Debunking Narratives on "Wealth Inequality"

Apologize in advance for the length. Coming into an election year, we will be spammed from every orifice of the gov-edu-union-contractor-grantee-trial lawyer-MSM Complex with propaganda narratives meant to a) divide people and foment irrational resentment, that lead to b) willingness to give more and more power over our lives to government and related entities, to suffer even more unjust levels of taxation, to engage in the fallacy that government force is somehow superior to voluntary choices... all of the preceding just so happen to also enrich Complex denizens of many stripes. I will be making a series of threads on several of the more egregious bogus narratives and just bumping them up or linking them when the inevitable narrative spam in place of realistic policy intensifies. This thread is about the "Wealth Inequality" propaganda narrative.

1. Any narrative, chart, claim, statistics, etc. on "wealth inequality" that does not also include a specific definition of the abstract term "wealth" is a lie narrative specifically crafted to deceive towards statist propaganda. By -excluding- several -mandatory- types of "wealth" from its definition, propagandists of the Complex seek to create the very false impression that some few group of people are getting very rich while the rest of us are not.

2. So how to define "wealth?" Mandatory categories of "wealth" include both very tangible and also intangible forms, but are reasonably easy to discuss.

3. Most people would likely include the general well-being of themselves, their family, their friends and communities as the most important category of "wealth." This is of course intangible, but there are several important tangible indicia of this kind of wealth. I will submit some questions, feel free to add, but -exclusion- of -any- such questions = lie narrative:

Are you safe? are you (will include family, friends and community in "you" going forward) at war? are you able to readily obtain food, clothing, shelter? are you suffering from privation? are you able to move about freely and express yourself freely, are you free to believe as you choose? are you able to worship as you choose or disdain worship? is "learning" available to you if you want it? Are you able to obtain emergency medical care? The answer to these things represents a very important component of your wealth, maybe the most important. Don't let them exclude it.

Before dismissing the above as givens, realize that most of the world's population do not possess all these forms of wealth to the degree we in the West possess them. Do not take them for granted. I claim that they are the most important, most fundamental characteristic of "wealth."

4. Personal property must be included in any reasonable definition of wealth, but is of course hard to calculate. This is so intuitive that it's fair to say that any definition of wealth excluding personal property is specifically crafted towards propaganda. After all, "money" "stocks" etc. are useless abstractions in one sense, personal property is the form of wealth we all use daily. What personal property do you, family, friends, community -own-? What kinds of clothing and are you able to replace it when it wears out? What kinds of innovations including everything from electric light bulbs to the supercomputer/phone in your hand? Do you own an automobile? Do you own things that give you pleasure, knowledge, entertainment?

5. Residential real estate -must- be included in any reasonable definition of the "wealth" of a group or country. More specifically, the amount of -space- you control, even if indebted or leased, is a very important indicia of real "wealth." At all socioeconomic strata, we in the West are immensely, obscenely, vulgarly wealthy in terms of residential real property in world historical terms.

6. Financial assets, the only category usually included in lie narratives on "wealth inequality" are inherently inflated, especially the stock equity in their own companies that comprises a -vast- majority of the "wealth" of the super wealthy as misrepresented by propagandists. YES, a -few- people get extremely wealthy in terms of stock equity, but it is abstract, volatile, inflated by a P/E multiple that does not apply to restricted or "tied up" equity, and subject to change. The average corporate decamillionaire can't just go "cash in" their wealth into tangibles, yet the propagandists want you to form the impression that they can.

To be continued

 

7. So all that said, how to calculate "wealth" for purposes of measuring it?

Intangible, general QOL factors + personal property including ALL technological and innovation proliferation+ residential "space" controlled + financial assets

is a pretty good start. Please reply and include any -other- categories of wealth that I may be missing myself.

But the main point is that wealth is a complex quantity that must include several necessary components. It is NOT your bank account balance, your portfolio, your 401k or even the equity in your home, but IS an amalgam of many tangible and intangible quantities.

Do not allow statists whose activities your tax dollars fund to use YOUR OWN TAX DOLLARS to propagandize and advocate against you. Hold their feet to the fire and make them define their terms. After all YOU paid for ALL of their negative, resentment propaganda in the end.

 

Obama care and quantitative easing blew it apart, they made main street rich and left main street in the dust.

 

Thanks! I had a hunch a poster would come along soon and illustrate the forms of propaganda/false narratives on "wealth inequality" that the gov-edu-union-contractor-grantee-trial lawyer-MSM Complex uses to create toxic division/resentment and enrich itself at all our expense. I couldn't have found better examples of the canard if I tried.

Note that the definition of "wealth" is not included. This is because bogus, self-enriching Complex definitions of wealth invariably exclude several of the -necessary- forms of wealth I listed in the OP.

