Steve Wozniak, who's birthday is today, is the founder of Apple Computer, founded on April 1, 1976 with partner Steve Jobs. They were just a couple of regular electronics enthusiasts who sold some of their possessions (no corporate bank loans) and raised $1,300 in order to get started. They believed in their vision enough that Jobs was willing to sell his vehicle in order to help fund it, and Wozniak was willing to part ways with his HP scientific calculator.
Today, Apple Computer has more money than the United States of America.
Read the sentence above again and think about it for a moment, and then think about the people who say that "the rich should pay more in taxes because they got rich at the expense of poor people". Now, you tell me how Steves Wozniak and Jobs victimized poor people by creating the world's most successful company. You can't, because they didn't.
Our federal government alone (not counting state and local), on the other hand, spends $2 billion per year locking up non-violent folks for crimes that are often victim-less (marijuana-related, for example). In fact, as of this writing, the "war on drugs" has cost us more than $9 billion dollars at the federal level, $15 billion at the state level combining all states in that total, with a total of more than $25 billion and counting THIS YEAR ALONE! This is not a cumulative total. This is the total so far for THIS. YEAR. And we're losing the war. We've been losing it since the day we started it. Oh, and did I forget to mention that 15,000 human lives are estimated to be lost each year as a result of the war on drugs? Not drugs themselves, mind you, but innocent people killed as a result of the government's activity in the "war on drugs".
Nobody forces anyone to purchase an iPhone. If you want a smartphone, you don't even have to buy an iPhone. You can always choose an Android phone. The reason so many choose the iPhone is because it does so much for them, and is so well-integrated with their needs and what they are trying to accomplish in their lives on a daily basis. Nobody dies for an iPhone or because Apple makes iPhones, or even because Apple is in a "war" against Android phones, unless you want to count Foxconn's employee suicides as a result of their business practices which they are currently revising in light of these tragedies. (If only we could get our government to revise their policies so quickly in response to the tragedies they have created with their freedom-destroying restrictions on an individual's right to ingest marijuana into their own bodies.)
It's a great phone, and an even better personal digital assistant. Some of us dislike the fact that Apple doesn't provide an open source platform like Android does, but at least our federal government did something right in affirming that it was never illegal (still isn't) to "jailbreak" your phone so that you can program it (or purchase non-Apple apps) in order to use it the way *you* want to use it.
I sometimes worry that not allowing the phone to process Flash will be the downfall of Apple, but so far they seem quite unphased. As a beta-tester for app companies on the side, I will soon have to purchase an Android phone in order to be able to test apps for both platforms, so if I want to access a site requiring Flash I can always use the Android. Nobody forces me to purchase one over the other, so I really can't complain. That's the beauty of a free market, where the consumer makes the decisions about what they will buy, and companies make products in order to please their customers.
If you take away the profit motive from companies, you do away with their incentive to provide what the consumer wants. Everyone loses. I'm going to say it: self-interest is not a dirty word, even if it is hyphenated!
If we continue to allow our government to step in and interfere (or even "bail out") companies, we create an environment where the government decides which companies should and should not be saved with OUR money, and even worse, the government then has the power to tell the company what they can and can not do as a company, since the government is now the owner of that company (at least until the money is paid back, assuming that happens).
I have friends who act disgusted when someone like me expresses disdain at our government taking so much license with our money and our freedom. While I admire their desire to avoid cynicism in expressing "trust" of "their" government, I also remind them that our government was founded on a mistrust of government. We literally would not exist as an independent country today had the founders of this country not decided that government was untrustworthy... and not just other governments, but *our* government, and governments in general.
There is a certain amount of cynicism inherently necessary to keep your government in check. Cynicism is something that many of the "love and light" types claim is not in their nature, and yet in the same breath that they make that claim, they turn around and claim that the rich are all dirty, rotten bastards who stole from them in order to buy a private jet. Seriously? If that's not cynicism of the worst kind, I don't know what is.
The fact of the matter is, there are people who can't be trusted at both ends of the political spectrum and at both ends of the economic spectrum.
