the top one percent and the remainder of society. He believes it is linked to structural problems with our society -- especially Wall Street's ne'er-do-well financial engineers -- that can only be solved by big government.

In 2011, for instance, Cowan wrote that he was unsure whether "the new financial regulation bill [Dodd-Frank] will help" and offered several endorsements of its key features. Cowan seems to have missed the century-long tidal wave of regulation already levied upon the financial industry with government inevitably destroying that which it claims to protect (housing, student loans, etc.).

The thousand-page Dodd-Frank bill -- which was never read by lawmakers -- confers immense and unconstitutional powers on an unelected bureaucrat

All these quotes have been <snipped> Please go to the link for the whole story

The "Robots Will Steal All Our Jobs" Tribe:
Mike Shedlock is the archetype of the robophobes, publishing one fear-mongering article after another, seemingly on a weekly basis. A sampling of his headlines may help offer some perspective into the mindset of this particular brand of Luddite:

• Meet "Baxter" the Robot Out to Get Your Minimum-Wage, No Benefits, Part-Time Job, Because He's Still Much Cheaper; Fed Cannot Win a Fight Against Robots
• Carl the Robot Bartender Mixes Drinks and Chats With Customers
• Future of Medicine: Meet Sedasys - Your New Robot Anesthesiologist
• Robotic Outsourcing; Food Preparation Robots Invade China, Japan, US; Who is to Blame, and What Can be Done About It?
• $210,000 Cow Milking Robot; Presenting the "Astronaut A4 - A Natural Way of Milking"; How Far Off is the Completely Robotic Farm?

There are more. But the last one is particularly striking: since the dawn of human history, increased automation has marked the cultivation of food. From men tilling fields and picking crops to massive farm machinery and crop-dusters, mechanization of farming has improved the lives of billions of people.

And somehow "robots" will disrupt that trend?

Each new innovation -- a robot is but one example -- creates entire new ecosystems to plan, design, build, and service.

The 1730 invention of the flying shuttle dramatically accelerated the process of weaving and production of cloth. This innovation in turn led to incredible new opportunities for entrepreneurs to supply raw materials, service machinery, create new families of finished products, and the like.

You may know it as the Industrial Revolution.

The "Statist" Tribe:
Paul Krugman, on the other hand, belongs to the dogmatic school of progressive thought. In this case, you can read progressive as Doctrinaire Marxist.

Krugman, whose inane posturing and reflexive hypocrisy have been thorougly exposed as pure, unvarnished idiocy by historian Niall Ferguson, pretends to belong to the Cowan tribe.

But his cheerleading of Communists like Bill DeBlasio gives away the game. Krugman is a Statist; his religion is government; and any of his bleatings -- income inequality or otherwise -- are designed to lobby for increasingly centralized and authoritarian government.

As the French painfully discovered with their one year flirtation with Marxism, collectivism can't work, won't work, and has never worked in all of human history.

And somehow Paul Krugman and his fellow ideologues missed that part of history class.

What's 1,000 times worse than income inequality? Income equality.

In truth, North Korea represents the ideal for those who fight for income equality with its one man at the top worth tens of billions of dollars while the entire civilian population starves, largely impoverished.

 

[eagle1462010]

As long as they make their money on equitable capitalism I have no problem with people being rich. Which means they create a product that people want and make money off of it.

Where I draw the line is USURY...............In which those in that class make massive amounts of money in the markets, without producing a dang thing.........Derivatives out of this universe, without the means to back it up.........

Trading commodities 1,000's of times to drive prices up. Not by supply and demand, but by Stock Market CASINO MAGIC.............Bubbled up with 85 BILLION a month from the Federal Reserve............

After the Great Depression, our country passed the Glass Steagal Act to prevent another melt down.........It worked, until we decided to change it back and then the Derivatives exploded to well over a 1,000 TRILLION in the markets to IMPLODE in 2008. They did this in less than 8 years, and crushed our economy.

Too many, still try to narrow the blame on those who lost homes and not the system that allowed this to happen by not regulating Wall Street. Completely ignoring how they drove the prices of every day goods up of commodities and materials bought by the public. And then bailing out the 2 Big to Fail banks with LOANS at 16.2 TRILLION from the Federal Reserve at virtually 0% interest.

These same banks are STOCK HOLDERS at the Federal Reserve in one form or another......

