Joseph Marshall:
Three issues:
1. This ain’t Monopoly. Wealth can be created, not just passed around. If someone is good at creating wealth, that doesn’t mean they are taking it from someone else. If someone down the street starts a business, risks what they have and works long hours, what is it to you or anyone else if they make good? When the assumption is that wealth is a finite pie to divvy out, that is when talk of wealth redistribution comes in which means that the guy down the street has no incentive to risk anything if it is going to go to the bum across the street who sits at home all day doing nothing or to someone with so little initative that after being in the world of work for ten years they can’t do anything that a part-time teenager can’t do just as well.
2. The concept of this percentile and that percentile is faulty. People move up and down in relative income and wealth over time. Individuals have to be tracked over time to look for progress, as opposed to an assumption that individuals remain forever arbitrary statistical break points of the top 10% or bottom 20% of whatever. You’d be shocked at how many start in the lower 20% and show up in the top 20% later on. My parents, back in the ’70s lived like extras from the Walton’s. Now they own their home out right, and their vehicles, they retired early to spend time with the grandkids, and have no material wants. I stated out in the late ’80′s making $3.35 an hour, now I make than 12 times that and it doesn’t distress me that someone else is making more than I am. If someone risks it all and goes into business and works like a dog, then if there is any justice they should do better than I do.
3. People working harder now? Doing what? Surfing the web at work while sipping coffee in a warm office posting “me too” to Daily KOs? Having a catered lunch meeting? That is work? My Grandfather did hard work–real work–by the hour, and never complained about it once. Half the twenty year old “over worked” twerps these days would’ve had a cardiac arrest just trying to keep up with him at age sixty on any day at the iron works–they’d have thought they were in some sort of extreme reality TV show where the contestants were measured by how many minutes they could stay in the game. The contention that Americans are working harder now than ever is funnier and funnier the more I think about it.
