You are still avoiding the fact and argueing against an extinct victorian idea that the rich are rich because they are geneticlly superior, socially superior, etc. THE RICH ARE RICH BECAUSE THEY HAVE MONEY. it is a simple consept to understand. there are many reasons to be rich. Only a complete dumbass would compare the work a "lazy CEO rich person" does with the work a "rich actor" does. and there is a huge difference between income and assets. A professional sports player has huge income, does that mean that he has money? abolutely not. the same is true with most celebrities in the entertainment industry. They have money comeing in so they spend it thinking it will last forever, no investing or anything, so they have to go out and get millions for another shitty movie and live off that for a while. they don't have money or assets, they have income. They have no knowlege of how to invest so they have money, their children will most likely never have the lifelong benifit of money that the child of someone with money and assets will.
Most rich also put in EXTREEMLY LONG HOURS OF WORK. yes they take vacations, yes they have money and go to great shows ocassionally and other bullshit. when you are willing to put in 60-75 hours a work in of that kind of responsibility you are going to recive the perks of that work. Yes, our economy requires there to be a working class, but our economy also requires a wealthy class. the wealthy class is the one that has the jobs that the working class work for. rich do create, although they don't physically build.
I am not saying the workers don't have a stake in the sucess of a company, i mean they want the company to suceed so they get paid. however look at this analogy. if you hire me to build a house and you buy all the material, pay all my and my workers labor to make the house. when it is done you have the ownership and financial stake in the house. are you saying that because you hired me to build it i should have a right to it as well because i put the work in? that is just fucking stupid.
>>41
"When a rich guy drives through town in his mercedes, walks safely through the streets, sits down at a nice resturant and is hand served food by expert cooks, then drives home to his huge central heated electricity consuming pointlessly large house built using difficult to extract materials he is wasting a shit load of resources provided by that society that could've be used to do a lot of good in that society. Why does he deserve this just for getting dividends from owning property? Surely an economic system that put his monetary talents to good use and forced him to work hard all day, possibly to maintain his wealth, would be better?"
Well you are using a computer to look on the internet which is a service you paid for, using electricity you paid for, that very few people have the luctury of, how about you put all that money to better use for society? because the rich have more that they could give? That is just a greedy notion that everyone that has more than you is responsible for all those that have less, but certainly not you responsible.
Also, have you ever tried to put someone with monatary skills to work where they don't get monetary gain? they will find the gain, just like politicians now get rich off of their offices. they will find wealth in their position if they have the skill, at least in the market they are competing their skills in a straight forward contest of who gets the most money, rather than trying to hide it under the carpet.
Also you are once again comparing things that come to the government with things that don't. the mercedes he bought with his money, and takes up no more road room than somebody elses car, he doesn't walk the streets more than somebody else, the resturant is privately owned and he is paying the owner to use the services, the cook is geting paid no small ammount of money at a fancy resturant for his expertise, he is paying the electric company for the electricity, the heating company for the heat, the gas company for the gas, and all of it by the same unit measurement as you. All of the services he gets from others are paid for just like the ones you get from others, and the ones that he gets from the government he pays for because he pays much more in taxes than you. and he isn't using them more than you.
And he is actually in a much higher tax bracket than you, he simply has more exceptions than you. for instance if you were to build a new house, it would be a tax exception on your 1040a, the same for him, and he has the money to build houses more often. If i were to have a exception of x% of your income per child you have, a rich person will have more money comming back per child because he hs more money taxed away in the first place than you. And you keep on saying that he has all this money and is spending it on stuff because he has it. well where does it go from there, just back to his pocket? even if he buys something from the company he is the CEO of he only gets pennies on the dollar of what he spent. the rest goes to paying the workers that make the product, paying for the materials that make the product, all the maintenence on all of the equipment and building and land used to make the product, all of which gets spread out to several hundred people, and the government is going to take it's share of it at every step. The federal government collects every dollar that the US has issued over 3 times a year, and thats not counting all the times it is collected by various state and local governments. he buys more and he pays sales tax on every item he buys the same as you. that money then goes to buying the materials and labor for the product, income tax then more sales tax, and then all those people that have their shares of that money spend and pay various amounts of tax on it as it spreads further. so that rich person, spending more money than a normal person, creates more cycle for all that, and causes more money to be paid.
As for a office building using more money than a house that is just stupid. Look at an office building, now look at a house, which one do you think uses more energy. the office building right? you are now as intelligent as the one who said that. now look at the same house and the same office building again, which one do you think causes geater gain for socity on a whole. the house holds one family and benifits only them. the office building has possibly thousands of workers that all get paid, uses many tons of various products a year such as paper and other office materials, all of which have to be purchased from other companys, which in turn have more workers to make them. now the house and the office building sit on about the same ammount of land. which one do you think should be torn down for not providing enough for society by these people's logic?