blazr Wrote:One person's success (as vast as it may be) has absolutely nothing to do with another's suffering.
One person's suffering may not always be the fault of someone else's success, but to say they have nothing to do with one another is patently naive.
The U.S. has high income inequality for an industrialized country. But the correlation is only really evident when you go to a country with really high income inequality. Have you spent much time living in India or Africa? It may change your mind on the connection between income inequality and extreme poverty. There are thousands of examples of industries where individuals do get wealthy based off of the desperation of workers. Look into the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh or India, and you can see injustice up close. While the economic maxim that "if the job wasn't improving their lives, they wouldn't be taking it" holds true, the converse "if their primary educational opportunities improved, the exploitative industries would have to pay them more and provide better safety standards" is also true. The link between this latter truth and the issue of some wealthy profiting from misfortune can often be found in the government policy making process. In South Asia, shipbreakers and other predatory industries use their wealth to influence politics at the local level, ensuring that anything that would improve the infrastructure of the local area never comes to pass, and they have a reliable stream of desperate workers.
In the U.S., things are more subtle. And its not conspiratorial. But many industries do benefit from income inequality.
I'm not making a normative judgement on that or advocating for nationalizing the economy or anything like that, but the antiseptic notion that wealthy people and poor people live existences and experience outcomes that are wholly exogenous to one another is just not true. It may be a more comforting notion to believe, but its simply not true.
And my background is someone who grew up on the far lower end of middle class, and whose socio-economic status has risen considerably through my own hard work and the hard work of others. My father was the first in his family to go to college, and I'm the first to earn a post-grad/professional degree. So I'm not in anyway discounting the importance of hard work and intelligence.
But the playing field is not exactly equal, and until it is, your statement isn't really true. Thats why liberals argue for increasing opportunity.
I'll close with this comment about Warren Buffett, from
an excellent column in the New York Times from the always sharp witted, hillarious Conservative
Ben Stein:
Quote:Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
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Bill Gates no longer richest man in the world
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