Which part of history? The Bolsheviks, Viet Cong, Khmer Rouge, Castro, Venezuela, Romania, Nazi Germany, Greece, Iran, Detroit?
Imagine if you two ever said anything substantial.
Way before all of that. Start from Feudalism and see, if you can find similarities.
And well, we are saying substantial things every now and then and they are way more substantial than "So?", "Everything my president says is right, because he's the president." and "No other country could possibly have a system that's better than in the US. And if so, it would never work in the US."
Similarities to what? The fact that people in power will always step on those who don't fight back?
And the only quote you got was "So?", the rest is shit I've never said in my life.
That’s one way to think of it- but it’s also a way of thinking of it which is part of the problem of why the concentration of wealth is so bad. We gauge labor on hours spent- what a terrible way to think. Does each moment of your life have a price? If you’ll sell an hour of your life for $20- your whole life is worth about $13,840,800. So look at your child or your spouse or whoever you love most and ask- if Mark Zuckerberg took you to his private island and offered you that much money for him to kill that person- would you take it? If you ever loved anyone you lost- if you had a million dollars would you pay it just for 10 more minutes with them? It’s a stupid way f thinking that commoditizes human lives and assigns is all. Value. Funny enough your life is worth that much at $20 an hour- but how much would your family get if you died? Life is priceless and worthless in dollars all at once.
So let’s look at this another way- it would take you all those years to make that much money if you were being paid $2,000 an hour- but hourly pay is arbitrary. Teachers, Service men and women, nurses and bus drivers and janitors etc- how much do they make? It’s arbitrary. What we make isn’t linked to anything except for what someone decides we are worth- unless you produce and sell your own physical goods right?
So to make $8 billion dollars- You’d need everyone in China to give you $8. That’s it. You could make $8 billion in 60 seconds with the internet- a month without. Most of America pays a water bill or gas bill or electric bill every month. That’s a lot of money. So how much you make an hour is an ignorant way to look at things. Making $20 an hour is a great job for a guy who takes 10 hours to finish a job that takes someone else 2 hours right? The guy that does the job faster gets more work to do- the person that produces less work gets paid the same or more by those standards. If you get paid by the job, if when you finish your work you are done- no farting around because you have to burn hours- you get productivity. You get people doing things and not sitting doing nothing.
Reframe the problem. The problem isn’t wealth disparity. If someone does the work of 20 people- why wouldn’t we either pay them 20 peoples wages or if they finish 20 yikes faster pay them the same and either let them do more work or get the rest of that time back for them? The problem is that people are paid disproportionately to what their actual contributions are.
The person who thinks of the idea, the person who finances the idea- they are usually at the top of the list for who gets paid the most- but we know that in human history- where one human comes up with an idea there are others who have the same or similar ideas around the same time. There’s nothing special about being the one who thinks of an idea. If you’d never heard of Newton or any sciences and figured out gravity on your own- congrats. You’re as smart as him on that one- the fact he did it first doesn’t mean anything- he was born before you, if you were born in 1200ad we may have had “Newtonian Physics” a lot sooner. Having money doesn’t make you special. Lots of people have money and could pay for something. We have this idea we need to reward rich people for spending their money.
Why? What the hell would they do with it if they weren’t spending it? They can hoard it- but that can’t really do anything for them can it? For money to actually mean anything you have to spend it eventually.
Tl:dr- it’s all messed up and using this example shows the system is messed up and it isn’t just rich peoples faults. We think wrong. Stop thinking on arbitrary terms defined to plug into an easily managed and conceptualized system of economics. Look at reality- what is. ASK- what is it we are trying to do? When you forget the purpose of WHY something exists it starts to twist on itself. We are trading real resources and real objects for intangibles and concepts- and have removed the links between earnings and real value.
If you had half a brain, lived that long, and made that much and weren't the richest person in the world, you probably learned that money isn't everything.
But why should you have to pay rent? How does that make sense? The basic idea stems from land rights correct? It’s like 2 kids in the backseat- if you don’t set the clear boundary (and even if you do) they’ll encroach on the others space. So to keep it civil we say that THIS is your space and no one else is to violate it right?
But.... how does one person need or deserve enough land to make up the personal space of 300+ people? That’s like your brother getting the entire backseat, front seat, and the trunk- and you having to pay him money just to get in the car. But if you don’t get in the car- your parents will yell at you and you might get left behind- so you’re two choices are really to die, or pay your brother so you can sit in a seat that he isn’t using right?
And at the heart of income disparity lies that- property law. We obviously need some way to allocate property. Not everyone can own a house on the Malibu beach front or in a secluded forest or in a down town rooftop loft. Some land is more in demand. So we need SOME system- but the idea that we still have landed gentry like it was 1200ad is perhaps part of the problem. Space is not something we can easily or realistically create at a given location. We can’t create 40 acres of land in down town NYC and insert it between Central Park and the Empire State. So generational entrenchment and land hoarding and loans against land and... its another part of a mess.
Imagine if you two ever said anything substantial.
And well, we are saying substantial things every now and then and they are way more substantial than "So?", "Everything my president says is right, because he's the president." and "No other country could possibly have a system that's better than in the US. And if so, it would never work in the US."
And the only quote you got was "So?", the rest is shit I've never said in my life.