Animosity towards the rich

[Deleted]

It has nothing to do with how rich anyone is, it's about right-wing policies which do nothing towards society.

[Fernii]

Huh. The majority actually thinks that one can make too much.

[melodramocracy]

There tends to be animosity for CEO's and folks like them, because of a rather fundamental flaw in how capitalism is conducted in this country. And that is that workers are easily expendable, replaceable, and the least important cog in the chain when compared to shareholders and customers. This creates a general feeling of distrust of one group of folks to another.

So when a CEO gives him or herself a pay raise while axing a few thousand jobs, shareholders view this as a boon to their bottom line, and the now - jobless employees (who are, more often than not, not shareholders either) view it as utterly reprehensible.

Politicians are also viewed with the same level of scorn for similar reasons.

---------- Post added 2013-05-08 at 01:47 AM ----------

Huh. The majority actually thinks that one can make too much.

Because the majority realizes that wealth isn't an infinite pie.

[Curanhadin]

I dont think it rich people as a group that people hate. Its the ceos who get payed a huge bonus while the company is losing money or going bankrupt. The super rich idiots like Donald Trump who has went bankrupt multiple times but because of loop holes in the system his personal wealth is protected again and again. The worthless scum like Paris Hilton and the Kardashians who flaunt wealth that the didnt create. I personally hate people who have money but never lifted a finger to earn but because of the hard work of their parents or great or even several times removed ancestor actually did something real. I think that you can leave up to say a million dollars taxed at a normal income rate in an inheritance. Any cash beyond that amount per recipient is taxed at a 90% rate. Why should some dickhead whos contribution society is claiming she invented the phrase thats hot live a life of luxuory because of some one elses hard work. People talk about the poor having a sense of entitlment what about the super wealthy who have never worked a day in their life. Why is it that the grad student or research or theoretical scientist barely making a living and begging for grant money to try to create something that could revolutinize medicine or surgical procedures, when we have stains on our society getting wealth and fame because someone else in the family actually created something in our society? Thats my problem with the rich, I admire any who is a self made man or women but despise any one whos entire success is purely based of what their family has done.

[Riidii]

Because the majority realizes that wealth isn't an infinite pie.

Does this suggest there is something morally wrong with accumulating wealth? Would you actually prevent someone from doing so?

What if it was made through perfectly legitimate means?

[melodramocracy]

Does this suggest there is something morally wrong with accumulating wealth? Would you actually prevent someone from doing so?

The law does, in a way, prevent it. Monopolies are illegal. Pyramid schemes are illegal. There certainly is a point, I suppose, where one person having absolutely insane amounts of wealth would be heavily scrutinized as to exactly how he acquired it all.

If a set of individuals had so much wealth that it was a clear and provable detriment to the rest of that particular population, and was acquired from the efforts of that population, then yes, it should be prevented, capped, whatever.

[Rooflesstoofless]

Rich begets rich. At least that's what I see over and over where I live (orange county, ca).

Also what a lot of people think of as rich really isn't. That guy making 'a lot of money' because he works 60 hour weeks and works harder than everyone else isn't rich. Plenty of people out there making six figures and hardly having a pot to piss in as they drown in various debt and also plenty of people making less who spend lots of time on their sailboat.

[Deleted]

I didn't read through this whole thread, but I wanted to comment all the same because the first few pages already summed up a lot of the nonsensical part of this general discussion. I personally thought this article(although meant to be humorous) did a great job of highlighting the flaws in many of the perspectives I saw in this thread.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-things...o-stop-saying/

I don't want to reiterate everything in that article, but animosity towards the rich isn't just because of jealousy, or because people with less money want handouts. A lot of the animosity comes from the attitude I've seen expressed in a lot of the "pro-rich" comments in this forum. That the rich have worked hard and deserve what they have, and that it's no business of anyone else's how much they get paid or what they do with their money.

First, saying they worked hard and deserve it, implies that all of the other people that work hard just haven't worked hard enough and that's why they aren't rich. The problem is I don't see a lot of soldiers that have been stationed overseas for a year at a time, and who are essentially always "working", making $90 million. I'd consider getting shot at professionally, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to be much "harder" than flying around the country attending meetings. There are plenty of single parents working 80-90 hour weeks plus taking care of their kids that work extremely hard and barely make ends meet. I can probably think of 100 jobs that are harder, less pleasant, and require just as much time commitment as being a CEO that don't even pay 1/100th of what a CEO earns. So equating what they make with how hard they work is just silly.

