Quote from: username18333 on November 18, 2014, 07:50:19 AM

Quote from: brian_23452 on November 18, 2014, 07:43:36 AM

Quote from: username18333 on November 18, 2014, 07:28:49 AM

Quote from: brian_23452 on November 16, 2014, 09:34:31 AM

Quote from: ARadzi on November 09, 2014, 02:33:01 AM

Lets face it, there's a colossal gap between the rich and the poor, and that gap is certainly getting wider. But whose to blame in this economic inequality? Is it the government that favors capitalist who contributed large amount during their campaign periods? Is it our constitution that institutionalized the practice of contractualization and other forms of labor flexibilization, hence undermining job security? Like a joke from my previous job, "If you are not a regular employee, you are casual. And after 5 or 6 months, your employer says TY (Thank You) to you which makes you a casualTY. Can we blame capitalist that hoard as much wealth as possible leaving only a thin slice of the .pie for the average guy to share among themselves?

Well, we know that the economic inequality has existed since the beginning of civilization so we can rule out all possible reasons listed here, as they are much newer than civilization. There is clearly something intrinsic about civilization itself which leads to this result.

Obviously, as the people who are rich are historically the people who make the rules, it stands to reason that they would establish rules that maintain and increase their wealth; this is true regardless of political or economic systems in place. Further, it is also clear they it is critical to their wealth that they main a lower class (basically everyone else). Even if there were an abundance of wealth to go around such that we could all be "rich", it is not in their best interests to facilitate this. After all, I can't hire another billionaire to do my work for me, it requires someone who has no choice but to do my work for me.

Civilization began with the ability to store (read: withhold to an unnatural degree) value. Prior that, Homo sapiens had to meander about with the animals they huntedenduring egalitarianism.

Precisely. If I can't store excess, it makes little sense to extract more than I can immediately consume, especially if the excess comes at your expense (and since we are all equal, even if I wanted to do this everyone else would hate me for it and punish me). If I *can* store the excess though, and use that excess to do things like, pay someone else to work for me, than that is what I will do. I can further use this excess to essentially bribe other people to see things my way (especially given that historically, the rate of return on capital vastly exceeds inflation, if my family was rich in say 1800 they are even richer now barring some catastrophic event). As the ability to store excess is intrinsic to civilization, all these people who think bitcoin is going to magically solve a problem that is older than money itself are simply fooling themselves.

In this case, it is deprivation that is utilizednot excess.

I suppose it is a matter of perspective. From my point of view I am extracting excess, more than I need. If it comes at your expense, than from your point of view it would be deprivation.
In reality though it would be both. Theoretically anyways (since there is no practical way to compare) in a modern, western society, I am of course depriving you of some of the resources you extract by syphoning them off for my own use (without actually having to produce them myself), but because our overall production is so much higher than it would otherwise be, you agree to go along with it. So instead of producing say, 100 units a day of food that you need to survive, you produce 300 a day and I take half of them.