A truly capital way would be to share the wealth equitably with its producers this Capital holiday and henceforth.

blcksmth,

Here's a little tale about a landscaper Billy Workingman. This guy goes out, gets contracts, and then diligently maintains the yards of people -- often very well-to-do people.

On of his clients is Robert Addington Wellbegotten, heir to the great Wellbegotten fortune, who now spends his time investing his considerable inherited wealth in blue-chip dividend-bearing stock, while Billy cuts his grass.

As you can well imagine, Robert Addignton Wellbegotten's income is largely in the form of dividends and capital gains. He falls into the 15% tax bracket on these instruments because, as the saying goes, the money has "already been taxed".

After paying his taxes, he uses some small amount of the remainder of his earnings to pay Johnny to edge his flower beds.

So now the question is, what should Johnny's tax bracket be? After all, the money that he was paid by Robert Addington Wellbegotten had "already been taxed".

Hmmm... that Johnny is Billy, really...

The proportion of American children not completing high school - around 25 percent - has scarcely changed in recent decades. "Hedge-fundocrats and their private equity cousins should consider ways to pile money into ending this national failure."

Are you kidding ?

They need that 25 percent as economic conscripts to fight in Iraq.

What we need is Socialism of the 21st Century, that would eliminate the axis of evil: USA Capitalism.

It will all come tumbling down one day in the not so distant future. Greed always seems to do that. Socialism will be coming to America.

"In the United States, the top 300,000 earners pocketed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million in 2005." also consider that the bottom 150 million also have almost no assets and are probably living a paycheck or misfortune away from destitution (even if they "own" a home.) income alone is not an accurate measure of wealth; the picture is far worse than the article presents (and this is in an extremely wealthy but very unequal country, the US. when you put the top 1% globally vs the bottom 99%, the inequities are even more staggering.)

and yeah, blcksmth, you have the figures about right: you can make about 75 grand, and society will take the rest and redistribute it equitably. any more is definitely social theft. how many think it's fair that bill gates alone (not microsoft, but gates himself), is worth several hundred billion dollars while millions of americans are food insecure?

How crippled a mind does one need possess not to appreciate the grand canyon-scale disparities in wealth in America and the accelerating rate of expansion of these disparities? Does anyone really believe that there are people among us who are deserving of a million dollar daily income? Did these individuals build their own houses?, pave the roads they travel on?, invent the internal combustion engine which moves them about?, teach their children calculus?, put out the fire when their summer home burned? Wall Street is overrun by some of the most worthless, hyper-dependent parasites on this green earth, many of whom have homes in the Hamptons you couldn't afford with 500 years of your present salary. Tragically, one unfortunate aspect of this current mess, which affects us all, is that real merit has been terminally devalued, having been, to a dangerous degree, replaced by the advantages and synergies of wealth/class, political connections, race, religion, criminal ability, ruthlessness, and the bizarre vagaries of a globalized marketplace. These factors are all too central to the destinies of many Americans today. Our culture, thus, rots from within. Hard work, dedicated study, the pursuit of classical ideals, all have been reduced to a sucker's game in a world in which the barely literate "King of All Media" pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars for being little more than a televised/radioized pimp. Our economic system is out of focus, off-center, out of kilter, use your own expression, but whatever you call it, it will not repair itself, it is unhealthy and there promises to be no happy ending. Gross National Product means nothing to the terminally unemployed ex-factory worker. The fact that a multinational corporation surpasses it's quarterly earnings- per-share estimate may be worthy of note on the Nightly Business Report, but matters only to a very small number of wealthy shareholders, now that most "retail" investors have been driven out of the market due to their losses in the Wall Street crime wave, and particularly when most of that company's jobs are overseas notwithstanding it's American label and the faux patriotism of it's leadership.

Corporations must be brought to heel, stripped of their excessive prerogatives and "civil rights", required to pay taxes, produce domestic jobs, refrain from destroying the environment, or have their directors imprisoned like the common criminals many of them have proven to be. Capitalism, like all forces of nature, requires elaborate controls to make it benefit more than a tiny few who have managed to usurp the wealth of a broader base of beneficiaries by capitalizing upon the illicit activities of their highly paid lobbyists and not, as they would have you believe, as a result of any natural or logical process.

The real reason we allow the new Gilded Age to continue unabated is because, deep down, we all know we want the "easy" hedge fund money and we all know we'd be just as obnoxious once we had it, and would fight just as hard to keep every dime. It's the "greed" hypocrisy we simply cannot wrap our minds around. We know accumulating anything more than, say, a few steady million is pretty much worthless, yet once the greed switch is flipped, it apparently cannot be flipped back. So we begrudge the billionaire with envy - by the grace of God go I...

And the "filthy rich" have the money, right now, to help fund sustainable technologies, but they do nothing, being some of the most UN-GENEROUS mo'fo's on this tragically beautiful planet- the moneybones they throw to the poor in NO WAY compensates for their contribution to the enslavement of the working masses, or the Earth's demise.
Fuck them all.

The answer may be modeled something like this: The people have basic rights to land, natural resources, food, healthcare, education, local economic opportunity, and responsibility to protect those rights. The rights exist at the local level but do not extend further, because expanded opportunities come at the expense of someone else, resulting in class hierarchy and mass exploitation.

The advantage of such a model is in its simplicity, so the more people can grasp it, and the more people can defend it as an institution. Such an institution may be implemented everywhere at the local level with almost no inputs from power centers. Lines of communication linking these local communities must be kept open and free from exploitive influence, in defense of the right to education. This is a challenge, but not impossible.

