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From fork-admin@xent.com Mon Sep 23 12:09:34 2002
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In-Reply-To: <ILEHJNJFPDLMDEKNIAKCOEINCAAA.geege@barrera.org>
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References: <ILEHJNJFPDLMDEKNIAKCOEINCAAA.geege@barrera.org>
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To: "Geege Schuman" <geege@barrera.org>,
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"Owen Byrne" <owen@permafrost.net>
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From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>
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Subject: Comrade Communism (was Re: Crony Capitalism (was RE: sed
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/s/United States/Roman Empire/g))
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Cc: "Gary Lawrence Murphy" <garym@canada.com>,
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"Mr. FoRK" <fork_list@hotmail.com>, <fork@xent.com>,
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"Digital Bearer Settlement List" <dbs@philodox.com>
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Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 22:01:22 -0400
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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Hash: SHA1
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At 11:15 AM -0400 on 9/22/02, Geege Schuman wrote:
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> Most of them seem to have Ivy League educations, or are Ivy League
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> dropouts suggesting to me that they weren't exactly poor to start
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> with.
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Actually, if I remember correctly from discussion of the list's
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composition in Forbes about five or six years ago, the *best* way to
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get on the Forbes 400 is to have *no* college at all. Can you say
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"Bootstraps", boys and girls? I knew you could...
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[Given that an undergraduate liberal arts degree from a state school,
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like, say, mine, :-), is nothing but stuff they should have taught
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you in a government-run "high" school, you'll probably get more of
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*those* on the Forbes 400 as well as time goes on. If we ever get
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around to having a good old fashioned government-collapsing
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transfer-payment depression (an economic version of this summer's
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government-forest conflagration, caused by the same kind of
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innumeracy that not clear-cutting enough forests did out west this
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summer :-)) that should motivate more than a few erst-slackers out
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there, including me, :-), to learn to actually feed themselves.]
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The *next* category on the Forbes 400 list is someone with a
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"terminal" professional degree, like an MBA, PhD, MD, etc., from the
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best school possible.
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Why? Because, as of about 1950, the *best* way to get into Harvard,
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for instance, is to be *smart*, not rich. Don't take my word for it,
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ask their admissions office. Look at the admissions stats over the
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years for proof.
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Meritocracy, American Style, was *invented* at the Ivy League after
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World War II. Even Stanford got the hint, :-), and, of course,
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Chicago taught them all how, right? :-). Practically *nobody* who
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goes to a top-20 American institution of higher learning can actually
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afford to go there these days. Unless, of course, their parents, who
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couldn't afford to go there themselves, got terminal degrees in the
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last 40 years or so. And their kids *still* had to get the grades,
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and "biased" (by intelligence :-)), test scores, to get in.
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The bizarre irony is that almost all of those people with "terminal"
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degrees, until they actually *own* something and *hire* people, or
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learn to *make* something for a living all day on a profit and loss
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basis, persist in the practically insane belief, like life after
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death, that economics is some kind of zero sum game, that dumb people
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who don't work hard for it make all the money, and, if someone *is*
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smart, works hard, and is rich, then they stole their wealth somehow.
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BTW, none of you guys out there holding the short end of this
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rhetorical stick can blame *me* for the fact that I'm using it to
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beat you severely all over your collective head and shoulders. You
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were, apparently, too dumb to grab the right end. *I* went to
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Missouri, and *I* don't have a degree in anything actually useful,
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much less a "terminal" one, which means *I*'m broker than anyone on
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this list -- it's just that *you*, of all people, lots with
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educations far surpassing my own, should just plain know better. The
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facts speak for themselves, if you just open your eyes and *look*.
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There are no epicycles, the universe does not orbit the earth, and
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economics is not a zero-sum game. The cost of anything, including
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ignorance and destitution, is the forgone alternative, in this case,
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intelligence and effort.
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[I will, however, admit to being educated *waay* past my level of
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competence, and, by the way *you* discuss economics, so have you,
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apparently.]
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BTW, if we ever actually *had* free markets in this country,
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*including* the abolition of redistributive income and death taxes,
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all those smart people in the Forbes 400 would have *more* money, and
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there would be *more* self-made people on that list. In addition,
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most of the people who *inherited* money on the list would have
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*much* less of it, not even relatively speaking. Finally, practically
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all of that "new" money would have come from economic efficiency and
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not "stolen" from someone else, investment bubbles or not.
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That efficiency is called "progress", for those of you in The
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People's Republics of Berkeley or Cambridge. It means more and better
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stuff, cheaper, over time -- a terrible, petit-bourgeois concept
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apparently not worthy of teaching by the educational elite, or you'd
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know about it by now. In economic terms, it's also called an increase
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in general welfare, and, no, Virginia, I'm not talking about
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extorting money from someone who works, and giving it to someone who
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doesn't in order to keep them from working and they can think of some
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politician as Santa Claus come election time...
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In short, then, economics is not a zero sum game, property is not
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theft, the rich don't get rich off the backs of the poor, and
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redistributionist labor "theory" of value happy horseshit is just
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that: horseshit, happy or otherwise.
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To believe otherwise, is -- quite literally, given the time Marx
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wrote Capital and the Manifesto -- romantic nonsense.
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Cheers,
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RAH
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--
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-----------------
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
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The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
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"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
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[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
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experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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