Is it possible to have too much wealth? To be too rich? And should we therefore have a cap on wealth?
Dutch political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns believes the answer to those questions are: yes, yes and yes!…
Robeyns has written a book arguing that we’d have a vastly better world if we had a hard limit on the wealth that any one person can accumulate – a cap on the rich. She calls the concept Limitarianism – and she’s willing to put a number on it.
She says the idea of people being below the poverty line is morally unacceptable and wants an upper threshold too.
This is like arguing that as it is unacceptable some people die at a young age, it should be unacceptable some people live to an old age!
What Robeyns promotes is basically Marxism – the notion that all wealth belongs to the state, and you can only keep what it allocates to you.
Imagine her $14 million limit in real life. Rod Drury made more than that from Aftermail. So under this worldview, any surplus wealth would have been confiscated. So how likely is it Drury would go on to create Xero, if every cent he made from it gets taken by the Government? Almost zero – he’d just go surfing instead.
So under this system, we would not have a Xero. Thousands of jobs would not have been created, and the world’s best accounting software would not have been created making life so much better for millions of small businesses.
David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders.
4 comments:
Yep it's interesting, the poor will always have their hands out and once money enters their palms, it's off to the pub , and on the way home a couple of packs of ciggys. Then hands out again.
Even if you gave everyone of the poor 2 million dollars 95% of them would be poor again within 2 years. The left loonies just don't get it. They are programmed not to hold onto money . And the world suffers for it as there is no incentive to do anything, why work when u just need to put your hand out....and I'm sick of working to help those who are lazy left radical loonies. Here's their solution.....GET A JOB AND CONTRIBUTE.
Max Rashbrooke (NZ author of Too Much Money) would share this same view of wealth distribution and limitation.
Interesting. In the past the very wealthy seemed often to be owners of business. Wealth released many famous persons to do what they did (Joeseph Banks, Marconi, explorers of Egypt etc and a myriad others) The hugely paid employee milking the company and indirectly society seems a modern phenomenon. There is and alwys has been a degree of obsenity in the like sof America Cup.Although I suppose its contribution to mankind knowledge hugely exceds that of the te reo industry.
You can't discuss this topic without considering public education.
Many on welfare are victims of our Progressive -Marxist education system which has produced people who through no fault of their owncan only ever get low paid manual, menial work.
Raising educational standards,with proper effective and scientific teaching methods which include instilling a work ethic along with morality and discipline is what we need. It is what we used to have. You can go nowhere being illiterate and innumerate which is of we have with the longest tail of underachievement in the developed world.
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