Being super-rich makes you stupid, because nobody will tell you why you're wrong. Here's the basic thinking of your typical billionaire. The federal government makes me pay taxes, provide some basic level of safety and fairness for my employees, and won't let me dump my toxic waste in the river. Therefore the federal government is bad, and should largely be abolished.
They literally have no concept that commerce and industry are only possible because of government. They do not understand how society and the economy work. They are utter idiots. They're about to find out.
Also, too: Josh Marshall on the same subject. Some pull quotes:
One of the great truisms about economics is that people assume CEOs have a deep understanding of economics when in fact most evidence suggests they don’t. This isn’t just the general and often true fact that people think captains of industry type CEOs are smarter than they really are. It’s more specific: what’s good for an economy isn’t just not identical to what is good for a company. Often they’re precisely opposite. You really don’t need to do anything more than actually read Adam Smith to know this. (You could actually argue it’s one of his central points.) . . .
In economic terms – and obviously that’s not the only terms governments operate in – governments main role is to foster economic growth and kinds of growth that benefit the population as a whole. That means creating a climate of predictability and rules that foster economic activity. It also means certain kinds of public investment that drive economic activity – basic research, etc., infrastructure.
They just don't understand how the world works and where their wealth comes from. Again, they're idiots.
2 comments:
What's happening is the logical result of a nation that worships greed and cruelty. That's why Shitler and Mask are in power; that's why Shitler is even allowed to come anywhere near the White House. Imagine, a miscreant who would run a candy store into the ground being given control of a country.
Our problem is that we don't view our country, and its government, itself in more capitalist, corporate terms. Let me give you a little parable to explain how this'd work:
Artie the artichoke farmer works a plot of land under a crop sharing plan with its owner under a typical 75% - 25% split with him; labor gets 75% and capital gets 25% of whatever he raises. Now suppose he learns about an ideal farm on which he could raise 10 times as many artichokes without working a bit harder.
He visits its owner and proposes a similar crop sharing plan with him. The owner however says that he wants 75% of his crop instead. Archie is furious, "That's robbery. I won't put up with it!" The owner replies reasonably, "What do you want, 75% of 100 bushels, or 25% of 1,000?" The owner was generous, a CFO could maximize ROI by taking an even higher percentage and it would still be in Archie's interest to accept. This could easily happen since the owners of capital usually set the terms. That's the beauty of private enterprise.
Why shouldn't this apply to actual people who have moved here, a more lucrative plot - Shohei Ohtani, from Japan; Elon Musk from South Africa. I doubt that Shohei became a better athlete or that Elon got any smarter by moving here. The USA just has more folks willing to pay bigger bucks to watch an elite baseball player; and it has a much bigger pool of talented engineers, financiers with with way deeper pockets, and more plum government contracts. I'd guess that both of these guys multiplied their income by well more than 10 times for their labor. You don't have to be an immigrant for this logic to apply: The return on everybody's labor depends more on the environment in which it occurs than it does on its actual value.
The USA can easily be viewed as a corporation in which every adult inhabitant owns a single share of voting stock. The more profit it creates from its share cropping clients the more it can be upgraded so that future clients can be even more productive!
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