In "Bigotry and Economics: Part One" I mentioned the bigoted statements often made by those who believe the poor are victims of the wealthy. Now I will mention that there are those who make statements of a bigoted nature against the poor as well. We've all heard it: "The poor are poor because they are lazy and don't try hard enough."
Again, just as with the wealthy who fit the stereotype of selfish asses who don't care about anyone but themselves, there are those who are accurately described by the statement that the poor are lazy. However, the problem with all stereotypes and bigoted attitudes is that it blankets all people in a category and does not make allowances for the many who do NOT fit that stereotype.
I've met some wealthy people who don't seem to give a rat's ass about anyone but themselves. I've also met some wealthy people who give more money than their liberal wealthy counterparts because they *do* care about others, sometimes to a fault.
By the same token, I have met quite a few folks who are disabled (I know more than one paraplegic.) and in need of assistance in a variety of ways and who truly need help. I have also delivered many a pizza to the projects during the first week of the month when welfare checks go out when I worked as a delivery person, and watched as the residents in tax-payer provided housing complexes unloaded sacks full of junk food from $40,000 S.U.V.'s.
My point is that I can see very clearly that there are people who take advantage of others on both ends of the economic spectrum, and that without careful attention to that reality we run the risk of continuing to hemorrhage trillions of dollars in wasteful assistance paid to folks who don't need it and in bailing out companies and banks who behave in an irresponsible and predatory manner.
Make no mistake: the companies and banks we bailed out had to be bailed out because of circumstances created by their own unethical, even illegal, behavior. Banks knew that if they made home loans to people who couldn't afford the mortgages, they'd collect money on the loans until the borrower defaulted, and then make money selling the note and/or the house once they foreclosed. This is a very old practice and is nothing new. This was just the first time the scheme blew up in the banks' faces all at once, causing the illusion of theoretical future interest they had created for their investors to collapse.
Unfortunately, people have decided that because of the widespread banking fraud and the Ponzi schemes committed by a few individuals, that all people who appear to be wealthy are guilty of some unknown crime against poor folks.
I find it interesting that the banks were bailed out for what amounts to a very similar scheme as what Bernie Madoff was doing on an individual level. Apparently, fraud is legal as long as it's being committed by a bank.
The subliminal message we seem to be promoting is that people are bad, and corporations are good, but let's take a closer look:
All of those high-paid executives who receive huge bonuses, even when they are systematically making decisions that result in the bankruptcy of the company, do not decide what their salaries will be. Unlike Congress, whose members DO get to vote for their own raises, corporations are controlled by a board of directors. While it's true that there are some C.E.O.'s who sit on the board of directors, it is the exception and not the rule, and the C.E.O. gets one vote, unlike Congress, which amounts to a room full of C.E.O.'s all voting raises for themselves.
Getting back to my original point that it is unreasonable to expect the wealthy to pay 40% or more of their income in taxes, I think these terms we throw around like "fair share" and "higher percentage" are very misleading.
The very high income of someone receiving $1,000,000 or more per year already ensures that the same percentage of their income is exponentially higher than someone with a much lower income. Applying the same percentage across the board is not the same thing as applying the same AMOUNT across the board. The percentage of higher income equates to MUCH more money paid by the wealthy and MUCH less paid by the poor. That there are those who want the wealthy to pay even MORE than this is very telling of the attitude that the lower, and even middle, classes have toward the "rich".
If you really get honest about what this implies, you understand that these people who think this makes sense are essentially saying that these people are making too much money. If you truly believe that, you need to understand that the person taking home the paycheck isn't the person with whom you should be angry. You should instead be angry with the board of directors of the company willing to pay that amount, and taxing the high-salaried corporate executive to death is hardly any different than a mobster forcing a business owner to pay "protection money".
Also inherent in the attitude that these people are making too much money is the belief that one person making lots of money somehow causes another person to lose money, which is completely false.
