canndo
Well-Known Member
How do you define the middle class having; "their small amount of wealth redistributed to the already wealthy?" And do you believe that in the name of fairness this alleged redistribution should now be reversed resulting in the wealthy having some of their wealth redistributed to the middle class?
First off, how can you justify saying that someone with wealth who might want to increase their wealth want to do it at the cost of; "people already struggling?"
One of my friends owned two successful businesses. He could have had his son oversee them and retire very comfortably. Instead he hired managers and he and his son opened a third business, one that manufactures floating aluminum docks. About the least expensive dock he sells is roughly $18,000.00 and most run between $25,000.00 and $45,000,000.00. People who are struggling are not his clientele, they are not the people who come in and write a check for a new dock.
My brother in law has had three successful businesses. On Tuesday I was at his house and he was showing me his new invention and showing me the process he is going through to get it patented. A marketing and advertising agency already has the products marketing ready to go once he receives his patent.
I used to have a neighbor, a man much older than me at the time, who married one of three sisters who were from an extremely wealthy family. They family fortune was split equally between the three daughters. At the time one of the sister's husband use a portion of her inheritance to purchase the Minnesota Twins, just a portion of it. My neighbor had 27 patents and collected fees for the rights to use his designs and royalties on whatever was produced. But he did not stop attempting to create new inventions, new designs to add to his number of patents, not even though his wife had a truly massive fortune.
One thing the envious worker bees fail to understand about people like I just used as an example is that their drive is not actually to build more wealth, that is only a pleasant side effect of the true cause. What drives many of the most successful is not greed, it is strictly personality type. They fit, or mostly fit, into what is called a Type A personality. People with Type A personality are highly competitive. They have clear drive for success, victory, high ambitions and goal oriented personality, which often makes them successful in their careers.
They are unable to just play golf and sit around on a yacht and enjoy their wealth. To them that is a waste of time, and not as in a loss of additional profits, but a loss of further achievements. It is the need to achieve that drives them far more than the profits their achievements bring them.
In two of the examples of people I gave above both set up businesses, grew them, made them successes and little by little over the years transferred stock in their corporations to children and later grandchildren, giving them the income and securing their futures, rather than amassing more and more personal wealth. Their need was to achieve, They are not greedy and do not need the income so they transfer stock in their corporations to their children and grandchildren.
The third did not do that, but he and his wife never had children. But he donated very large sums of money to everything from food-banks to major charities.
Going back to the mid-80's I can give another example. Friends of my mother owned a manufacturing company that made things like punch presses and metal lathes etc. They had enough personal wealth to get they though the rest of their lives comfortably and they had been transferring stock little bits at a time to their children and grandchildren. They sold their business for $71,000,000,00 and little babies were instantly multimillionaires.
Had they been greedy they would have retained all the stock and then collected all the profits and then left whatever they had left when they died to their children and grandchildren, which if they were greedy people who wanted to live a lifestyle of the very wealthy would have meant far less would have been left to leave their family.
I do not remember the entertainer, but many years ago I saw one interviewed and the question was asked, how long will you go on, just how much money does one person need? The reply was that he had long since stopped working for himself and his wife and everything he earned went into trust funds for his children and grandchildren. His home was nice, but it was not lavish. He could have loved a jet set lifestyle, but he didn't. He had no interest in those things, he had no interest in amassing as much personal wealth as he could. Instead he was only working to assure the security of not only his children and grandchildren, but also others that would come after his death. His singular goal was to make monetarily secure as many generations of his family as he possibly could.
I cannot call that greed. I can only call that love for one's family, including those he will never live long enough to know.
Something else the worker bee seldom if ever factors into things is how people like myself and my brother in law and my dock making friend will take large risks taking out large loans to open or buy into businesses, business that are the backbone of employment in the U.S. where the vast majority of wage earners work for small businesses, then we work our asses off to make the business work. If not for people like that the worker bees would not have what they amass in their lives. Also, if someone takes out a $2 million or $3 million loan, hires worker bees and then they fail to make their business a success, the worker bees are out of a job, but the employer has not only lost his income, but is in the bucket for a million or two million or three million or more dollars.
The employers take all the risks, not the worker bees. When you take a risk like that, a risk that creates jobs and paychecks for others besides yourself, you have more than earned the lion's share of the business profits.
Those who have never started and operated or bought or ought into and then operated a business have no conception of what it is like, the risks taken, the life insurance policies and homes or other properties that at times are needed to use as collateral to secure a loan. While they cash their paychecks, signed by their employer, and bitch how they see how much business the business does and if not for people like them that couldn't happen and that they deserve a raise, they do not know, or care, that many new businesses operate at a loss for one, two or more years and the employer they see as growing fat from profits has spent many hours on his knees in front of lenders attempting to get more loans or to renegotiate a loan in a way that will allow them to remain in operation until the business grows to a point where it has a decent degree of security.
Of course the response will likely be about major corporations with billions of dollars in profit and CEO's who make more in a year than a small business owner will make in their life. But remember, it is small business who creates the jobs and signs the paychecks for the majority of the nation's wage earners.
For all those complaining middle class workers, if they want out of the middle class they need to do what many of their employers had the balls to do. Walk into a lending institution and get a several million dollar loan and see if they can succeed or not and maybe then be able to join the ranks of those with larger amounts of wealth, rather than not take any risk whatsoever and simply claim they deserve a larger piece of the pie and actually believe they deserve to profit more off the risks taken by and hard work put in by others.
"worker bees" eh? does that make you and yours queens? royalty? The rich and business owners don't creat wealth - the worker bees do. All the "queens" do is establsih an environment in which the workers can create (not that that is all easy, its not but they don't create anything more).
