Is It Immoral To Be Rich OR Is It Immoral For Govt To Allow Obscene Wealth Created By Govt Freebies

[eniwetok]

Would there even be any obscenely uber wealthy without government freebies that permit some to game the system? These freebies include intellectual property monopolies such as patents, copyrights and trademarks and free limited liability protections for private wealth in the case of corporate bankruptcies.

There is a constitutional basis for protecting intellectual property and it's one of the few places in the Constitution that states a specific purpose... the other is the Second Amendment. Art 1 states

"The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

This would seem to limit the money that can be made from an invention or copyrighted creation to the point that it promotes progress and the useful arts. It would also seem to deny giving patents to anything that was designed solely to create vendor lock.

It's easy to see how this system can be gamed... or how business whores in Congress can allow extensions that permit a patent or copyright to be extended past the specific purpose stated in Art 1.

Another government freebie is how capital gains (unearned income) is taxed at a lower rate than earned income. For the top bracket it's 20% (minus the ACA surcharge) where earned income is taxed at 39.6%. And capital gains is free of payroll taxes. I can see where we'd give tax breaks for investments in risky endeavors such as medical and energy research... but to give this tax break to speculation on Wall St?

[dchill]

1. I'm gonna go with AND.

[eniwetok]

2. I assume you mean...

It's immoral to even be rich... ?

Not sure where "not rich" ends and "rich" begins... but I suspect the prospect of making money is a big motivator of progress and we mess with that at our peril. I believe that when working properly the public and private sectors bootstrap each other. Public investments and laws create a good environment to be utilized by the private sector. But that doesn't mean we should let the intellectual property system be gamed... and I certainly believe in a strongly progressive tax code to recapture some wealth those public investments and intellectual property protections makes possible.

[dchill]

8. I'm referring to your title. What I think is immoral...

about being rich is the disease of greed. Enough is never enough. Protection of assets is more important than moral responsibility. Wealth becomes a religion, and its faithful are not to be questioned, regardless of the increasing gap between the rich and the poor.

[eniwetok]

11. as I said...

Not sure where "not rich" ends and "rich" begins. One could be statistical about it saying the top 1% of income and/or wealth owners are rich. Maybe it's the top .5%. But it clearly gets absurd when an infinitesimally small fraction of the population owns as much as say the bottom 50-60%.

But sure... some DO suffer a from a compulsive need to get rich to the point it's a mental illness. Then there are those right wing beliefs that try to reframe that mental illness into something moral and noble.

But I don't agree that everyone who wants to be rich... again we have no definition here... is mentally ill.

[safeinOhio]

3. We still have the best government

money can buy.

[roamer65]

4. I think we could buy better.

We need to be choosier shoppers.

[safeinOhio]

5. Only the elite

get to shop.

[eniwetok]

6. Yup... our system now has no protections against...

Our system was designed to give elites... especially in the Senate, a veto over the People. But the system has no real protections against the corruption of the elites... nor does it have any protection against demographic changes that make the system increasingly antidemocratic and in that latter area the amendment formula is now so absurd states with a mere 4% of the US population can block any reform. In the Senate 18% of the US population gets 52% of the seats.

Is there any wonder we can't implement rational reforms?

[ileus]

7. All wealth is the governments and the government should take what's needed

to run itself.

[eniwetok]

10. and the moral basis for your position is?

At least I believe there's a natural right to own property... but the fruits of one's labor gets more complex given that virtually no one in the US earns all their income outside of a context of a larger social contract which includes government spending on education, infrastructure, public health, law enforcement, intellectual property protections, etc.

[beachbum bob]

9. 10,000 pages of taxcode bought and paid for is where all this starts and ends with

......money is power and influence..........the normal everyday common people have neither

[eniwetok]

12. 70% of capital gains tax break goes to the top 1%

CBO estimates that more than 90 percent of the benefits of reduced tax rates on capital gains and dividends will accrue to
households in the highest income quintile in 2013, with almost 70 percent going to households in the top percentile. Those benefits will equal 2 percent of after-tax income for the highest quintile and 5 percent of after-tax income for households in the top percentile.

https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/113th-congress-2013-2014/reports/TaxExpenditures_One-Column.pdf