

Capitalism vs. Democracy - flurpitude
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/opinion/capitalism-vs-democracy.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=1

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pedalpete
What I fail to understand in many of these arguments regarding income
inequality, is why inequality matters?

Personally, I think the argument shouldn't be focused on how much the top 1%
have, but rather on how well (or currently not well) the bottom 20% are
living. If everybody has effective health care, abundant availability of
healthy food, access to knowledge and the ability to be a productive member of
society who doesn't have to work more than 40 hours a week in order to
struggle to survive, who cares if the top guy earns 10000x more.

Do we need to demonize the top 1% in order to motivate us to help the bottom
20-50%?

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ergoproxy
This NYTimes article is behind a paywall. When I click on it, I get shaken
down for money, with the following message: "Thank you for visiting
NYTimes.com We hope you’ve enjoyed your 10 free articles this month." Then it
tells me I need to pay between $3.75 and $8.75 per week to continue.

Since I'm in the bottom 20%, I can't afford this stomm! If I want to read this
article, educate myself about income inequality, and become a more informed
voter, then I need sacrifice something, like food. But if I were in the top
1%, I wouldn't need to think twice about subscribing.

The first sentence of this op-ed is obscured but readable. I can see its about
the work of a french academic named Thomas Picketty, whose website is at
[http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/fr/](http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/fr/)

The facts published on his site don't seem controversial. His papers seem well
researched and reasoned, albeit very narrowly focused, highly repetitious, and
not particularly enlightening or useful.

I did not see any kind of "demonization" of the rich in his work. I routinely
see Fox news pundits demonize the poor, angry for example that 50 million
Americans get $80 billion in Food Stamps per year, while never mentioning that
Ben Bernake's QE3 prints $85 billion per month for the rich. Fed money
printing seems to be the main cause of income inequality. And anyone who wants
to reverse the growing income inequality should make abolishing the Fed their
#1 priority.

