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Originally Posted by Cherry7
Interesting reading. Shows how people believe things told to them in spite of the facts which are freely available.
There is very little social mobility. The rich stay rich. The poor have everything stacked against them, family, diet, housing, schooling.
In a society which does not mind a child inheriting billions, or a man who writes a computer program earning again billions. Why should that society not keep people in food and housing?
The guy who invents "facebook" billions, the guy who does medical research - a normal wage.
If the problem is that 20% of the population is lazy, how do you explain periods of full employment. like during and after WW2 ? Did the lazy forget to be lazy?
In the Rhonda Valley in Wales is it an outbreak of laziness that caused the high unemployment? or the fact that they shut down the coal mines?
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How much you earn is relative to a few things: what it is worth and if you own it. Sure, it seems a little crazy that a guy who can shoot a basket or is good at tackling a guy carrying a ball makes millions while an engineer might make a good wage, but it is only a small percentage of what the athlete makes, you have to take those two factors into consideration. First, the engineer likely doesn't own the stuff he is working on or creating. If he wanted to take the risk to start a business and develop it himself he could reap a larger reward. Also, thousands of people don't pay to sit and watch him do his job and millions don't watch him on TV from their homes. I have never wanted to buy a replica engineers anti-static smock (although I have a USB drive signed by Dov Moran), but I have bought team shirts before.
So should the creator of Facebook make millions, if not billions? Why not? He owns it and millions of people are using it. Why shouldn't he benefit from it?
Sure, upward mobility is limited to a point. Capitalism is a pyramid. The higher up you go the fewer opportunities there are for you to climb higher yet. That said, there is a huge difference between learning a trade/skill and/or going to college to get an education and using those things to land a job that may end up paying you a nice wage and starting business and growing it.
It takes a certain type of person to be self-employed. Most people don't have that in them for whatever reason. So for them upward mobility is limited. They will be limited to the best job they can get and the best wage that this job can pay. The person willing to strike out on their own, create something and start a business have a larger potential scale when it comes to their upward mobility.
Lazy also doesn't mean unemployed. There are plenty of lazy people with jobs that do just enough to not get fired, but have no ambition to improve their position.