In that case it was a specific presumption, not a general dismissal. I based it on your location and your general board activity; if you were one of the wealthiest people in New Jersey - beyond merely being "comfortably well-off" - I can't imagine you'd be spending much time on a message board. It's a pretty class-limited hobby, I think.

I don't know what you're actually trying to imply here. Is it that the "richest one percent of people in the US, who take in nearly a quarter of the country's yearly income* and who control around 40 per cent* of its overall wealth" do not, in fact, constitute one per cent?

That's quite the mathematical mind-fuck. It actually makes no sense to anyone who thinks about its contradictory implications for more than half a serious second.

* Twenty-five years ago, the richest one per cent took in 12 per cent of the country's yearly income and controlled 33 per cent of its wealth. The kind of concentration that has obviously occurred in the last quarter century cannot possibly happen without the other ninety-nine per cent seeing themselves controlling less and less of the wealth.

But apparently, this kind of growing inequality should be justified, by your logic, as "what's mine is mine, what's yours is yours": that is, what belongs to the rich should belong to the rich, and what belongs to the poor... ah, but the poor have nothing but their wage labour to sell. And to say, "well the rich make more money because they work more" is a load of tosh, considering the sole basis of capitalism is the employment of one class by another class (without that basis, capitalism ceases to exist); the employed class being the class whose productivity creates all of the surplus wealth that isn't given back to them, but is instead held onto and accumulated as self-expanding profit by the employing class.

Don't you see how that works?

Say Ronald McDonald sets up a new fast food restaurant with a $10,000 bank loan. He employs workers to make burgers and serve customers. After one year of business, after he has paid all of his staff and kept a little for himself, he has $1,000. He gives that to the bank. In ten years the loan is paid off (give or take, given interest rates). What happens after that? The staff are being paid the same - maybe their hourly wage will rise but not by much, not in proportion to living costs. So what happens? We have what's called surplus wealth. Ronald McDonald is getting fat on his self-expanding cash.

Rent goes up; that's okay, he can increase the price of his goods. But what happens if his staff, whose labour has been sold for less than it is worth - whose wealth they solely have created has not been given them - can no longer afford to buy his goods?

(Bear in mind that all other goods such as tills, counters, refridgerators, grills, etc., have in turn been made through human labour; these things aren't produced in thin air.)

So Ronald McDonald might "inject" his surplus wealth to fund a refurbishmen, get some new grills and technology etc., compete with that Burger King across the road. But what happens if the firms from which he buys such stock have gone down because they too weren't selling the goods they'd made, due the same problems as what Ronald McDonald was having?

You can't have capitalism without overproduction and surplus wealth, without inequality and the economic crises that heighten it; and it's not just economic inequality, it's not just the notion that "one guy has two cars and everyone else has one". All other inequalities stem from this; racial inequality, gender inequality, all kinds of irrational beliefs about how people make a living and so on form - oh, "she doesn't have a job therefore she must be lazy", even though she might have just been laid off because of the growing demands for the rich to retain their social positions through wealth. Just look at this very message board for some of the most reactionary, hateful, repugnant opinions you can find on the Internet; and I'm not even sure some of the people spouting it are aware of what they're saying. ("Hey, I'm all for equality! It's just that...." Uh oh. That's just the sort of "Who-me" liberalism that needs to be stamped out, physically if need be.)

Economic inequality is the basis of all other inequalities; it decides who has access to education and who doesn't, who and who does not have access to art, to medicine, to shelter and food... all of these things are rights, not privileges. Humans separated themselves from animals at the point at which they began to manipulate their habitat for their own survival, by providing their own means of essential sustenance. No other creature on earth can manufacture raw minerals into the magnificence of the Empire State Building, for instance.

And it's not that "the rich are evil" and that "the poor are good". It's not that at all; the rich retain their social positions because of the logic and demands of the system itself. That's why the social relations that stem from the economic base must be smashed, in order to build new ones.

^^^ That's a lot more than I intended to say in this thread.

I don't get how you couldn't be in the least interested how these things work and affect you, frankly. All I can say is, suit yourself. Cheers for reading.