I suppose my retort to your fatalistic acceptance of your plight is - 'don't just sit there and take it like a chump'.
Not everyone can be wealthy, then the super wealthy would be. Today, the average American in poverty lives a lifestyle comparable to that of the average American family in the 1970s.LOL.
What NDN said is correct though, Real Wages have pretty much stagnated since the age of Reaganomics. Most of the expansion of consumerism was made through debt which will have paid off sometime and creates in the future a completely unsustaible situation.
Wonderful. I'll remember that line whenever I work for Hallmark.
Are you implying that wealthier people have higher standards of "happiness" than those that are poor? Fantastic.
Tax distrubtion is pretty inefficient anyway. Better go loop-hole and evasion busting. I would also like to make Tax Migration illegal too but given that large parts of the world economy depend on the super-rich paying even less in Tax it is probably best not to touch it.
Ah yes, Human Nature. The ultimate loser in arguments. Reminds me of the people back in the 1830s who believed that human beings couldn't possibly travel on trains as they go too fast for the fragile human skull. Furthermore it isn't true, most pre-agrarian societies are non-hierarchial such as the Bushmen of the Kalihari and the Mbuti of the Congo Jungle and most Paleolithic societies (perhaps all, not fully clarified on this). Hierarchy only emerges with the invention of agriculture.
So hierarchy is not part of Human Nature; neither is "Capitalism" as "capitalism" didn't exist until c800yrs ago. They were invented.
Income? No, Class is a better indicator. One's Material reality makes your view of existence and so on.
"earned it"? LOL. Remind me again who works harder, Paris Hilton or Bolivian Tin Miners? Who is rich?
And before you add anything Hilton is hardly the exception to the rule. IIRC of the 500 richest people in Britain a very high percentage are from aristocratic backgrounds, go to the right schools, connections, etc. Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are the exceptions, not the rule. Anyway I'm particularly fond of the idea that people (and here I show I'm not America) who "work hard" should become rich anyway. People who want over 1 million dollars a year are particularly psychologically disturbed individuals anyway. And many are pretentious buffoons anyway.
And then there is stuff like this. What? "Power" is a pretty nebelous concept anyway. The idea that the wealthy contain no "power" is LOL though.
Success? Now that's something which requires comparsions.
On a side note, Phillip is actually right. Wealth takes account of one's whole assets aswell as income.
Poll