When asked to define their terms, they will go into a transparent "loop" of appealing to inadequate dictionary definitions of "wealth." When this is objected to, they will begin insulting, introduce a red herring or shift the goalposts. What they will -not- do is simply offer the definition of "wealth" that was actually used to create their graphs. This is because the definition will not include intangible forms or wealth, personal property, and very often not residential real estate. In fact, the most common definition of "wealth" used in their propaganda narratives includes only financial wealth... that is conveniently all abstract and intangible.

True wealth is a sum of 1) the intangibles that form the well-being (or deficit of it) of you, your family, friends and community, as has been described 2) personal property, the "stuff" you own and use every day, most importantly, THE STUFF YOU WOULD RATHER HAVE THAN MONEY BECAUSE YOU MADE THE CHOICE TO BUY IT INSTEAD OF KEEP THE CASH, 3) residential real estate and the whole circumstances of the space you and your family control and occupy, 4) financial assets.

Or you can buy their propaganda that it's only intangible balances in accounts.

Choose the path of least resentment and be a happier person. Personally, I could care less how much Bezos is worth or even his faux leftist politics veneered over the profits Amazon rakes in with redistribution. As long as he keeps delivering things to me I can't easily obtain locally, he can put all the agitprop in WAPO he likes and I'm FINE with that!

 

wealth
/welTH/
Learn to pronounce
noun

1. an abundance of valuable possessions or money.

 

Obama had little or nothing to do about it,it began in the Reagan administration when gigantic disparity in executive and worker pay and benefits began their now enormous separation with the introduction of 401k's and the termination of over 100,000 private pension plans run by employers.The employers took the money saved from no longer funding pension plans and spread the savings out among CEO's,executives and Boards a trend that continues to this day.

 

Reagan had some to do with it but he knew our glory days passed us by and the world caught up after WWII, but like I sad Janet Yellen along with Obama blew it out of the water with quantitative easing.

 

Q.E.D.

Thanks again!

"When asked to define their terms, they will go into a transparent "loop" of appealing to inadequate dictionary definitions of "wealth."

"What they will -not- do is simply offer the definition of "wealth" that was actually used to create their graphs."

"This is because the definition will not include intangible forms of wealth, personal property, and very often not residential real estate. In fact, the most common definition of "wealth" used in their propaganda narratives includes only financial wealth... that is conveniently all abstract and intangible."

Such a good helper you are!

 

The topic of this thread is "wealth inequality" propaganda narratives. "Income inequality" propaganda narratives are different, though it's common for Complex minions to try to shift back and forth between resentment-based false narratives. Please don't do that. It doesn't do your cause any good when you do.

"Income Inequality" propaganda narratives, including the "CEO pay" lie narrative, will be irrefutably debunked in a future thread, but not this one. Therefore, please stick to discussions of "wealth."

Thanks for the bump anyway!

 

So you are making up definitions of wealth and expecting others to just accept it?
Have any data sets utilizing hard numbers for this new definition?

Let’s start by comparison between the bottom 0.01% and the top 0.01%.
What is the approximate average “wealth” of each group?

 

You are perfectly free to disagree with my numbered, easy to understand definition of "wealth" as the sum of: intangible QOL factors affecting self, family, friends, community; personal property one owns, uses or controls; residential real estate/space one uses or controls; financial assets.

But if you are going to disagree with it, do so, you haven't even begun. Which category should be excluded from my definition? Are there other categories I missed or skipped that should be included?

As far as data sets go, the federal government has been compiling such for decades, resentment propagandists ignore it of course, doesn't fit the narrative. Cato compiled lots of government and other data on the types of wealth I describe in the OP, each chart, unlike yours, is credibly sourced to U.S. federal government census and other reliable data at the bottom. The summary is on page 6. Many other of the government graphs and charts in the white paper bear directly on the categories of wealth I have described:

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa364.pdf

Note especially that when useful, and not propagandistic analysis of anything is undertaken, concrete, easily definable characteristics such as "what % of homes are electrified?" is vastly preferable to nebulous abstractions ... that is if we are being honest and not self-serving gov-edu-union-contractor-grantee-trial lawyer-MSM Complex propagandists seeking to rationalize self-enriching force over voluntary transactions.

No let's not.

1. Let's rationally define what "wealth" actually is first. I've done that. You haven't even bothered to include the specific definition that was used to create your spam-charts. And you have blessedly skipped the "insult" phase (for the time being I suspect) and gone directly to the "red herring" goalpost-shift and "dodge" phase. No thanks.