Second, saying that poor people are just jealous misses the point of even the article that started this thread, and subsequent comments here. People aren't mad because a CEO made a lot of money, they're mad because so many other people lost their jobs while one person got paid enough to keep all of them and much more. If a corporation's goal is to increase value for it's shareholders(and this is the ONLY duty of a publicly held corporation) then it's awfully hard to argue it is doing that by paying one person enough to hire 500 people that could actually make a product the company could sell. Even if we agree that only a fraction of those 500 people were productive, say 1/10th(the rest spent 8 hours a day, every day, playing Angry Birds at work), I still can't believe 50 productive people would create less value for a company than paying 1 CEO 50 million dollars more. Or that paying 50 incredible programmers $1 million wouldn't earn them more.

I think what infuriates a lot of people about the rich is the disconnect between them and everyone else. To a CEO making $80 million/year, $1 million is a haggling point. It's deciding between buying a new Bentley, or a new Bugatti. To the average person, it's nearly all they will earn in their entire lifetime. It's enough to get everyone they know out of debt. It's enough to send all of their kids, and all of their friends' kids to nice colleges. It's enough to create 200 really decent jobs for their kids when they graduate. It's really difficult in the minds of those people then to grasp how a rich person can justify why they are more deserving, or that there is any way at all to justify why they need that much more money.

I believe in capitalism, but I don't believe capitalism is what we have. We have a system where the government props up businesses that fail, and ignores individuals that do. I have heard that there was a point in the history of automotive companies in the US where company policy stated that the CEO was not allowed to make more than 10 times the salary of the lowest paid employee. It seems reasonable to me that we could be even more generous, say the highest paid employee of a company can only make 50 times the salary of the lowest paid employee, and we would be approaching a system with much less animosity, and a much smaller division of wealth.

[ihatepeople]

I didn't read through this whole thread, but I wanted to comment all the same because the first few pages already summed up a lot of the nonsensical part of this general discussion. I personally thought this article(although meant to be humorous) did a great job of highlighting the flaws in many of the perspectives I saw in this thread.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-things...o-stop-saying/

I don't want to reiterate everything in that article, but animosity towards the rich isn't just because of jealousy, or because people with less money want handouts. A lot of the animosity comes from the attitude I've seen expressed in a lot of the "pro-rich" comments in this forum. That the rich have worked hard and deserve what they have, and that it's no business of anyone else's how much they get paid or what they do with their money.

First, saying they worked hard and deserve it, implies that all of the other people that work hard just haven't worked hard enough and that's why they aren't rich. The problem is I don't see a lot of soldiers that have been stationed overseas for a year at a time, and who are essentially always "working", making $90 million. I'd consider getting shot at professionally, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to be much "harder" than flying around the country attending meetings. There are plenty of single parents working 80-90 hour weeks plus taking care of their kids that work extremely hard and barely make ends meet. I can probably think of 100 jobs that are harder, less pleasant, and require just as much time commitment as being a CEO that don't even pay 1/100th of what a CEO earns. So equating what they make with how hard they work is just silly.

Second, saying that poor people are just jealous misses the point of even the article that started this thread, and subsequent comments here. People aren't mad because a CEO made a lot of money, they're mad because so many other people lost their jobs while one person got paid enough to keep all of them and much more. If a corporation's goal is to increase value for it's shareholders(and this is the ONLY duty of a publicly held corporation) then it's awfully hard to argue it is doing that by paying one person enough to hire 500 people that could actually make a product the company could sell. Even if we agree that only a fraction of those 500 people were productive, say 1/10th(the rest spent 8 hours a day, every day, playing Angry Birds at work), I still can't believe 50 productive people would create less value for a company than paying 1 CEO 50 million dollars more. Or that paying 50 incredible programmers $1 million wouldn't earn them more.

I think what infuriates a lot of people about the rich is the disconnect between them and everyone else. To a CEO making $80 million/year, $1 million is a haggling point. It's deciding between buying a new Bentley, or a new Bugatti. To the average person, it's nearly all they will earn in their entire lifetime. It's enough to get everyone they know out of debt. It's enough to send all of their kids, and all of their friends' kids to nice colleges. It's enough to create 200 really decent jobs for their kids when they graduate. It's really difficult in the minds of those people then to grasp how a rich person can justify why they are more deserving, or that there is any way at all to justify why they need that much more money.

I believe in capitalism, but I don't believe capitalism is what we have. We have a system where the government props up businesses that fail, and ignores individuals that do. I have heard that there was a point in the history of automotive companies in the US where company policy stated that the CEO was not allowed to make more than 10 times the salary of the lowest paid employee. It seems reasonable to me that we could be even more generous, say the highest paid employee of a company can only make 50 times the salary of the lowest paid employee, and we would be approaching a system with much less animosity, and a much smaller division of wealth.

Best post of the thread right here.......bravo sir.....bravo