SPREADING WEALTH, INCOME INEQUALITY AND OTHER MANURE

1. It’s impossible to “spread wealth.”

Wealth is an instantaneous quality of something that arises during exchange and disappears as soon as exchange happens. Let’s say a retailer has a bicycle for sale and you have cash. When you sell your cash and buy the bicycle while simultaneously the retailer sells the bicycle and buys your cash, the bicycle becomes wealth.

As soon as you gain property (right of ownership) in the bicycle, the bicycle no longer is wealth. At most, the bicycle represents potential wealth.

Let’s say years pass. You have tired of riding your bicycle so you decide to sell it. Months pass, yet no one comes to buy your bicycle. Thus, your bicycle is not wealth. It lacks buying power. It’s worthless.

2. The phrase “income inequality” is a phrase of rhetoric. It labels a false concept that does not exist. Those who speak of it make appeals to others through jealousy.

Income means wages through time. Someone buys wages by selling skills through time. Any wage is a price. All prices arise from the great, infrangible, Law of Prices. The Law of Prices holds the winning bids of purchase and sale in the face of what is on offer set the price.

3. The claim that “[c]apital gains taxes and marginal rates are unfairly low” is bogus, mental fiction. Income taxation of any kind is immoral and amounts to a quasi-slavery. All anyone has is a limited slice of existence during infinite time. To tax one’s income is to tax one’s expressed skills through time.

As a labor (work), that is skills expressed through time is the poor man’s capital. Taking income (labor) amounts to taking a share of profits from that man’s own capital without having invested in that capital first.

Likewise, when politicians lay claim to tax capital gains, politicians are taking a share of profits without having invested in that capital first.

Without profit, there can not be any taxation.

Since labor is a kind of capital and thus since selling labor is a kind of capital gains, any taxation on either labor as capital or capital gains ought to be taxed at the same rate, however immoral doing so is. Income taxation is little more than political wage garnishment.

Since labor is a kind of capital, workers ought to have deduction and depreciation write offs for their expenses such as food expenses, transportation expenses, skills acquisition expenses and so on.

4. The real problem is not bogus “income inequality” it is politics, specifically CRONY POLITICS. Through crony politics, established players have created oligopoly markets, thus inhibiting competitors from entering markets, introducing innovation leading to superior efficiency, and thus more output, leading to lower prices owing to the Law of Prices.

All of the foregoing would render obsolete existing capital structures of extant players. Yet, through politics, large, established firms can protect themselves from their capital structures becoming obsolete.

The other aspect of crony politics sees established players using politics to have economic quantities of purchasing transferred to some and thus conferring upon them buying power. In so doing, added buying power pushes up prices in the face of extant output arising from extant capital. Again, of this arises from the inescapable and only law of economics, the Law of Prices.

Welfare programs like SNAP keep up food prices that would otherwise would fall in the absence of buying power as ever fewer poor could buy food. With less buying power, bidding on food would fall and thus prices would fall.

Food prices owing to SNAP, medical prices owing to Medicare and Medicaid, rent prices owing to Section 8, higher education prices owing to PELL — all of these are higher than otherwise would be if such welfare programs didn’t exist. Welfare keeps the poor poorer and keeps ever more poor.

Yet another way that Crony Politics infects all is through subsidy of inefficient capital. When producers seek and gain subsidy to stay in production, in so doing, all become worse off and products get made that otherwise could not get made, pulling away resources from other production, thus forcing up costs in other areas and even prohibiting the production of otherwise new products.

So the true problems are Crony Politics, Crony Governance and Crony Regulatory Capture. The problem rests in politics and governance rather than people in pursuit providing wanted products efficiently.

When exchange is not hampered by artificial restriction of supply, nor inflated by artificial giving of buying power, the righteousness of a free market prevails. Only through markets free from Crony Politics, Crony Governance and Crony Regulatory Capture can all benefit owing to efficiency.

5. We’re living in the 21st century. The goal should be to have the least governance as likely rather than the relentless pursuit of the most governance as tolerable. Government is mafia with better public relations.

For all to live better, all need enforced competition (freed markets) rather than regulated competition (political cronyism). All need regulated politicians (limited government). All need self-rule (freedom) and all need entrepreneurialism (capitalism).

6. Economics and Politics. If only many knew how these worked. No longer would many suffer from silly, indoctrinated false beliefs such as “income inequality.” Their eyes would become fully opened. Only then would they lay blame where it belongs. Only then could they rise up in action to stop the madness and evil that punishes many at the hands of the few tyrants abounding — politicians, politically-connected producers, welfare recipients.