[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by sendler

Much of this totally vast wealth of the top 1% is stashed away as digits in accounts. Or gold in safes. Ect. Much of it is not doing society any good. Generation after generation.

Most wealth doesn't survive the 2nd generation. The people at the top tend to be different families each generation or two. Eventually money gets spent/squandered and circulates in the economy.

Then there's people like Musk who were rich, then spent almost all their money to create new things like an EV company, rocket company, boring company...

That which does get spent is often very highly resource consumptive. Since every good or service must first start with an energy input, and 87% of our energy comes from fossil fuels, everything anyone spends literally does cause something to burn somewhere. Our overconsumption is blowing through everything the planet has to offer in the space of 200 years and leaving little left for those that will follow us. Shame on us. Future Humans and all other life will suffer depletion and degradation.

So which way do you want it; the wealthy saving their money and slowing resource consumption, or for them to spend it spurring on further resource consumption?

Income for the bottom 70% of Americans leveled off in the 1970's and has fallen since 2000. Justifying vast wealth inequity in human civilization by comparing a redwood tree to a scrub bush has no relevance whatsoever to the discussion human society.

I'm not comparing wealth inequality to a redwood, I'm comparing it to absolutely everything in the entire universe. There's a few people that hold the majority of marathon trophies. I could enter a marathon and then complain about not getting anywhere near the number of awards as the top athletes, but it doesn't mean some injustice has been done. Further, my well-being has nothing to do with your well-being, regardless if it's fantastically better or worse than mine.

Because of globalization and increasing automation, the average wage that a worker in any part of the Global North has decreased on average since most "jobs" are now in the service sector. There are now more bartenders/ waitresses, store clerks, ect, in the USA, than manufacturing jobs.

...as if most Millenials would rather be welding car frames 12hrs a day than working as a barista. Automating repetitive tasks is a good thing.

The workers of the Global North have already chipped in their share to raise up the exploited Global South. It is now time for the exceedingly wealthy owners of capital to chip in more and do their share to raise wellbeing at home to maintain social cohesion and abroad to mitigate and develop so that people will not need to mass migrate in the coming decades.

I don't fully understand this, but I'll point out that plenty of fantastically wealthy people donate enormous amounts towards humanitarian causes. Just watched a good documentary called the Brain of Bill that talks about a few of his philanthropic endeavors that are also backed by Warren Buffet.

In the USA, the top 1% owns 40% of the accumulated wealth. You don't see a problem with that? On the world level the numbers are of course even more distressing obviously because there are 3 billion people that still cook and heat with wood or dung as there only source of heat.

I don't know at what arbitrary number I would become distressed, as it's not something I dwell on. Mostly I focus on what I'm able to accomplish and that seems to be more productive than comparing myself in various meaningless ways to others. The top 20% pay 87% of the federal taxes; do you see that as distressing? I don't, but then I don't see any of it as that distressing... and you bring up a good point that compared to the rest of the world, the USA is the 1%. People around the bottom 15th percentile that are happy to redistribute "rich people's" money should likewise be eager to redistribute theirs to Africa, North Korea and India.

We are seeing countries turning inward all over the world already. Nationalism is completely on the rise. Although I would personally not hope for border walls and machine guns as the answer. Information has widespread availability now. This is truly the advance that no one would want to lose. The workers will use their majority in democracy to vote in progressive representatives that will stand up for organized bargaining for labor and institute forward thinking programs to rebuild infrastructure and socio-economic systems for an eventual net zero carbon/ zero growth system that allows everyone to thrive.

It was inevitable for nationalism to be on the rise. As I'm always saying, authority must be at the lowest level required to solve a given problem because it's the most efficient way to solve problems. I don't consult the UN to figure out what to eat for dinner; that's an individual/family-sized problem. Each larger encompassing level of government represents a failure of each smaller authority to adequately solve a problem, or at least it should be approached that way. Instead, 1 person doesn't want to bake a cake, and we need to assemble the might of the federal government to figure out how to solve the problem, and we sit around somehow thinking this is a reasonable use of time and authority.

I'm all for collective bargaining, and unions in principle. I'm also for a company reserving the right to move operations to India. Indians can collectively bargain if they want to also.

Net zero carbon sounds like a fine goal too. The problem with new ideas is that most are terrible. There's a reason why things are the way they are, and it's because they have stood the test of time. Monkey with these vetted systems at your peril. By the way, that's why I keep advocating for more States rights, because they are meant to be testbeds for ideas. A state, through progressive ideals, can make a terrible mistake and not mess it up for everyone else. Likewise, progressive ideals can stumble upon a great new idea and be readily adopted by the other states.

Finally, there are problems that require a global governing body such as pollution, overfishing the seas and other global commons. Most other things are just inefficient garbage meant to grow bureaucracy and stifle excellence.