[ExI] The Great Gatsby Curve

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Sat Mar 2 13:56:53 UTC 2019


On Fri, Mar 1, 2019 at 7:49 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:



> >>…As far as everyone except for the super ultra crazy rich is concerned
>> all that effort in constructing that idiotic boat went to exactly the same
>> place that a 4.5 billion dollar project to build pyramids would go… John
>> K Clark
>
>
>
> *> So all those people who built the boat received part of the 4.5 billion
> and those who supplied the gold and silver received part of the 4.5
> billion, the government received part of the 4.5 billion.  Where did it go
> after they spent it?  The people who received that 4.5 billion wouldn’t
> care if it was a boat builder or a home builder who bought their stuff, **just
> so long as someone bought it.  So they get a piece of that 4.5 billion as
> well.*
>

Spike, is it your position that any large scale project is equally wise?
Does it matter if millions of people are building hospitals or pyramids for
dead trillionaires of a size that would put anything in Egypt to shame?
Will both projects contribute equally to advance social peace and
happiness? If you think so then I don't want to hear anything more about
wasteful government spending because a weapon system that works is the same
as a weapon system that doesn't because either way all that money spent on
them still exists and there is no such thing as a silly use of government
money or of money of any sort.

In fact I don't even understand why you object so strongly of the
government taking your money, after all according to you nothing changed,
the money is still there.

> *John… the money didn’t disappear. *
>

Money is just a token for the exchange of work, it's only a symbol for a
resource and you can't build anything with a symbol you need the resource
itself and money is nothing but a bookkeeping method for keeping track of
it. But work is more than a symbol it is the resource, unlike money you can
directly do something with work and the many millions of man hours that
went into the construction of a ridiculously expensive private yacht *DID*
disappear for nearly everyone because only one of the super ultra crazy
rich can make use of it and they are a hundred times rarer than Andean
condors and becoming rarer and richer every year.

And the rate at which the super ultra crazy rich are becoming rarer and
richer is accelerating so I want to ask you a very important question, do
you think this acceleration can continue for *eternity*, and if not what do
you think will stop it?

John K Clark
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