I pity the envious, they gripe about incentive and achievement. The thing is they have neither. God help us if they ever put their attitudes into practise to form a Government. All would be on social welfare like themselves. We live in the lucky country and the harder one works and plans wisely the luckier one becomes. I suggest you get off your welfare butt and try working for yourself for a living you might actually be able to afford an overseas holiday every year. You might even lift your income and standard of life higher than John Howard. The top 5% of workers / investors in Australia would be earning equivalent or greater than John's Government allowance. The article posted is nothing more than envy. One of the deadly sins of humanity, deal with it!

Rob513264 “If the government really believed in fairness it would enact laws that provide it, instead it produces laws which support privilege and compound poverty.”

If it were simply about “fairness” we would all be healthy athletes, no one with a disability and no one so athletic as to produce an exemplary sporting performance.

We would all have the same IQ

We would all have some level of aesthetic taste and appreciation (instead of the morons who designed the building to the north west of Melbourne’s Federation Square, you know, the one which looks like is draped in a camouflage net).

No one would want recreational drugs.

No one would seek to pursue reckless and stupid acts.

No one would need to express their inadequacy by painting graffiti on my front wall.

Unfortunately, no laws exist which compensate for differential physical, intellectual or emotional development and ability.

For which I am relieved, a state with such power would certainly be manipulated by those who have an undue interest in social engineering to ensure we all turned out the same. “Unfairness” has some negatives, however, the its great benefit is to make people different and with difference comes individuality.

Individuality, a much underrated quality, in lower orders of flora and fauna it is also called bio-diversity and is considered a good thing.

For myself, I believe it is a good thing and I cherish not only it but my right to exercise it.

Philo, I would concur with your view, small minded envy is a very unattractive trait which does not merit being presented or represented in politics or elsewhere.

I dont support egalitarianism - I think it is unworkable and I have nothing against one person having a big house on the water while someone else has a little flat in the outer suburbs or one person driving a Ferrari while someone else can only afford a Kia.

What I do object to is one person having an chain of waterfront mansions, some they've never even been to while someone else has nowhere to sleep out of the weather or one person having an aircraft hangar full of exotic sportscars while someone else has not the bus fare to get to the doctor.

It is not that I condemn an unequal distribution of wealth, that is inevitable anyway, but that I think the imbalance has been allowed to go too far. This is bad for the culture - it is bad for the poor (obviously) but it is also bad for the rich because, as history attests, eventually the poor decide they are not going to take it anymore and they mount a revolution and it was 'the heads of the rich' that filled the baskets below the guillotine - it was the aristocracy who were lined up against the wall in Russia, etc.

The inference that poverty equals lack of effort is really offensive, the example I gave was of a single mother with 5 kids (as my mother was) who works her butt off and still cant get ahead. Successful people who are honest admit that luck played a big part in their success. This world is full of hard-working, talented people who are just scraping by because they have not been lucky. The tendency for successful people to take credit for the luck they have had is a sign of their own ignorance.

Rob513264 “I have nothing against one person having a big house..”

“What I do object to is one person having an chain of waterfront mansions etc”

So you do not object, to people benefiting from whatever effort it takes or what ever the fortunes of birth endows them, you just object to “how much” it endows them.

Unfortunately, such notions are impossible to legislate for.

1 You can either not legislate (the capitalist / libertarian system)

2 Legislate through tax to the point of expropriation. eg. Marginal tax rates of 98%, as was used by enacted by socialists in UK in 1960s/70s.

3 Adopt wholesale expropriation of assets as deployed by Lenin and then when some people started to reaccumulate and benefit through their own efforts, they can be exiled and executed, as Stalin did to the kulaks who recovered despite Lenin’s expropriations.

The problem with a policy of “regulated wealth” is “where to draw the line”. You suggest big house is OK but chain of waterfront mansions is not. So how many waterfront mansions is “acceptable”, 1 2 or 5?
Do waterfront mansions equate on par with big or small houses in non-waterfront locations?

The other point is, what happens to people who already exceed where you draw the line, do you expropriate or compensate them for the assets which they are no longer allowed to hold?

(This is sounding much like the debate on ideas I had with Spider when he presented his “New Wave Fascism” and to which he has scurried off, tail between legs and failed to attempt to answer.)

So I will put the same question to you –

First decide if you would expropriate or compensate – which?

Then

If you expropriate, what happens to the expropriated assets – how do you distribute them to supposed “deserving causes”?

If you compensate for them, How do you finance the cost of compensation?

How do you prevent people from accumulating assets and wealth through their own prudence and energy?

And how do you prevent the majority of people from voting against such draconian legislation?

MMM glad to see this topic generates so much passion.

Robert, thank you for your input..balanced and articulate as always.

Col rouge well paced and presents his arguemet with a seeming fair degree of political acumen.

Philo still reduced to sarcasm and put downs, not really interested in the topic or fact.Very witty.

Rob513264 is in tune with my thoughts exactly . Post a more complete response later on today.

Thanks to all so far....

Col
“If it were simply about “fairness” we would all be healthy athletes”
You have much greater faith in the power of legislation than I do.

“Union thuggery”
What about Management thuggery? Dismissal, harassment, retraction of negotiated conditions, police with attack dogs – ring any bells?

“And how do you prevent the majority of people from voting against such draconian legislation?”
Funny, I thought forcing people to work long hours in sweat shops for pittances was draconian – ‘sharing the wealth more evenly’ – that is a meaning of ‘draconian’ of which I am unaware. And I don’t think you can get people to vote for it. Even though only those with extreme wealth would be ‘disadvantaged’ and so the vast majority of people would benefit from it unfortunately all the owners of all the media are people of extreme wealth and so the weight of propaganda produced against these sorts of solutions would be prohibitive.

It is also interesting the subjects you do not address such as the example of the extremely hard-working person of whom there are many who cannot get out of their situation because the demands upon them exceed their ability to provide.

With respect to the redistribution of wealth – the Keynesian Clearinghouse concept works well although I don’t think this is original – the Jewish tradition which I think is called ‘Jubilee’ was probably the genesis of that although it would need to be updated (that was the practice of bringing everything back to a baseline level of wealth for everyone every seven years).

In the modern context I would suggest an escalating tax system – the higher the income, the higher the tax rate until eventually it became 100%. This would be coupled with a Cuban type system of allowing free-enterprise but only in businesses up to a certain scale. Enterprises which are macro by their nature such as mining, banking, insurance, car manufacture, etc would all be state owned. Such a system would not require legislation of property because the nature of income would be a limiting factor in itself.