230 Spread the Wealth

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The goal of wealth redistribution has nothing to do with fairness or inequality, those are socialist concepts; it's simply that wealth concentration limits liberty if the goal is the-most-liberty-to-the-most-people. Capitalism is a good mechanism for spreading wealth but it also concentrates wealth in a tiny handful of people. Other than catastrophe, the only way to redistribute concentrated wealth is through taxation, but taxes too can be exploited. In fact, regressive taxation, like Sales Tax, Property Tax, Social Security & any other tax that subsidizes The Rich by taking from everybody else, actually concentrate wealth more. Only progressive Income Taxes & Inheritance Taxes work to spread the wealth.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Of the 330 million people in the U.S., 2% are considered "Gifted," meaning they can basically do anything. That's 7 million people, and another 5-10% of the population are extremely competent. In fact, the Top Quarter of the population pull everyone else along. Almost all jobs could use any Gifted person, and most of the Extremely Competent people are interchangeable too. And once a process is in operation, any Competent person can take over. However, as it stands, a quarter of the GNP goes to only the Top 1%, and the Top .01% get the lion's share of that, while the Middle Class is precariously shrinking. Society would be much healthier if income was pushed downward from the super-elite. This is not the same as redistributing wealth to the poor, instead it's letting the next equally talented & ambitious person catch some opportunity.</p>