Although there is some disagreement on the data provided by the GINI, I see why you are making the point you are. Something though has been left out of the equation that I think you may need to consider when discussing this issue though: standard of living.
What good is income equality if everyone's poor?
Right, and I suspect that's why Bangladesh is there among the rich countries as being relatively low-inequality. Bangladesh is so poor that even the rich aren't very rich. And of course that's been the argument used on the right against attempts to level incomes: that it would mean we were all equally poor. But as the CIA's data show, that doesn't tend to be the case. Those countries with narrow income gaps tend to be the rich ones, and it's the ones with wide income gaps that tend to be poor.
What I find interesting is that nations that have been developing the most quickly since 1990 have the sharpest rise in inequality, but the instant their economies start to decline, their income equality goes up. So I guess since that the EU is in an economic power dive, that equality would be rising as poverty grows.
No in the case of the EU, which has had strong social-welfare and labor-friendly policies in place for a long time, and is in an "economic power dive" at present only because the whole world is.
Nations that have been developing the most quickly are, almost by definition, industrializing countries; an industrializing economy experiences extremely rapid economic growth that cannot be sustained, and also tends to experience rapidly growing income gaps. (This happens because of the rapid growth in GDP, which goes disproportionately into the hands of the wealthy.) This leads to a dynamic of repeated economic breakdowns due to slack consumer demand, followed by the implementation of reforms. So what you're seeing is to be expected. But the nations of the EU were industrialized long ago and so are following a mature-economy dynamic, as is the U.S. of course.
That would be yet another unfounded opinion. If communist economics of government run, five year central plans worked, the USSR would have won the cold war. instead they had to try and adapt to capitalism and it destroyed them.
Apparently you misunderstood what I was saying. I was not defending the Soviet Union's economic policies, which clearly were a bust. I was comparing your defense of capitalism on the grounds that "pure capitalism has never been tried," with a hard-core Marxist's excusing the Soviet Union on the grounds that "real communism has never been tried." (Actually, to be technical, the Soviet Union never claimed to be communist; however, it's clear enough that its version of socialism was not a success.)
Do you understand now?
Till it was forced to compete in a global economy and then fails miserably.
We were competing in a global economy from the beginning. The "whole world except us destroyed by war" idea is a myth. The only industrialized countries whose industrial plant was significantly reduced by war damage were Germany and Japan; most of Britain's industrial plant was in the northern part of the island, out of range of the Luftwaffe; France fell fast enough that the Germans didn't bomb it all to hell; same is true for Norway and the Low Countries; the Soviet Union moved its factories east of the Urals where the Germans never reached. Even Japan and Germany were back in the game by the end of the 1950s.
There's a myth on the other side (the left) that the global economy and outsourcing are entirely to blame for the stagnation and decline of real wages in this country. Not so. I don't even believe it's to blame entirely for the loss of manufacturing jobs -- automation accounts for at least as much of that, and if for some reason outsourcing became impossible we would see more automation rather than more industrial hiring.
No, the problem has been that the service jobs which have replaced the old manufacturing jobs haven't paid as well on the average. And that is because they have been non-union, and the strength of unions has declined, due to government hostility since 1977 and especially since 1981. (Carter wasn't very union-friendly, but Reagan was worse, and Clinton was only a small improvement. We
may be seeing a real change in this trend under Obama, but I'm not prepared to say that for certain yet.)
The dynamic by which the powerful post-war economy lost its grip in the mid-1970s, creating the political climate that led to Reagan and the return to Gilded Age policies, all involved oil and OPEC. I'll go into details on that if you're interested.
The slave was made so by force. He has choices, but they're pretty brutal ones. He can work in the situation, escape, or die trying. They are still choices he can freely make and no man can stop him from making them. That is an inalienable right of freedom to choose his actions and live the life he sees fit in the circumstances he finds himself.
Exactly. And, although things are somewhat softer, the modern person without capital can choose to work for someone else's profit, or live on charity, or be a criminal. Or starve to death. There are always choices; that's an inherent part of having free will. But that being the case, if the word "freedom" is to have any meaning, it must refer to a situation where one has genuine options that are all acceptable. A slave is considered "unfree" not because he literally has no free will, but because his only options to working for his master are brutal punishment and death. It's like being robbed at gunpoint: you CAN choose to refuse to give the robber your money, but then he'll shoot you and take it anyway. And so we call that being "forced" to give your money.
Our economy is set up, and has been for over a century, so that most people have no good option except to work for someone else's profit. Long ago, say about Lincoln's time, most people didn't work for wages except temporarily, while putting their capital together to become a small farmer or tradesman. For most people the norm was being in business for themselves. But that's no longer so.
Your wages ARE the fruits of your labor, not the product produced.
No. The fruits of labor are always what the labor produces. Labor produces goods and services, it does not produce wages.
He bought your labor via contract to make HIS products. It's an agreement.
It is a FORCED agreement, as noted above. It arises from the concentration of capital, from the fact that a few people control all of the means of production, so that I lack the ability to work and own the fruits of my own labor.
He hired you to do the job agreed, otherwise he'd have done it himself
No, otherwise it wouldn't have been done. If he could have done it himself he would have done that and not hired anyone. Ask anyone who's owned a small, struggling business and worked 14-hour days at it. If you can do it yourself, you do; if you can't, you hire someone.
If you think the contract is unfair, quit.
And what if the entire system is unfair, so that quitting will simply put me in another equally-unfair situation?
Wow. zen bullshit. You know, you could give an aspirin a headache with how convoluted your thinking is.
"Then I will leave it to a power greater than me to explain it to you if they will bother at all."
What do you predict would happen if you stole all their money and killed them so they could never be a threat again?
No, let's use a real-world possible example. What do you predict would happen if you rewrote the rules of the economic game so that wages across the board were doubled and accumulation of vast private fortunes were discouraged, so that the gap between the richest and poorest people dropped to something like 100 to 1 instead of what it is now, over a billion to one?
I predict that the economy would boom like we haven't seen in decades, most people would live a middle-class lifestyle, and the American Dream would be restored.
inches bridge of nose::: Unbelievable. You're gonna pull something trying to stretch like that.
