The only thing holding that off now is owner occupied housing. If you deduct that, the top 1% currently owns over 50% of the nations wealth.
And if you deduct Montana's fouth quarter TD pass to Taylor the Bengals beat the Niners in Super Bowl XXIII.
Housing is the majority of many people's wealth. So its not even like deducting one score in a close game. A better analogy might be if that if you deduct 70 points from the Bills opponents in the right games they won 4 Superbowls in a row.
So how else can you do it than look at assets?
Income or assets could be enough for someone to avoid the "very poor". If your making more than enough to support yourself at more than the most minimal level then your not very poor even if you have very little in the way of assets.
You might well consider it a good thing, but my claim is that it might well end up being a "bad" thing.
I recognize that. I was obviously disagreeing with your claim.
America was a unique experiment in that it was a fresh start for a group of people not at the top of the ladder.
When America started as a country it had quite a few wealthy people. Even if you include early colonial America you had colonies founded by wealthy people. The majority of the people were of course "not at the top of the ladder", but disparities in wealth did exist and were not small.
All I’m pointing out is that two very different systems, laissez faire capitalism and totalitarianism might both result in similar wealth distributions over time
Both can result in any number of different distributions. I find the claim that its possible for them to both result in very similar wealth distribution to uninteresting, and not a solid basis for any argument. If you rather say that inevitably or almost inevitably, they both will lead to the wealthy taking all the income and wealth, than that could be the basis for an argument, but I would disagree with the premise quite strongly.
1) What do you think the long term impact of extreme wealth inequality is wrt to a stable and safe society?
There isn't one answer to that question. It depends on the society, on how extreme the inequality is, on the cause of the inequality, on how it is maintained, and probably other things.
Do you think that the long term dynamics of capitalism, sans governmental redistribution methods, results in wealth aggregation, and if so, is there any mechanism which places an eventual limit on this, or does it finally peg at a boundary condition
I don't think the dynamics of capitalism, sans government redistribution, result in continual wealth aggregation to a smaller and smaller group. Capitalism with restrictions imposed to favor the capitalists might, but a real free market probably would not. Many of the very wealthy in our society come from middle class or even poor backgrounds within just a generation or three. Its not some fixed group of people grabbing more and more wealth to themselves. And this even in a country where rich special interest can get favorable benefits for themselves. Reduce those special interest benefits and it becomes even less likely for a very small group to continue to grow wealthier and wealthier at the expense of everyone else. |