This needs to end, and their actions are quite frankly TREASONOUS........

When they crash us again with this FAKE MARKET based on FIAT MONEY, will we again let them get more Fiat Money to bail them out again..........................Or should we SEIZE their assets and let them go under.................

 

[eagle1462010]

Fraud Caused the 1930s Depression and the Current Financial Crisis ? Washingtons Blog

This Mr. Ponzi of course is the man who gave name to the “Ponzi scheme” that many use today. He laid the groundwork for many of the criminals today in the housing industry. Yet during the boom he wasn’t seen as a criminal but a player in the Florida real estate bubble.

James Galbraith recently said that "at the root of the crisis we find the largest financial swindle in world history", where "counterfeit" mortgages were "laundered" by the banks.
As he has repeatedly noted, the economy will not recover until the perpetrators of the frauds which caused our current economic crisis are held accountable, so that trust can be restored. See this, this and this.

No wonder James Galbraith has said economists should move into the background, and "criminologists to the forefront."

Note 1: I asked Professor Black to comment on this essay, and he said the following:
The amount of fraud that drove the Wall Street bubble and its collapse and caused the Great Depression is contested [keep reading to see what Black means]. The Pecora investigation found widespread manipulation of earnings, conflicts of interest, and insider abuse by the nation's most elite financial leaders. John Kenneth Galbraith's work documented these abuses. Theoclassical economic accounts, however, ignore or excuse these abuses. The Justice Department did not respond effectively to the crimes that helped spark the Great Depression so we have far fewer facts available to us.

The decisive role that "accounting control frauds" played in driving the current crisis is clear. The FBI warned of an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud in 2004 and predicted that it would cause an economic crisis if it were not stopped. The mortgage lending industry's own experts reported that "liar's" loans were "an open invitation to fraudsters" and fully warranted their name -- "liar's" loans -- because fraud was endemic in such loans. Lenders and their agents led these lies. They led the lies for an excellent reason -- the strategy is a "sure thing" (Akerlof & Romer 1993 -- Looting: the Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit). It guarantees record (albeit fictional) profits, which maximize the CEO's bonuses. The same strategy for maxmizing fictional income maxmizes real losses in the longer term. When many lenders follow the same fraudulent strategy the result is a hyper-inflated bubble followed by a severe crisis.

 

[orogenicman]

A big part of obama's "Statists of The Union" dictum will center around this topic. You can expect his OFA minions to invade (Mau-Mau, actually.... Read: Tom Wolfe) our beloved message board with all sorts of misdirections and outright falsifications.

Wow, did you stop taking your meds? Oh dear.

These people need to be understood. If you don't understand your enemy, it makes it difficult to defeat him.

That's an odd statement. Enemy? Aren't we all Americans (most of us, anyway)?

 

[dblack]

This debate boils down to who should make economic decisions, individuals or government?

 

[LoneLaugher]

This debate boils down to who should make economic decisions, individuals or government?

Our system is one of representative government. You have your answer.

 

[eagle1462010]

A big part of obama's "Statists of The Union" dictum will center around this topic. You can expect his OFA minions to invade (Mau-Mau, actually.... Read: Tom Wolfe) our beloved message board with all sorts of misdirections and outright falsifications.

Wow, did you stop taking your meds? Oh dear.

These people need to be understood. If you don't understand your enemy, it makes it difficult to defeat him.

That's an odd statement. Enemy? Aren't we all Americans (most of us, anyway)?

The polarization of our opinions are extreme. One side wants limited Gov't and the other does not. The Statist never want to cut anything, and they usually complain that we don't do enough even though we spend 45% of the GDP on Federal, State, and Local Gov'ts...........

Some, like myself, think this is a path to economic ruin just like I think the Market Fraud is a path to economic ruin..............We cannot sustain this continuation of debt. More taxation is the cure of the liquidity trap (look at the history of Japan on this)....We need to learn to limit Gov't to within it's means........At the same time we should not allow the Banks to OWN OUR CURRENCY...........Then we could get into the Free Trade issue, where our companies move to countries like China with laughable EPA standards and no longer tariff their products as they ban our products............

This issue has a lot of topics.........And I get into arguments with both sides of the spectrum often.

 

[dblack]

This debate boils down to who should make economic decisions, individuals or government?

Our system is one of representative government. You have your answer.

