Entitlements - what's so bad about them?

So when a CEO takes a large salary because they feel entitled to it, then someone else is obliged to pay.....namely the rest of us.Increasingly in the UK the state is subsidising the profits of corporations and the obscene salaries execs pay themselves by allowing companies to pay their workers wages on which it is impossible to actually live thus necessitating those workers to receive government assistance in the form of welfare payments of one sort or another. Welfare bill up and profits made on the back of poverty wages.Any objection to this is met with the standard cry of "market forces, market forces" while those at the top are hailed as wealth creators and the working poor (many working more than one job) are demonised as scrounging layabouts.It really is a rigged system.....

Which nation best exemplifies the successful implementation of the sort of economic system you are advocating?Is there an example of such an economy actually working?

Is there any nation that has succesfully implemented the sort of economic system you are advocating? If so where?

The main difference of opinion here seems to revolve around who is "productive". You seem to equate owning vast wealth with being the most peesonally productive. But of course this is patently flawed.If the most productive people stopped producing as you keep hinting at it isnt the rich that would dissappear. Its the rich that would be wondering where all those they depend upon had dissappeared to....And you obviously have no example of anywhere that has ever successfully implemented the economic system you advocate. Which makes your advocacy an act of faith...

In order to get wealthier in a capitalist economy all that you need is capital (i.e. money) to invest. You don't have to be personally entrepreneurial or innovative or even particularly clever (if you have enough money you can pay others to invest it cleverly for you). You just need money and the more of it you have to invest the more wealthy you are likely to become.Now at it's best a market based capitalist economy will marry up those who have the ideas, innovations and entrepreneurial flair with those who have enough money to invest such that both the investor, the innovator and those actually doing the physical production all get wealthier and society at large benefits from the innovations in question. Technological advancement, job creation, wealth creation etc. Innovation, investment, competition, risk, entrepreneurship, jobs, growth etc. etc. etc. These are the hallmarks of capitalism working well. At it's best it has demonstrated itself to be a very dynamic system of technological advancement and wealth creation.The problem is that increasingly this isn't really what we have. For the above to work there needs to be a fairly delicate balance between wealth accrued from investment, wealth accrued from providing the innovation in which investors invest and wealth accrued from wages earned producing the actual goods in question.What we have at the moment is declining/stagnating wages and ever increasing corporate profits paid to those who are not actually providing much innovation at all. The balance between capital and labour has been tipped very much towards the investor side and that is having some fairly stark social consequences.Add in the fact that increased wealth provides greater political influence and we come to the situation where not only are those with the most capital (i.e. the wealthiest) apportioning themselves the greatest benefits from any economic growth - We also have the cartel like situation whereby huge corporations can privatise massive profits for the few at the top and nationalise their losses such that we have to pickup the pieces when their financial risks don't pay off (i.e. bail-outs).The idea that Coyote and you seem to have of the self-sufficient country folk being robbed blind by the state demanding taxes bears no relation to the fact that the richest in society are increasingly a city dwelling elite who neither produce nor innovate but who game the financial system to their own ends through the disproportionate political influence their money can buy.

Those with enough wealth to do so can manipulate politicians and markets to their own ends. Big Corparatism is at least as damaging as Big Statism in that regard. A pragmatic approach takes what works and changes what doesn't. Blindly adhering to either the idea that market forces always result in the best outcome or that the state is always best is a fools game. It's about balance. It's about genuinely democratic government taking the steps necessary to curb the worst excesses of market forces, concentrations of power and imbalances whilst recognising that the power of markets and personal entrepreneurship can be harnessed to generate wealth and drive forward innovation. Being British rather than American I don't have any great feelings either way about Gore and Soros is, from my perspective, the guy that made billions when Sterling was forced out of the EU Exchange rate mechanism back in the 90s.

Here is the Wiki page listing nations in terms of government spending as a percentage of GDP. Government spendingI am not sure what you mean by small government exactly but unfortunately that phrase has been adopted by free market ideologues and comes with a mass of baggage associated with it. When you talk about small government which nation has successfully implemented the sort of policies and economic model you are advocating?And on tax policy - You seem to despair at the notion of progressive taxation but is there a successful major capitalist economy that doesn’t have progressive taxation to some degree or another? Which country best exemplifies the sort of tax policy you are advocating? But it's not the "innovators" who are accruing the wealth.A book by a guy called Thomas Piketty is currently making waves in economist circles.

