What the 1% don't want you to know

[donquixote99]

There is some good discussion here. What I meant by 'right distribution first time,' of course, is not some 'absolutely accurately correct' distribution, since there are no stone tablets or anything containing rules on how to calculate that. I just mean something more approximately good than the way things are trending now.

People claim 'the market' should decide all this, but the market is not some neutral force of nature. It exists in a legal and cultural framework, made by humans, and alterable if we have the will to do it. For example, corporations normally are set up so workers get a defined return (wages) and the owners get a variable return (profits). We might do it the opposite way if we wanted. We might invent a scheme that blends these two approaches.

What is the right way? The way that most avoids human misery and most promotes the most people feeling like they have a good life. The one where we most often do justly, and love mercy. The one where people love their neighbors as themselves, do unto others as they think is right when others are doing unto them, and return blessings for hate. (Everyone knows this stuff, even those who reject it.)

The idea is certainly to put more money into the hands of the many, and less into the hands of the few. And not by giving it to the few, and then taxing it away from them. That irritates their sense of entitlement. (That sense is an irrational thing that most people have, but the .01% are currently in a position to be really obnoxious about it.) Anyway, I'm saying more pie, up front, to the many. Alter the distribution.

How? Altering the profit entitlement, as I alluded to above, would be one way. Working with minimum and maximum wage laws would be a way. Returning negotiating power to organized labor would be a way. I fully expect there are other ways. All the ways will have good and bad aspects.

Whatever ways we go with should be considered deeply, as to their long and varied effects, against the basic ideas of goodness I mentioned in the 'What is right' paragraph. I'm not saying I know exactly what the best solution. But I'm pretty sure that 'whatever the greediest of the .01% want' is not the way. Instead I see the power this group wields as being likely to just lead to more and more suffering for everybody. We are now in a headlong rush to 'a few own EVERYTHING,' and that needs to change, and quickly.