Heh well, your answer anyway.

 

[eagle1462010]

This debate boils down to who should make economic decisions, individuals or government?

Our system is one of representative government. You have your answer.

BS.........they make decisions now on who greases their palms..........Sold out to the highest bidder for their own personal gain................BOTH SIDES...........

They no longer serve the people.....

 

[dblack]

This debate boils down to who should make economic decisions, individuals or government?

Our system is one of representative government. You have your answer.

It seems you would have all our personal decisions subject to democratic rule.

 

[eagle1462010]

This debate boils down to who should make economic decisions, individuals or government?

Our system is one of representative government. You have your answer.

It seems you would have all our personal decisions subject to democratic rule.

They want pure democracy not a Republic........Plain and simple.

 

[Wildman]

A big part of obama's "Statists of The Union" dictum will center around this topic. You can expect his OFA minions to invade (Mau-Mau, actually.... Read: Tom Wolfe) our beloved message board with all sorts of misdirections and outright falsifications.

Wow, did you stop taking your meds? Oh dear.

These people need to be understood. If you don't understand your enemy, it makes it difficult to defeat him.

That's an odd statement. Enemy? Aren't we all Americans (most of us, anyway)?

liarberals are NOT true Americans, they are more European and that is where they belong.

 

[bripat9643]

This debate boils down to who should make economic decisions, individuals or government?

Our system is one of representative government. You have your answer.

Representative government has proven itself to be a cruel joke, so the answer is individuals.

 

[bripat9643]

This debate boils down to who should make economic decisions, individuals or government?

Our system is one of representative government. You have your answer.

It seems you would have all our personal decisions subject to democratic rule.

Democrats would like to have the majority decide what kind of car we will buy and what we will have for dinner.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

This debate boils down to who should make economic decisions, individuals or government?

USMB Libs answer, "Why is that even a question? I'm a Lib and cannot be trusted to make decision regarding my own life"

 

[CrusaderFrank]

This debate boils down to who should make economic decisions, individuals or government?

Our system is one of representative government. You have your answer.

^ thinks government IS the economy and the world

 

[LoneLaugher]

Very active imaginations for a group of dullards.

 

[Edgetho]

This debate boils down to who should make economic decisions, individuals or government?

Our system is one of representative government. You have your answer.

Representative government has proven itself to be a cruel joke, so the answer is individuals.

Representative Government works best when politicians are honest with The People.

dimocraps are the lyingest scum to ever walk the Earth.

Even in places where socialists actually call themselves socialists (the honesty is refreshing) like France, they are failing and they are failing BADLY.

I don't hate socialists. I can talk to an honest one.

I hate marxists. marxists should be shot on sight.

Read this.

For the New Yawk SLimes to write something like this, it's got to be bad....

BTW, the further down the article you read, the better it gets.

That's a little secret you need to learn about how the LSM works.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/w...alt-its-slow-decline.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Try it, it's not a bad article.

 

[Wry Catcher]

A big part of obama's "Statists of The Union" dictum will center around this topic. You can expect his OFA minions to invade (Mau-Mau, actually.... Read: Tom Wolfe) our beloved message board with all sorts of misdirections and outright falsifications.

Wow, did you stop taking your meds? Oh dear.

These people need to be understood. If you don't understand your enemy, it makes it difficult to defeat him.

That's an odd statement. Enemy? Aren't we all Americans (most of us, anyway)?

liarberals are NOT true Americans, they are more European and that is where they belong.

"liarberals"? Oh goody, a new pejorative by another illiterate member of the far right. Why do morons post such crap, brainwashed by AM Radio and Fox 'News'?

 

[orogenicman]

A big part of obama's "Statists of The Union" dictum will center around this topic. You can expect his OFA minions to invade (Mau-Mau, actually.... Read: Tom Wolfe) our beloved message board with all sorts of misdirections and outright falsifications.

Wow, did you stop taking your meds? Oh dear.

These people need to be understood. If you don't understand your enemy, it makes it difficult to defeat him.

That's an odd statement. Enemy? Aren't we all Americans (most of us, anyway)?

The polarization of our opinions are extreme. One side wants limited Gov't and the other does not. The Statist never want to cut anything, and they usually complain that we don't do enough even though we spend 45% of the GDP on Federal, State, and Local Gov'ts...........

Do you have a citation for that statistic?