Not one person is required to purchase an iPhone from Apple Computer. The people who work at Apple Computer do not make less money because the C.E.O. of the company takes home so much more money than them. They make what they make because they have agreed to trade their labor for the price offered by the company who employs them. The fact that there may not be a lot of alternatives out there or that someone is not in a position to turn down a job which they feel they should be paid more to do is not caused by the C.E.O. of the company. Why then, do we blame the C.E.O.?
Perhaps a better illustration would be two farmers who each have the same amount of land right next to one another. Both have the same quality soil and seed, both receive the same amount of rain and sunlight. One is able to negotiate a much higher return from the soil by providing the soil with more seeds and fertilizer, and perhaps paying more attention to pest and weed control. The other may have some personal or family issues that prevent her from being able to cultivate the crops as well, resulting in a much smaller harvest. The smaller harvest is not in any way caused by the farmer next door reaping a huge harvest. The harvest is created in agreement with the requirements of the laws of nature, and the circumstances of one farm have nothing to do with the circumstances of another.
Is it nice for the farmer with the better harvest to share their harvest with their less-fortunate neighbor? Sure. Should it be required? No.
In life, there are no guarantees. Sometimes things get messy, sometimes there are things that happen to us that we can not control. But this childish attitude many seem to have that others are wrong for not rescuing them usually comes with a heavy dose of hypocrisy.
The middle-class retiree who lost a lot of money in her 401K and is now forced to live on little more than what Social Security pays each month is not a victim of the wealthy, but a victim of her own bad decision to invest the money in the manner in which she chose.
If you truly believe that a corporate executive is making "too much money", the solution is not to take that money away from them, but to stop buying the product the company they work for produces. Write a letter to the board of directors and tell them why you have stopped buying their product. If you are truly concerned that these people making too much money is what is causing the workers in their company or the poor in our country to not have enough, go directly to the source of the alleged problem and deal with it there. Don't give your government the right to start taking "just a little bit more" of everyone's money. That's like saying that some people are too healthy, and it's the fault of the healthy that the sick are sick, so let's go infect all of the healthy people with "just a mild version" of whatever it is that's making the others sick, and somehow that will solve the problem. It won't.
I agree that in a civilized society we can not allow those who are starving or homeless to starve and be killed by the cruel elements of mother nature simply because it isn't our fault they are in the situation in which they find themselves. I am also aware that there are many people who are more than willing to help those people, who just don't happen to think that the government can be trusted to get the job done as well as private non-profit organizations can.
The middle-class retiree who owns her own home and lives alone and wants to use other people's money to take care of the homeless is not willing to open up her home to the homeless, and seems to see nothing wrong with her attitude that she is somehow a better person because she advocates that others pay to solve the problem while she complains that her circumstances are not ideal, despite the fact that they are of her own making. Even if they were not of her own making, she is still much better off than the people she claims to be so concerned about, yet is unwilling to make sacrifices herself, claiming that it will be more difficult for her to do it than someone much wealthier. And there lies the problem: there's always someone much wealthier whom everyone else thinks should foot the bill for their ideologies. Lots of lip service, but the hands remain idle except when pointing the fingers at those whose money they are all too willing to spend, despite the fact that they did nothing to earn it.
To sum it up: the blame game has no winners. Those who make risky investments are not guaranteed to receive a huge return, nor are they guaranteed that they won't lose all of the money invested. If it is fraud causing them to lose their money, then it may not be totally their fault they lost their money, but in the case of Bernie Madoff, there were a lot of very greedy people who are now painting themselves as victims, even though any reasonable person not drunk with greed would have known it was too good to be true. Indeed, it wasn't the greed of Bernie Madoff that allowed the largest Ponzi scheme in history to occur, it was the greed of those who chose to buy into it, despite the fact that everything about it screamed "FRAUD ALERT"!
So, you think it's not the responsibility of the individual investor to question the validity of the investments? You "trust" your government? Let's not forget: there were those who tried to tell the feds that there was something illegal about Bernie Madoff's investment company, and they failed to act on the information until it was too late to save the billions of dollars that were lost. That's what happens when you trust your government, especially in order to justify giving yourself permission to do foolish things.
To be continued...
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