Quote Rob post #42
If we are not to be left to die on the street we face two basic choices: we work our asses off whilst we can in order to raise the dosh to support ourselves to the end or, secondly, we do the minimum we can and hope enough other people pay an ever-increasing proportion of their earnings in tax to keep us going. Something in the latter choice strikes me as rather wrong.
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The problem is that hard work doesn't mean that you automatically get earn a good living. There are lots of hard workers - educated and intelligent - who are in poverty despite their efforts and millionaires who have plenty but don't work hard because others have sweated to provide his wealth. There is a conception in society that a millionaire deserves his money mostly because he has earned his money. The reality is that nobody- no matter how intelligent they are - can possibly earn the money purely by their own efforts. Why? Because society is at all levels a collective one with regards to production. A chain that is eternally linked. Nobody can produce anything purely by his/hers own efforts but needs others to to be part of the process. The capitalist looks to exploit their efforts by creaming off the profits of others to enrich himself. Without their efforts he wouldn't have a dime/penny to his name. Workers as a productive unit can exist and share their wealth among themselves without a millionaire being part of the process, but the millionaire will be penniless without the worker.
And this happens where, exactly? And it isn’t replicated because…?
Jesus, stamper, who the hell do you think
creates those "chains of production" who do you imagine puts up the money to set them up and spends millions taking them through development to the point where - if they are lucky - they turn into profit machines? Do you really believe that all businesses are successful, that entrepreneurs and investors never lose their shirts?
I know several millionaires quite well; they work or worked their butts off as, in some cases, did their families before them. If you really, honestly and sincerely believe that
anybody just sits back in the sunshine doing nothing and getting richer, you are living in a world of your own - well, not of your own, you have millions of the conveniently politically blind sharing the delusion. Making the money is hurdle number one; keeping it is hurdle number two and appears to be even taller a leap that number one: everyone, from certain 'friends' looking for a piece of your action to governments wanting all of it, is out to screw you and reduce you to where they'd love you to be: down beside them or, better yet, below, so that they can feel satisfied to have brought you down to their level of failure.
Some of those rich people get there because they can't help it: they have an instinct and it just can't be refused, no matter the cost to their lives in every other respect. There's the old one that goes: "You're a beautiful, twenty-year old girl; so, tell me, what was it that first attracted you to this old, fat millionaire you married?" People laugh wisely, but nobody stops to wonder about it from the point of view of the millionaire. Can you imagine living your own life knowing that you can’t really take anyone around you at face value? That you can never know if your wife loves you or is simply setting herself up for life, trying to give you a child in order to make the chains even stronger and a divorce more unlikely, or more profitable if it happens?
The story of Life is that nobody comes out of it with a history of supreme bliss. From successes to disasters, from rags to riches and often right back to the metaphorical rags, it is never a smooth stroll along the golden path to nirvana.
People, broadly, get out of life what they deserve, and what they put in. You simply can’t regulate for success but you sure can for failure, as every socialist government through which I have lived and tried to work has shown me.
Rob C