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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (1340)	1/17/2001 11:28:36 AM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

sense of what an appropriate disparity is Count the number of zeros in the dollars held in the hands of the poorest guys (lets say 1 zero in the case of a street person) and the richest guy (lets say 9 zeros of Bill Gates) if the difference is more than 5, you might be having problems. If the richest guy has 100,000 times as much as the poorest people (let alone 100 MILLION times) there is considerable disparity. I don't want to say that people can't become wealthy (heck, I wouldn't mind being wealthier and I am closer to 5 zeros better off than the poorest) but it is the dynamic range of the problem. You don't want to structure your society in such a way that the rich get that rich and the poor get that poor. In my perfect world I wouldn't add zeros to get rich, we'd all become better off and keep the difference in our zeros constant. I'd also want to see who has what to change periodically. There really aren't a lot of ways to stop this separation and if you don't do something, it is entirely predictable that such disparity will exist, get bigger, and eventually become stable when a few people have the resources to have everything. It's a lot like the game Risk. We have two ways to combat this directly and another to combat it indirectly, taxation and charity are the direct means and education is the indirect one. I prefer the latter.