Where has Wealth Discrepancy Come From And Where is it Going?

Where does the inequality come from? Could it be that the saying "The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer" is right? It has happened in virtually every age and every country. Obviously the dynamic has taken many different forms -- the economy of the middle ages was not that of the "gilded Age" which was somewhat different from the (American) economy of the 1920s, which was somewhat different from that of today. The economies of 18th century France, of the Pharaohs, the Chinese Mandarins, the Aztec lords -- all no doubt substantially different. When power of any sort (including that of money) reaches some critical mass, it will snowball unless there is some counteracting force. The economic dynamic of recent decades (at least) is that if you have a large enough pot of money to invest with appropriate diversification, in periods when the market is rising 20-30% a year, it is obvious what can happen. If you are well enough connected, when the market crashes, you can be one of the early ones to pull out. Then, until the market starts to move again, you sit on your money, or invest in the least risky (and least growth-producing) sectors.



These dynamics have not changed without some kind of intervention. We can look to Britain and the U.S. for cases of orderly intervention, as opposed to spasms of violence (which tend to produce something as bad or worse then the prior regimes).



In the late middle ages, illiterate peasants lived in mud huts while barons lived in drafty stone castles, and were almost as likely as anyone to die of the plague or childbirth. I am no master of how we got from there to today's world, but am pretty sure it involved the barons giving up some of their treasures in a way that lead to public roads and canals (in the early days), and widely available free or subsidized education, and postal systems (in the American case, these from the very beginning subsidized the spread of printed matter). In the nations that followed this policy, the rich were rewarded by having an educated healthy populace available for the development of more and more technologically brilliant and powerful enterprises. The rising tide of welfare of the "99%" lifted all boats, including those of the very rich. The nations that didn't follow such policies, where the rich and powerful tried to hang onto everything, suffered a huge decline in relative strength and succumbed to colonization.

Another saving grace, in the case of the U.S. – the U.S. was exceptional alright; it had a huge public domain — the vast preponderance of potential capital, consisting of public lands belonged to the government, and unlike Russia in the 1990s, a newly minted democracy in a similar position, we did not say “This is terrible — all this property in the hands of government — we have to get rid of it, putting huge chunks into private hands or something terrible will happen”; instead we calmly, or the course of 100 years or so, sold it mostly in small plots to individual farmers, and sometimes even give it free to homesteaders, and we also set aside portions as assets to pay for educational institutions. Why? Because our government had the “general welfare” of the people in mind.


But omigod, that sounds like a welfare state! Well yes, the "welfare state" as conceived by people who see value in it, is not about "welfare", which has curiously become another word for the dole. It is about a state which takes positive actions for the welfare of its citizens. Unfortunately, we have become so unimaginative as to think the only way to do that is to dole out money to those out of work. And the U.S., and even more so Europe, have suffered by creating a class of people with nothing to do and no sense of purpose, which is not in the interest of anyone's welfare.

My Not-really-right-wing Mom and her adventures in Email-Land (revision)

"R. Kelly Garrett randomly surveyed 600 Americans about their online habits, and whether they'd heard—and believed—a number of widespread rumors. He found that the Web does expose us to more rumors. But the Web also delivers more rebuttals,...
            (Technically true, but most can't/won't find them)

"E-mail’s more insidious. Because you’re more likely to believe that rumor forwarded by cousin Rob. And the more you believe something, Garrett says, the more you want to share it with your social network."
                      [see below for source, c2011]

[This is a revision of my article from 8/29/2011 about email as a viral disinformation carrier at that time, before Facebook and Twitter increased the problem by an order of magnitude; lies such as that Obama was born outside the U.S. - which Donald Trump loudly proclaimed until it made him part of the political conversation]

Comment on "Arctic 'tipping point' may not be reached"

There is a huge amount of chatter on the web about a BBC sourced article from 8/5/2011:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14408930?print=true

Right leaning web sites seem to be ecstatic, as if it confirmed their denial of global warming.

BUT a couple of quotes from the article:

I don't say that our current worries are not justified, but I think that there are factors which will work to delay the action in relation to some of the models that have been in the media.

The (Republican?) [Anti]Confidence Game

[a fragment of debate]

Hal Morris

08/12/11

The Republican [Anti]Confidence Game

If we take seriously the idea that the mood of the country (confidence or panic) can have a huge effect on the market, the genius of FDR's "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" becomes clear.

On the other hand does anyone dare suggest that 2-1/2 years of a war against the president that showed its hand with the urging of parents to keep their children home from school the day he made a special address to schoolchildren -- that these years of calling the president a Marxist, a thug, a secret muslim, not an American citizen, an elitist intellectual an incompetent fool, a wild ideologue, a  triangulator with no ideology, and predicting doom for the country if he isn't stopped -- does anyone dare suggest that this is all bound to have a profoundly negative effect on the economy?

Corporations Can Serve as Made-to-order Scapegoats the Rich and Irresponsible

Corporations can do one thing that people can't do: disappear (without actual pain or death) taking with them the responsibilities for decisions that the people running the corporations made. They can go bankrupt turning thousands of pensions into smoke without the actual decision makers suffering a loss in credit rating. Or they can threaten to dissolve, making pensions go up in smoke, and then accept a counteroffer from the government to "restructure" carrying forward a limited set of its obligations -- e.g. the pension plans could be halved.

On the "Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism"

An opinion piece that just came out in Forbes recently  "New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism" cites an article published in "the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing" by "Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models."

The editorial is written by  "James M. Taylor,  senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute" and the implication is that it summarizes Spencer's 15 page article.

Problems I have in accepting this:

Some of the Best and Worst Reporting on the Oslo Norway Massacres

BloggingHeads.tv had an excellent conversation online between Michael B. Dougherty of The American Conservative and Michelle Goldman (distinctly liberal and feminist) of the Daily Beast and other venues.  It is at http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/37669.
These are just two earnest people grappling together over what to make of such an event and looking a bit shocked and grief-stricken.  One of the shocking things to these two was how coherently he wrote (though with a good bit of lifting of passages from other works).  He seemed nothing like the obviously insane shooter of Congress Rep. Giffords.  Dougherty (who admits he or his periodical are quoted by the apparent mass killer Breivik), says based of the first fragments he got of Breivik's saying or writing, he did not believe he was a "Christian Fundamentalist", and apparently Dougherty was right despite part of Breivik's manifesto indicating that part of his dream was a "Christian monoculture".  The two seemed to agree that, besides Muslims, he seemed obsessed with a sense of "emasculation" by the feminist culture.

Meanwhile, HotAir.com, which was founded "to provide content and analysis you can't get anywhere else on a daily basis" has next to nothing to say about the whole thing.  There only piece on it was titled  "Norway, with a substantial rate of gun ownership, is normally noted for non-violence".  Right, a hundred schoolchildren gunned down at camp provides such a nice segue to a reminder of their theories that the more guns, the less crime.  But the main theme of the article was "Well you can just bet that the liberals will be whining for gun control and more civility".  Better to make a preemptive strike on liberals reacting to what they haven't said yet.  Once you let them speak you then have to argue with real people rather than strawmen, which is always a pain in the ass.

I've been cruising a lot of new media lately, and intend to attempt some regular coverage and commentary.