Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

[pErvinalia]

Because the public is under-educated and scared.

[Brian Peacock]

I learned good when I went to scool.

[JimC]

Were you just another brick in the wall?

[Seabass]

This Life-Saving Drug Just Went From $0 to $375,000

[Animavore]

Can't have poverty if poor people are dead.

[Svartalf]

can't have an economy if there are no little people to tend the cogs, and the economy will work all the better if the little people have enough money to actually participate in it.

[pErvinalia]

But not too much to provide a disincentive to work in shitty conditions for a sociopathic boss.

[laklak]

Shitty conditions and a sociopathic boss? Luxury.

[Brian Peacock]

Yeah. In my day we considered it a good day at work if you got away without being smacked with the smelting tongs.

[Seabass]

Special report: Profiting from prison

A handful of American businesses have their fingers in almost every aspect of prison life, raking in billions of dollars every year for products and services — often with little oversight.

The big picture: Taxpayers, incarcerated people and their families spend around $85 billion a year on public and private correction facilities, bail and prison services, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

For-profit prison companies arose in response to the government's incapacity to handle the skyrocketing incarcerated population.
Now entrenched, they've become "one more hurdle" to changing the American system of mass incarceration, Lauren-Brooke Eisen of the Brennan Center for Justice told Axios.
These companies also have been known to cut corners — sometimes endangering people — in order to profit off of a system that disproportionately impacts the impoverished and marginalized.

Here's how they make money:

continued: https://www.axios.com/profiting-prison- ... c1aaa.html

[JimC]

Organ harvesting will be next...

[Tero]

This Life-Saving Drug Just Went From $0 to $375,000

This is a part that can be legislated. Orphan drugs and the small patient groups would demand international cooperation. Opposite of Trump. Drug purity standards are the same here and in Europe. So we are just talking about packaging it for these markets.

This is not a complex material to make, but there are some bulk chemical supply issues:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amifampridine

[Seabass]

The One Percent Have Gotten $21 Trillion Richer Since 1989. The Bottom 50% Have Gotten Poorer.

Some Democratic presidential candidates say that America’s economic system is badly broken and in need of sweeping, structural change. Others say that the existing order is fundamentally sound, even if it could use a few modest renovations. The former are widely portrayed as ideologues or extremists, the latter as moderates.

And it’s certainly true that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are ideologically “extreme,” if our baseline is the median member of Congress or the median policy agenda pursued by recent American presidents. But it’s not clear why these would be the appropriate metrics.

After all, we do not equate calls for sweeping change (whether from recent precedent or from current consensus) with extremism in all circumstances. When young people in an Islamist autocracy take to the streets demanding basic civil rights, we do not regard them as radicals, or the regime’s apologists as moderates. Our assessment of the dissenters’ ideological character does not hinge on how far their values depart from those of the status quo order — but rather on how far that status quo departs from our consensus values.

Thus, whether it is truly extreme or moderate to demand sweeping changes to American capitalism depends on the degree to which the existing system aligns with common-sense views of what a just or rational economic system should look like.

Happily, the Federal Reserve just released some data that makes the state of this alignment easier to gauge. In its new Distributive Financial Accounts data series, the central bank offers a granular picture of how American capitalism has been distributing the gains of economic growth over the past three decades. Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project took the Fed’s data and calculated how much the respective net worth of America’s top one percent and its bottom 50 percent has changed since 1989.

He found that America’s superrich have grown about $21 trillion richer since Taylor Swift was born, while those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution have grown $900 billion poorer.

Notably, this measure of wealth includes liabilities, such as student debt. And it does not include consumer goods, such as computers or refrigerators, as economists do not conventionally view such products as wealth assets. But if one did include the Fed’s data on the distribution of consumer goods, the wealth gap between the top one percent and bottom 50 would actually be even larger.

So, is an economic system that distributes its benefits in this manner consistent with Americans’ common-sense views of economic justice? If not, would incremental changes be sufficient to bring it into alignment with the median American’s values? Or would more sweeping measures be required?

Put differently: Does the average American believe that, over the past three decades, our nation’s richest one percent have contributed roughly $22 trillion more to our collective well-being than the poorest 50 percent have? Does she think that the tens of millions of working-class people who spent the past 30 years cooking other Americans’ dinner, cleaning their toilets, caring for their children, harvesting their crops, ringing up their groceries — and performing the countless other poorly remunerated forms of labor that our society demands — collectively produced an infinitesimal fraction of the value that America’s corporate lawyers, hedge-fund managers, venture capitalists, specialist physicians, heirs and heiresses, and other high-paid professionals did?

Survey data (and common sense) says otherwise. In 2011, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University published a study on Americans’ views of how wealth was distributed in their society, and how they felt it should be distributed. They found that, in the average American’s ideal world, the richest 20 percent would own 32 percent of national wealth. In reality, the top quintile owned 84 percent as of 2011. And that share has grown in the intervening years. Today, the one percent alone commands roughly 40 percent of all America’s wealth.

Given all this, any politician who insists that American capitalism is “already great” is clearly a far-right extremist whose indifference to inequality puts him or her wildly out of step with ordinary people. But is it the case that Warren and Sanders would take things too far in the other direction?

Not remotely. I do not have the relevant data or skills to project precisely how the full implementation of either candidate’s agenda would influence America’s wealth distribution. But neither candidate is calling for a series of reforms that would place the United States far outside the Western European norm. In fact, both Warren and Sanders have cribbed their signature policies from European nations. As the 2018 World Inequality Report demonstrated, policy choices do matter — and income inequality is much lower in Western Europe than it is in the U.S.

more: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/ ... alism.html

[Brian Peacock]

Income inequality may be lower in Europe, but it's rising globally, in Europe as elsewhere. If out of a population of a 100 one person accrued 99% of the wealth then it's still true that income equality is low in relative terms because the majority of people would have a similar level of income. In this situation, even though income inequality would be high in absolute terms, the 1%er would have the resources to promote the idea that the relative measure is more significant or important or informative that the absolute measure. Sound familiar?

[Scot Dutchy]

The tory party.