85 Richest People On Earth Now Have Same Wealth as Bottom Half of Global Population

need to give props to the Khan: https://www.khanacademy.org/

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/public_sector/teaching_for_the_new_millennium

 

Educating people on fiscal responsibility would def help some people in this world who spend a lot more than they actually earn by a wide margin.

 

I agree there are major problems but don't think having the inefficiency of the government further redistribute wealth (which is basically what people here are advocating here).

Education in today's world in the US is not liberation but is indentured slavery as people are leaving terrible institutions with excruciating amounts of debt relative to their wages. This is mainly based on free government guarantees of student loans which has allowed some extra people to attend college that probably should have focused on trade schools, but raised the price to the entire population.

I think this is a travesty. Inflating the prices of everyday goods and services like education, healthcare and such through government inefficiency is just tantamount to robbery to me as it effects the poorest of people that can afford the least to pay the gas (excise) taxes, or increased cost of tuition, or have their monthly power bill go up 15% to subsidize some wind energy or government interest.

You want to get people out of poverty. Reduce their expenses and watch capital accumulate. Ironically this leads to greater investment which leads to more jobs and the basis of an economy.

Whether it was John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt or Sam Walton; I think these men were the true advocates for the common man as all that they did brought down prices on everyday goods to people, when many liberal ideas of corporate taxation, regulations, legal ransoms all cause prices to rise on everyday common people.

 

banks provide capital

No, users give up some information about themselves in exchange for free access to a social networking medium.

Musk is a taker of tax dollars, his business model is based on crony capitalism and rent seeking.

Khan is great but I imagine he'll be tied to government purse strings soon enough, too tempting to resist.

 

That is just the bennies. You still can work some and still get the bennies.

 

Big banks provide capital at exploitative rates, then criminally violate their contracts (robo-foreclosures), create bets that destroy the value of your house, and your job, distort the present value of money, criminally manipulate key interest rates, shovel capital offshore, aide and abet monsters like the drug cartels and terrorists by laundering their money, then expect the public purse to pick them up. Great social value.

If you think getting government grants is crony capitalism, then I hesitate to ask what you think every industry in the world is doing---shale gas research was based on grants. The internet was a public system at first. Pharma is held together by patents. The story of successful private enterprise has largely been built on the public and open-source research financed largely by public institutions.

Entire industries like big data and revolutions like bitcoin are built on decades of work by researchers. Are they not cronies in your model?

You disavow government support as if it were a curse. Someone has to correct the misguided notion that private gain is always social gain. Are you really going to tell me Jamie Dimon creates more social value on aggregate than Salman Khan?

 

The story of Silicon Valley is based on Stanford research, at which last count received 72.3% of their R&D funding from government.

This research led to PageRank---which led to Google.

Francis Narin would of course publish this gem.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733397000139

 

http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/23/s...-is-2nd-nonprofit-accepted-into-y-combinator/

The best social value is often created with non-for-profit models. Coincidence?

Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator

 

Banks counterfeit and call what they're doing providing capital.

 

Warning !!! excessive libertarian cult words. Might be a random generator of Ron Paul/libertarian phrases. Check if responder is human.

 

"Rent seeking" is an economic term, not a "libertarian cult word."

 

"taker", "crony capitalism", "liberty", "freedom", "taxation is theft" "virtue of selfishness" "gold standard" "who is john gault" are all English words and/ or phrases, which have other uses, but it is the manner of use and the inflexibility that signal "cult" use.

 

Bernie Sanders ‏@SenSanders 5m
The bottom 60% owns only 2.3% of the wealth in this country. #EnoughIsEnough

 

Bernie with his redistribution to the "takers" or Romney's 47% might think he is helping the "poors" and the lazy middle class.

However, if he keeps messing around the 85 might decided that it just isn't worth the effort and then we might have only say 50 of the 85 willing to do their important work for the world. We will all be *ucked then.

PS some articles suggest that it is not the 85, but roughly 500 so who control that percentage of the world's wealth, so all the liberal/left NorthEastern egghead types should quit their bellaching anyway.

 

Let's order those 85 to 500 richest to move to Belize to give the rest of us some relief. Then, after instituting a graduated flat tax with no deductions or subsidies, let's set the tax rate at 90% for all income over the $5M mark. As a further measure, let's go to a wage system where the CEO (and other corporate administrators) can make no more than 500 times the lowest paid full time employee and politicians can earn compensation (from all sources) no more than two times their government paycheck (with the excess going to the political entity for which they are elected/employed).

Would that work for you?

 

Capitalism is the cancer of civilization, but it will end before this century is over, thankfully.

 

america is basically owned by a banking cartel. democracy? i think not.