And what is coming to the wealth creators? I guess you mean the 1% who contribute 30% of income tax in the UK for instance. Just wondering how you're going to make up the deficit (or what cuts you'll make) when they 'get what's coming to them' as you so crudely put it.
And here I thought that people actually building widgets in factories are wealth creators... As opposed to having your name on the deed to the factory.
Without labour working in those factories, producing goods, those deeds are about as valuable as toilet paper.
You're confusing creating value with economic velocity. Mere ownership cannot create value. Mere ownership can change the rate at which money circulates in the economy.
You are completely ignoring the value of risk. Labor is just one input among many to widget making. Without somebody willing to take the risk, to sink money he has into the widget building business, it just doesn't happen.
This is why capitalism works far better than the alternatives.
So, before capitalism, people didn't build widgets?
My point is that labour does not need capital to produce value (Although access to capital can increase the amount of value labour can produce.) Capital without labour is, quite obviously a lame duck.
Crediting the super-rich (A very few exceptions aside) for creating wealth is nonsense. In the best case, the people they employ created their wealth - said people just ended up keeping less/spending more of it. In the worst case, collecting rents created their wealth.
> So, before capitalism, people didn't build widgets?
Sure they did, at sustenance level. Or do you think that the noncapitalist economy of preindustrial Europe could produce enough widgets to sustain the modern standard of living?
>My point is that labour does not need capital to produce value (Although access to capital can increase the amount of value labour can produce.) Capital without labour is, quite obviously a lame duck.
This is looking more and more false by the day, to be honest. At this point, companies that employ hundreds of thousands of assembly line workers that produce "actual value" are less profitable than companies that automate that same assembly line using capital. On the flip side, the return to human capital in the form of educated workers has certainly increased.But I challenge you to build Google or Facebook without the venture CAPITALists who provided the money to purchase the infrastructure and hire the labour. The knowledge economy is great, but at some point the software still has to run on hardware purchased with, you guessed it, capital.
The point being that capital and labour are both necessary for a functioning economy, and concluding that labour is the only thing that matters and that anyone rich must be a rent-seeker leads you to becoming Venezuela or Argentina.
>So, before capitalism, people didn't build widgets?
There was no "before capitalism".
>My point is that labour does not need capital to produce value (Although access to capital can increase the amount of value labour can produce.) Capital without labour is, quite obviously a lame duck.
Labor without capital is the same duck. Creating a business is risky, and someone has to be on the hook for that risk.
>Crediting the super-rich (A very few exceptions aside) for creating wealth is nonsense.
The super-rich are a sideshow. Most "capitalists" out there are people like you and me putting money into their 401(k) every paycheck.
