Quote:
Originally Posted by sperbonzo
No offense to you personally, but this may have been the silliest post I've seen in a long time. Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Nothing is stopping those "hundreds of thousands" from starting their own businesses. Having rich people around to invest in those startups actually helps them!
If you become rich it's not because someone left and you took their place. If a millionaire leaves the country, and a burger flipper moves into his house, does that mean that the guy flipping burgers is now going to generate huge amounts of income? Is he suddenly going to come out with a new smart phone, or open a chain of restaurants, or come up with a new mass cargo technology?
Great wealth is created by the people that are smart enough, creative enough, work hard enough, and are willing to take enough risks, to create a product or service that fulfills a need so large that a huge amount of wealth is generated. It's not some fixed "pie", whereby when you have more, someone else has less.
When someone like you advocates pushing out all of the producers, you will definitely NOT want to live in the state that you will have then created. You will end up in a situation where all you have is a languishing status quo, with no advancement from there on, which will eventually decay into total entropy.
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you are distorting my argument, and using straw man rhetoric, by saying I have advocated "pushing" producers out of the country.
at no point do I make that suggestion, and you can't point to a sentence where I have.
what I said was, if "they" (the wealthy) want to go, based on such offers, we are just as well off to let them go, and good riddance.
anybody who would take such an offer was already on their way out anyway.
and you haven't demonstrated that the economy is not a zero sum game, which opens up an entirely new line of argument. asserting that is not is not an argument.
BUT, following up on your line of argument - you asserted that the economy is not a zero-sum game, THEN you contradicted yourself by implying that the wealthy, and their money and productivity, is a FIXED resource, one in which we lose (the very definition of zero-sum) if we lose any of that fixed resource.
so, your whole argument is based an an assertion that you immediately self-contradict.
so what is it - are the wealthy a fixed resource, such that the american economy loses if some one wealthy person leaves, and therefore a zero sum game? or is the economy not a zero-sum game, such that if one rich person takes some offer from some shithole country and emigrates, they are no loss, because they can be instantly replaced, and the local money stream remains equivalent?
and by the way, your argument, as I just demonstrated, was silly and self-contradictory, and based on distortions of my argument (straw man) for the purposes of forwarding your political and moral agenda. Your agenda does NOT respond to how we should feel about other countries offering lures to rich americans to emigrate.