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Anyone with the capacity to own in an era when the returns exceed those of wages and output will quickly become disproportionately and progressively richer. The incentive is to be a rentier rather than a risk-taker: witness the explosion of buy-to-let. Our companies and our rich don't need to back frontier innovation or even invest to produce: they just need to harvest their returns and tax breaks, tax shelters and compound interest will do the rest.

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This sort of "rentier" as opposed to "innovation" economy is the kind of thing I am talking about as the difference between good capitalism and bad capitalism. Not all forms of capitalist wealth accrual promote the positive points of innovation and healthy risk taking that good capitalism thrives upon.

But why be an ideologue at all? Pragmatism suggests that the most successful modern economies are ones where the right balance is found rather than where dogmatic ideology reigns. Big business and wealthy individuals don't seek political power and coercion....? Can you see why some might be cynical of that assertion?At least in a genuine democracy the people can rid themselves of a corrupt or power grabbing government by voting them out. In a plutocracy there is no such accountability. What we have increasingly at the moment is a nominal democracy with plutocratic underpinnings. Governments and faces change but the interests of the wealthiest remain disproportionately the focus of whatever politicians are in office. Because politicians are funded by plutocrats. That is very interesting. Here is Wiki on US income inequality in the period:

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But from about 1937 to 1947 — a period that has been dubbed the "Great Compression" — income inequality in America fell dramatically. Highly progressive New Deal taxation, the strengthening of unions, and regulation of the National War Labor Board during World War II raised the income of the poor and working class and lowered that of top earners. This "middle class society" of relatively low level of inequality remained fairly steady for about three decades ending in early 1970s the product of relatively high wages for the US working class and political support for income leveling government policies.

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Then we had the Thatcher/Reagan era and the adoption of neo-liberal economic policies and big-finance that persist in one form or another to this day. So you are advocating the strengthening of unions and progressive taxation as a method of getting back to a 1960s style economy.....?

You keep talking about redistribution of wealth but in recent decades wealth has become ever more concentrated at the top.How do you reconcile that fact with your redistribution assertions? The way to determine what works and what doesn't is evidence. Much the same conversation was had previously - Message 488 (from which much of the following is borrowed)In most of the world's richest 30 countries more than 30% of GDP is spent by the government. In other words the sort of government spending levels you are objecting to are most often associated with success and wealth in national terms at least.U.S. government spending is 38.9 % of GDP. If we look at your neighbours, Canada spends 39.7%, and Mexico a relatively low 23.7%. Government spendingDo you think that the U.S. and Canada should emulate Mexico?Wealthy countries in which government spending is less than 30% are generally unusual in their circumstances, like the eastern city-state trading ports Hong Kong and Singapore, or small enclaves with tiny populations swimming in huge oil fields, like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.Some very poor countries come out with strangely high percentages on the list above, like 97% and even 114%, but that's because the aid their governments receive from other countries can about equal or even exceed their own GDP! But generally speaking, poor countries have the "small" governments that you seem to think advantageous in wealth making. Here's a per. capita wealth list.

You keep talking about the rich in glowing terms as the innovators and producers whose fabulously wealthy existence we should all be grateful for and in awe of......Profits as a share of GDP in almost all western countries are at record highs, along with executive pay while real wages for the majority stagnate or even fall.What on Earth leads you to conclude that those enjoying these record profits and executive payouts are the most personally productive and innovative? Where do you get this idea from?This notion that simply being rich makes one a "wealth creator" or is evidence of personal innovation is patently absurd. But it seems to lie at the heart of your argument here. A healthy, educated workforce with a safety net that makes things like losing ones job or getting ill a temporary setback rather than a tragedy from which it is impossible to recover to live a fully productive life - These things benefit the whole economy in the long run. Add in investment in infrastructure and more generally the use of public finds to create an environment in which businesses can thrive, innovation can occur and wealth can be created such that all in society, rather than an elite few, can benefit. That should be the aim....... No?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.