2. Then, let's make sure whatever data we are using include an effort to measure and document ALL reasonable types of wealth, not slant towards only one type. CATO did this in compiling noncontroversial government data from government sources. As stated at the very tippy top of the OP, ANY narrative on "wealth," who has it who doesn't, that doesn't disclose and defend what definition of wealth is being used is propaganda.

3. Or better yet, let's completely -abandon- ALL narratives based on nebulous abstractions such as "wealth" and instead do what CATO did and COMPILE CONCRETE GOVERNMENT INDICIA of "wealth" and talk in those terms, who has what? who lives longer? how polluted are we compared to 100 years ago? etc., etc. that kind of -real- data.

 

There's no better illustration of a socialist's economic ignorance than AOC's assertion that instead of giving Amazon a 3 billion dollar tax incentive to build a home office in NY, the money would be better spent in some other way.

Socialists don't understand wealth because they don't understand the difference between the concepts of value, property and the monetary system. If I'm being generous, I would say that AOC believed that the value of a tax break was transitive. If I'm being cynical, I would say that AOC knew that the value of the tax break can't be converted to currency, and was relying on her constituents not knowing the difference.

These wealth arguments rely on that ignorance as well. Jeff Bezos might have a net worth 109 billion dollars, but that value cannot be converted to currency. The second he sells his stock, it's not worth the same any more. He can't liquidate his capital value and have it retain the same value. Not to mention the fact that if you take his capital and give it to someone who has no idea what to do with it, that capital now then has zero value. Bezo's wealth is a function of the value of what's going on inside his head. That's not transferable along with the value you assign to the things he has. It's how he uses those things that produces the value.

 

Exactly. And this is the primary reason they doctor and irrationally limit the definition of "wealth" to pure financial assets, the weak-minded targets more prone to "manipulation by resentment" don't know any better.

 

And then there's this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

 

The top 10% of wealthiest Americans own 84% of all stocks traded on the U.S.stock exchange.

 

All you have to do to debunk the idea that wealth is transitive is to show the lottery statistics.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/25/heres-why-lottery-winners-go-broke.html

Handing someone a pile a money doesn't turn them into Jeff Bezos.

 

So think about that for a second. What's the actual effect of this on the economy? The 10% you're talking about are clearly at the top tier of people who invest in the market. Think of them as the experts. They got to where they are through direct competition.

Why is it important to eliminate that competition so that more people who aren't as good at it have the ability to have greater control of it?

 

help me out here, if you will indulge me...

using the 'bezo' example, if they force him to sell off his assets so they could be redistributed, whom can afford to buy them... didn't everyone of 'wealth' have their's redistributed as well? if they took his house and gave to to someone else, then that person now has too much wealth and it will be taken to redistribute...

it's a freagin infinite loop...

they'd have to devalue everything to zero...

and this doesn't even touch on intellectual property (wealth)...

they're truly insane if they believe redistribution is viable...

 

Where did they get that money to play with?

 

Think about it that the average working American does not have the excess money that will afford him the ability to invest in the stock market???

 

So they dont have $ 10 but people thought they had $8000 lying around deductible for Obama care?



The best stocks to buy that are less than $10:

• Sirius XM Holdings Inc. ( SIRI)
• Zynga (ZNGA)
• Century Casinos (CNTY)
• Nokia Corp. ( NOK)
• Glu Mobile (GLUU)
• Vipshop Holdings Limited (VIPS)
• Vereit (VER)
• Camtek (CAMT)

More items...
•
Jul 22, 2019

U.S. News & World Report › money › ...
10 of the Best Cheap Stocks to Buy Under $10 | Stock Market News ...

 

They don't want to trade. They want to take. They conceptualize "wealth" as a number of bricks that you can take from one person and give to someone else. They want everyone to have an equal number of bricks. So they think that if Bezos has 110 billion bricks, they can take them and distribute them equally among 300 million people. Obviously, value can't be shaped into a brick and transferred from one person to another.

Value is a potential thing, not a physical thing. Sure, you force Bezos to spend his value to make bricks, but not everyone can produce the same value from those bricks. In fact, it's statically impossible for the entire distribution to produce the same value. Bezos is already at the top of the distribution, so giving his value to other people in the distribution will guarantee that the majority of them will produce less value from those bricks, and the likelihood that someone in the distribution will produce more value from their portion of the bricks is very low.

 

Wealth inequality is addressed exactly zero times in your source.
So you do not have raw numbers.
You do not have data.
You are redefining a word.

Yes, even the poorest American is richer than the poorest American 100 years ago.
That does not refute or even address the level of income and wealth inequality and disparities we are seeing today.

 

yeah, that was my point, sorta... how do they split up bricks that can't be split, such as real property... they'd either need to devalue it all, or demolition it and build tiny shacks for distribution