I’m reading an article that mentions “Wealth Redistribition” as an outcome of progressive policies and it got me wondering; Is it a redistribution of wealth from its “rightful” owners, or is it really a return of the wealth TO the “rightful” owners?
Did the poor people the progressives hand the wealth over to have it previously, before the progressives took it away from the rich people they redistributed it from? When the wealth in question is newly created wealth, the output of some productive enterprise, as opposed to preexisting wealth such as land, the poor people never had that wealth in the first place. Consequently, it can hardly be a "return" to them. You are peddling a fairy tale of zero-sum-game economic thinking.
When one thinks about, for example, CEOs who have massive incomes and hence wealth, one is obliged, IMHO to include the people who actuially made the thing. Without the thing, there are no sales. Without the person who turned one material into another, there is no thing.
What's your point? Without the CEO -- the person who manages the whole process and sees to it that every person who turns one material into another has access to the one material and turns it into the correct other material and hands the result off to the right third person who knows how to identify a fourth person who wants it and is willing to pay for it, and sees to it that all four of those people come out ahead on their respective deals -- there are no sales.
Production is a synergistic mechanism and all the participants are contributing to its success. That's why when political activists take power in a country and seize control of all the productive processes and decide some of the participants are parasites and get rid of those people, production always plummets and they usually bring on a famine. And yet this empirical observation never seems to cause the true believers to call into question their premise that everyone whose contribution they don't understand must necessarily be a parasite.
No CEO could make all the semi-conductors. They need the people who make the designs, the people whob assemble the precision equimpent, the people who machine the precision equipment, the people who mine the materials that are machined.
No worker could make all the semiconductors.
Entrepreneurs have proven that they can make things without a CEO
Oh for the love of god! An entrepreneur
is a CEO. You think you can prove the function is unnecessary by
renaming it?
and make at least as much as they would make in a large company.
Um, just how many entrepreneurs do you think make as much as the non-entrepreneurial CEOs of no-longer-entrepreneurial companies? Comparing the extreme tail end of one Gaussian distribution with the peak of another is not an apples-to-apples comparison. There's a reason companies usually stop being entrepreneurial when they get large. Building from scratch and further expanding an already large operation are different problems with different solutions needing different skill sets.
But no CEO has ever proved that they could make as much without the workers
And no Darwinist has ever proved that a dinosaur could evolve into a man. You have a cartoon image of capitalism; it isn't capitalists' job to prove your incorrect picture of capitalism is correct. What CEO ever claimed he could make as much without the workers? Of course CEOs need workers.
That's why they pay them! It's the left-wingers claiming workers don't need CEOs too who have something to prove.
- in other words, they have never proved that without skimming off the labor of others, they could not possibly be worth millions.
And the Labor Theory of Value rears its idiotic head again. That's not "in other words"; that's a completely different claim. How the bejesus do you think you can leap from "they can't make as much without" to "they're skimming off"?
Forget the CEO for a moment. Let's imagine the CEOless ownerless pinmaking co-op of collectivists' dreams -- just ten workers dividing up the labor with one making wire and one sharpening it and one making pinheads and one attaching them to pins and so forth. Not one of those people has ever proved he could make as much without the others. They can't. If one of them tries to make pins all by himself he won't make anywhere near a tenth as many pins. They have an efficient synergistic interdependent system. So according to the idiotic inference rule you applied above,
the workers are all "skimming off" one another. That's an absurd conclusion. Therefore your inference rule is wrong. Q.E.D.
The Labor Theory of Value is the economic equivalent of the Qi theory of medicine.
So social programs like progressive taxation are a return of money earned by labor back into the pockets of labor - where it was earned.
Entirely apart from the errors in your reasoning about how capitalism works, um, has it occurred to you that the “wealth redistribition as an outcome of progressive policies" is generally not targeted at handing Mary Barra's income over to the average General Motors workers, who make $90,000 a year? Progressivism stopped being about advancing the interests of the workers a long time ago.
