Wealth Distribution in the USA

I really doubt that Bill Gates worked millions of times more hours than I did last year, and yet he received millions of more dollars than I did.

Could you flesh that argument out a bit?

Is this person a slave?--Percy

They are free to leave their employer. To go where? Do what?Another equally dangerous $2.50 per day job? Walk the streets?When the choices you have are voluntary servitude or starvation then your freedom is not much different from slavery.Edited by AZPaul3, : Word change.

There have always been wealth disparities in the American system. What I think has changed in the last 30 years or so is the sense that wealth begets wealth through political influence, that the wealthy are gaming the system so that they can be even wealthier. We have seen middle class wages stagnate while CEO salaries skyrocket. We have seen billionaires make billions by shipping american jobs oversees, and leaving lower paying jobs in their wake. No longer do we see tariffs or duties protecting the worth of american goods and american labor. That doesn't even begin to touch on tax shelters.In the past one could say that there was even a feeling of mutual repsect between the worker and the big corporation. A worker could spend 30 years on the GM production line and retire comfortably and proudly. Now that relationship has almost become parasitic where the worker is consider a leech on corporate profits.Perhaps I am romanticizing the past . . . who knows. What I do know is that money spent on lobbyists by major corporations has skyrocketed. I can't help but feel that the people with the most money are writing the rules.

Because that doesn't always produce the best outcome. If, for example, taxation was a purely voluntary transaction, then this post would be written in Russian, and you would be a stalwart member of the Communist Party of the American Soviet Republic.

That depends largely on other conditions.The real test is to compare the practical differences between slavery and employee treatment.Some of the obvious differences are control over a slave's body - slaves can be beaten, branded, can be separated from their families by force, can be "bred," and other abuses.Typically even the lowest-paid workers don;t suffer quite so badly.But in other comparisons the differences blur more. A slave might receive at least shelter and food, possibly even medical care. But paying a "Wage" and making the person an "employee," the "employer" is unburdened from the responsibility of making sure that the worker is healthy and fed and sheltered. The "employer" can pay less than a livable wage and simply depend on government to make up the difference...which is exactly what happens. Meanwhile the "employee" is dependent on their job and the government to be able to retain shelter, food, etc.The independantly wealthy are not subject to this dependance. They are the truly free - they can work or not; they can go where they please; they are insulated from the whims of their employer or even economic downturns.But there is another way as well - in many countries a basic, minimum standard of living is guaranteed interdependently of the employer. If you lose your job, you will not be homeless, you will not starve, and you will still receive healthcare. The urge to innovate is still present in these societies...but the fear is not.American workers, at least the middle- and lower-classes, are far more similar to slaves than we would ever care to admit. Most of us are one bad day or just a few months away from losing everything. We cannot bargain in good faith with our employers because at the end of the day we always need them more than they need us, at least individually. We don't have the option of letting the "market" work for us to weed out bad employers, because the real incentive is to remain employed at all costs, because unemployment will cost you everything. For the working poor, employers receive nearly all of the benefits of slave labor without actually needing to provide for their physical well-being.$2-3/hr may not actually be abusive and inhumane...if the employee actually has recourse against abuse and inhumane treatment, if the employee can quit at will without fear of starvation or denial of other basic human needs due to lack of money.$10/hr can still be abusive and inhumane...if it costs twice that to be able to afford food and shelter and transportation to work, and if the employee is entirely beholden to the employer for fear of starving or becoming homeless on unemployment."Slavery" is not necessarily a simple concept.

Yes, more or less.If we leave it to the market, it will come down to supply and demand. And there is more demand for work than there is work. So wages will be driven down as those who are willing to work for next to nothing 'outbid' the others.And workers have little leverage to change this state of affairs. The only thing they can really do, outside of legislation, is collectively withhold their labour. This decreases the supply of workers, and hopefully persuades the market to up wages accordingly.But this is disruptive to society and those that engage in it are often reviled and legislated against.So in practical terms, the market is too cruel a force to be the only factor in determining wages.To justify the first sentence of this post imagine where the market forces forced wages down to the point where a person could only barely afford the cost of living (on a shoestring). What is the practical difference between someone in such a position and a slave? Some theoretical degree of freedom? It's not much. Slaves work in return for habitation/clothing/food etc, and those in poverty are basically doing the same thing. It might not be the malevolent and racist slavery made infamous by the Americans; it might be more akin to the slavery that was practiced in other times at other places.

How can we end this slavery? What can the people do?I can't even take off for work to protest!
And if I did protest I'd probably be fired!It seems the rich always manage to get richer.The golden rule always seems to apply:
"He who has the gold makes the rules."

Is slavery the only kind of abusive treatment you can imagine? People who take $2 a day to live on have few options, and being willing to pay such a person $2.50 a day doesn't make you some kind of philanthropist. It makes you yet another exploiter.To answer your question about value, there are many ways to evaluate the value added by an employee, but one thing we do know is that the value added by manufacturing an item is always greater than the mere wages the laborer doing the making is paid. Were it not, nobody would be asking the laborer to do the work. Yet we have posters here who would claim that the laborer does not create any wealth because he has been paid some trifling percentage of the value he has created.In fact, the value created by the labor of making a pair of shoes from a few dollars worth of materials pays almost every one else involved in the entire process. Most of the other people in the chain are extracting from the value added by the laborer.

The same thing they did before the employer moved into town.When a company builds a new factory in a low wage country, workers beat a path to their door because it beats the alternative.--Percy

So you believe people should be paid according to their needs rather than the value of their work.--Percy

So what you're saying is that today's masters have engineered society such that their slaves will beg to be allowed to work, in chains of economic impotence instead of iron, and with the threat of starvation or homelessness replacing the whip.Is that about right?

Really? What was he doing before the employer built a factory in his country? Did the employer build the factory only by destroying the job he used to have?--Percy

You must have missed my point, maybe you took the reference to slavery too literally, let me try again. Did he accept the job of his own free will, probably because it was an improvement on his previous job? And can he leave it of his own free will? The value of anyone's work is what someone is willing to pay.--Percy