In one sense, they are right. Any tax cut disproportionately favors rich people since the rich pay much more tax.
But the media and Democrats (is there a difference?) are wrong because they routinely portray rich people as parasites who take from other people.
Flying Dog Brewery owner Jim Caruso objects to that kind of thinking. He took over a bankrupt brewery and made it successful by inventing new craft beers. I won't buy his beers -- with varieties like blood orange ale -- but enough people like them that Caruso has become relatively rich.
He's the kind of person Sen. Bernie Sanders rails about. "The top 1 percent," complains Sanders, "earned 85 percent of all new income."
That sounds unfair. But Caruso doesn't see it that way.
"My goal in life is to be the best part of your day," he told me. "You will have unequal outcomes (but) we all benefit from that."
He's right. Caruso provided consumers new choices and created more than 100 jobs.
But for my YouTube video this week, I pushed back: "The top fraction of earners has half the assets in this country. This ticks people off. They view it as evil."
"Think about it this way," responded Caruso. "Apple was the first company to be worth $800 billion dollars. I was curious, how much was (Apple founder) Steve Jobs worth in 2011 when he passed away? ... Ten billion dollars! I did some quick calculations..."
His calculations revealed that because about 2 billion Apple devices were sold, Jobs collected about $5 for each device.
Isn't your cellphone worth much more to you than $5? Mine is. It must be, since I just paid $800 for a new one. I got a machine worth hundreds of dollars to me, but the inventor got only $5.
"Steve might have been underpaid," said Caruso. "The feeling tends to be that somebody like Steve Jobs took something away from everybody else ... (but) what did Jobs take? ... (H)e had this idea: Wouldn't it be great to have a thousand songs in your pocket? (He created) one of the most massively important tools for productivity and communication in life!"
Generally, Jobs got a pass when the media attacked rich people, maybe because reporters liked Apple's products. But other rich Americans are routinely labeled "parasites." Sanders suggests that if some people have billions, the rest of us must have billions less.
But that's not true, Caruso points out. "It's that zero-sum game mentality: that somehow people who create stuff are taking it from other people. That's simply inaccurate. It's not a zero-sum game. They're creating stuff that didn't exist before."
He's right. It's not as if there's one pie and when rich people take a big piece, less is left for the rest of us. Billionaires like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, the Koch brothers, etc. got rich only by baking thousands of new pies.
Entrepreneurs create things; they don't take from others.
Comment: The question is what they or their companies then do with that new found power and wealth:
- Under the influence of power - does it cause brain damage?
- Planned obsolescence: Apple products become much slower just before release of a new model
- Oligarchs, billionaires, uber wealthy are killing capitalism-- They are dangerous
- Zuckerberg announces harsh anti-Russian censorship measures on Facebook?
Well, they do take if they conspire with government to get special deals -- subsidies, bailouts, regulations that protect them from competition. But without government force, businesspeople get rich only by selling us things we willingly purchase.
We get to decide if we'd be better off with the products that creators offer to sell. Producers get to decide whether they can make enough money from those sales to make their efforts worth their while.
This mutually beneficial exchange is the heart of a market economy.
Government, on the other hand, only knows how to do two things: make you engage in exchanges you don't want, and prevent you from engaging in exchanges you do want. With every order it issues, government makes the pie a little smaller.
As long as rich people don't collude with government, they make our lives better.
Reader Comments
Hrrm, there's some kind of common denominator here.
It might sound like they're just glorified rent seekers, but they're actually worse. A landlord doesn't make you buy the building before you move in.
The success of Apple's manufacturing side is massively profitable due to the fact that they've funneled manufacturing to countries willing to exploit workers. Apple essentially takes a dirty cut from every job they export overseas.
Those roads and public utilities needed to maintain the lives of their chickens are built on tax dollars. How much tax does Apple pay?
Reward for hard work shouldn't be punished and making lots of money isn't in itself a crime.
But this is far from a black & white issue.
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There's a show on cable called Damnation (I haven't watched it). It's whole plot is the imbalance between the 1% and the 99%. I read that the shows creators were give. 5 months to get the show out. This strikes me as extremely suspicious. It's almost like " they" wanted to put this show out at this specific time. The question is why? Could it be that they want to provoke a violent response? They want to trigger attacks on people just because they are wealthy? I can see how this would benefit the globalist monsters. They've been itching to disarm America. That's the only way they will be able to force the population to accept open austerity. Until now they've had to rely on covert measures. But those don't have the same demoralizing effects nor trigger the same sense of hopelessness.
I have major problems with the canyon sized gap between the 1% and the 99% in terms of wealth. But these juvenile efforts to enflame people are just lame.