The quest to "get ahead" individually is legitimate until it involves exchange with power centers that override the local community. Such exchange, either selling one's labor or buying products/services, further empowers the power center to oppress and enslave the local community, and eventually undermine the individual's rights. This is the "sell-out". So individual responsibility includes limiting exchange with power concentrations to preserve the autonomy of the local community and the basic rights of individuals.

This article has some useful information but supports false premises about society. It's about 50% disinformation.

"[H]ow many think it's fair that bill gates alone (not microsoft, but gates himself), is worth several hundred billion dollars while millions of americans are food insecure?"

Remember Gates built his empire on a system (DOS) that he virtually stole from its inventor and then claimed as his own.

Yeah, my friend who worked on Wall St all his life votes Republican because he doesn't want his capital gains "double-taxed". (Apparently the financial companies don't give their workers pensions; the workers are expected to invest successfully to fund their retirements.) Isn't it just the new money, the gains, that are being taxed at the ridiculously low 15% rate? How is that "double" taxation? Does that make sales taxes (where we are taxed for spending, rather than making, money) "double" taxation? Actually, yes, it happens all the time. Why investment gains should thus be exempt from regular income tax rates is beyond me.

There is also an archaic rationale in Democracy known as the Social Contract. Briefly, without labor, a secure and stable society, protection provided by the state, and all the other benefits of a country which allow you to make money, you wouldn't be able to make (or protect) your dough. So the rich owe society. Today's libertarian rich have conveniently forgotten that.

And don't get me started on inheritance tax. If individual success is to be prized and protected by the state (and the self-righteous libertarian), inheritance should be seen as the opposite of that. Inheritance is what gives us Paris Hilton and George W Bush - spoiled brats who never worked for anything in their lives and are thus out of touch with reality. Let the Prescott Bushes make money any slimy way they can, but when they die they can leave $250K to stake each of their kids to a leg up on the rest of us, and have the rest go to improving democratic society rather than perpetuating oligarchies.

Bill Gates became the world's richest man in 20 years.

Ergo: he overcharged me for his crappy Windows!

I'd love to know how many of these people are actually self-made. It seems as if most of the very wealthy, or even upper-middle class were born into money and that rags to riches stories are by and large fairy tales.

That's my point iwarrior - the libertarian right holds up the self-made millionaire as a god, but very few of them are self-made, and none could have approached their success without a social system in place to empower and protect them.

Right wcdevins.

Another person that capitalists love to hold up as an example is Donald Trump, a man whose father owned a real estate company. And guess what? He's still lost his ass a number of times. An average person who tries to pull off what Trump has would have no cushion to land on. Trump did.

Is it any wonder 80% of start-up businesses fail after 6 months? I see it in my neighborhood. They come and go on our main drag.

"The proportion of American children not completing high school - around 25 percent - has scarcely changed in recent decades. Hedge-fundocrats and their private equity cousins should consider ways to pile money into ending this national failure."

When pigs fly.

Taxing them won't work either--them with the gold makes the rules.

Socialism is not popular.

Capitalism has morphed into fascism.

But there is a way:

http://ni4d.us/

Whats happening at the 'cellular' level of this economic paradigm which drives and amplifies such desparities?
Its seems important to note this is a system of beliefs with legal backing which envisions no relative limits as to how much one person could 'earn'-theres no maximum wage.
There's also no limits set as to how much of the finite earth, the source of our life and all wealth, one person or group of persons could own/control.
This is also a system which gives a specialized class-bankers, the franchise to issue/create the common currency of exchange, as interest bearing debts to us all-including our so called democratic governments.
If this structuring of rules/incentives was to be packaged as a boardgame it could be called Monopoly or Monetocracy and when played, you'd could be assured of certain outcomes.
Theres no reason for a just and sustainable economic system to exist until enough people envision what could really work and set out to create it...this system folks aint it...for obvious reasons.To expect such a game to be more fair is like expecting the game of Monopoly to be more fair.... in other words its reasonable to expect gross imbalances of wealth.
So what will work to create a vital sustainable and just exchange economy?

What would we have if a worker has to keep himself and family on slave 'low' wages and no benefits and still serve his master to the masters beck and command? Looks like the definition of modern slavery...no worker overhead..few rules.

Not quite, rtdrury. People do not have a "basic right" to food, healthcare, education, and local economic opportunity. For every one of those things, someone has to provide them. So, what you are saying is that they have the right to enslave others to provide those "rights" for themselves. Nope.

As for only "local" exchanges being "legitimate", autarky always results in poverty. No solely local-based economy can deliver more than a subsistance-level life, because no local-based economy has sufficient resources to maintain anything higher.

Sorry, but I prefer living in a technological civilization to the neolithic.

inflation equals greed, put moratoriums on it with price limits, and cut back on those taxes deemed unfair to the poor, such as income tax, abolish it completely, stop the cities from sleeping with corporations, they nickel and dime us to death with stadium taxes, car rental taxes and etc...Also, make education free in this country for all, allow no more than 100% profit margins for any business, put a moratorium on building in the southwest and send all contractors to rebuild the midwest and eastern cities and towns and employ legal americans, stop building houses and charging us ridiculous prices and making us pay for 30 yrs, stop redligning, blackballing, brownnosing and all of your white lies....just to name a few things to do!

The rich became wealthy the old-fashioned way - by stealing from the poor.