Oh joy, more disingenuous semantic games, the hallmark of someone with no intellectual substance.
And the standard general meaning of "gather" is simply "Bring together and take in from scattered places or sources." (
OED). You little think how eloquently you have pleaded your rival's cause.
Really? How does that support your cause that the only legitimate literal use of "concentration" is in reference to uranium enrichment and that any other use is merely metaphorical?
And nothing about the definition of gather implies that things were gathered from within a closed system. They can be gathered from anywhere, and can be created then gathered together.
And the actual word was the noun "gathering", not the verb "gather" which you swapped in b/c an verb implies some intentional actor who brought each the objects together. Gatherings/concentrations of objects can occur via any type of process and can be an unintended epiphenomena, such as birds who independently fly themselves to the same island and incidentally produce a gathering/concentration of birds (the example given right in OEDs definition of "concentration). In fact, objects can be concentrated without ever coming from anywhere, but rather simply coming into existence within close proximity of each other, resulting in a
gathering/concentration of trees, stars, dark matter, etc..
IOW, nothing about concentration or gathering implies merely that that the objects are in proximity of each other, with no implication that ever even came from anywhere, let alone your magical thinking assumption that they must always have been brought together by some sentient mind who took them from somewhere.
... taking ... taking ... taking ...
That makes four times you've proven my point. People who complain about "concentration" of wealth are implying that wealthy people
took it and didn't
cause it to exist in the first place.
Gee, now why would you delete the 161 other words I wrote that provided the context for the otherwise meaningless 3 words thatyou kept?
Well, there is only 1 possible reason, to lie about the meaning of those words. Do have any other form of rhetoric that isn't intellectually dishonest?
What I said in those other words you clipped made two things clear:
1) The issue of whether "concentration" inherently implies a closed system where wealth is taken form the poor (your assertion that I soundly falsified), is separate from the issue of what I think are the sources of increasing wealth disparities (note that increasing disparities isn't even the same thing and doesn't have the same cause as there being some amount of disparity at a given timepoint).
2) That I explicitly agreed with the idea of wealth being added/created, and that the "taking" in that context merely implies that someone claiming a larger portion of the created wealth. There is zero logical implication there that those taking that created wealth did not contribute to its creation. The wealth is added by someone and my comments thus far have been agnostic on who added it.
The number of Americans with negative wealth has increased and the average amount of debt has doubled, yet Americans are working about the same number of hours and productivity/hour is up due to tech. So where is the wealth going created by this labor?
Do you have evidence that what created the wealth was the labor of the people with negative wealth?
Ah, so now you admit that I explicitly acknowledge the reality of wealth creation, yet just a second ago you were stripping 98% of my words to pretend that I think wealth cannot be created and can only be taken from one place to another. If you're gonna grossly misrepresent my words, at least try to be consistent.
Barring magical forces (much like your believed little fairies who took the stars and gathered them together to create the concentrations we call galaxies), wealth is not created from nothing nor can it be created merely from ideas which have no direct impact on the world. Physical actions (aka labor) is what creates wealth by causally manipulating the physical environment and thus adding the wealth of the labor to the existing wealth of what is already in the environment.
The vast majority of people with increased negative wealth work for people who only employ other’s who add wealth. Given that, and given that these laborers have worked the same amount and there is evidence that the types of labor they do produce more efficiently, it would quite extraordinary (downright magical), if their labor was somehow producing less wealth. If your theory requires that extraordinary assumption then you need extraordinary evidence for it. Otherwise, the most parsimonious account is simply that the division of the wealth their labor is creating has changed in favor of the more wealthy, who not coincidently have gotten wealthier during that same period (a fact that your theory that laborers are producing less of value cannot explain).
Also, even if all members of a society increase in wealth over time, an increase in relative wealth disparity (aka an increase in wealth concentration)
That's not an increase in concentration unless the wealth was
gathered, aka
taken. Otherwise it's just an increase in inequality.
As already well established, you equating of “taken” with “concentration” is based upon your magical thinking and anthropomorphizing of the Universe and has nothing to do with standard meanings and used of the word.
means an increase in the disparity in nearly all forms of social, economic, and political power, which destabilizes society in ways that threatens the absolute levels of wealth and well being its members enjoy.
Well then, now you're talking about whether
inequality of wealth is a problem.
Yes, after establishing that concentration of wealth does not presume a closed system and can refer to a situation involving a fluctuating amount of total wealth, I ended by pointing out the concerns about wealth concentration that are the point of the thread exist, regardless of whether or not the is the result of zero-sum transfers of wealth.
If by “work” you mean your success is showing that you have no grasp of how language works and that your only form of argument is semantic games and deliberate misrepresentation, then yes, you are done.
