Bad analogy. Slaves were forced to work at swordpoint, with no influence over their own life. Workers in the US work by choice and have infinite influence on their work.

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"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his father has acquired too much, in order to spare to others who (or whose fathers) have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "to guarantee to everyone a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

-Thomas Jefferson

It's a good, if imperfect, analogy.

Slaves were indeed forced to work at swordpoint, and under threat of corporal punishment. Wage slaves are not. Instead, they are forced to work under threat of starvation. There is certainly a difference, but it is not one that amounts to freedom.

And even a wage-slave's employer doesn't have "infinite" influence on the work, infinity being an impossibility under any practical conditions. A wage-slave's influence is marginal to insignificant, except in professional practice.

Weve covered this. Im not going to deal with it again.

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"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his father has acquired too much, in order to spare to others who (or whose fathers) have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "to guarantee to everyone a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

-Thomas Jefferson

That's socialism and that's now what this country is all about. I wrote a tribute to my own hardworking father a month or so back for my blog and I hope you don't mind if I share it with you (US Fears Shortages of Gumption « That’s Right Nate)

If the recent Subprime crisis has taught me anything it is that the American people are suffering near record lows in gumption. Following Katherine Kersten’s moving stories of her family which I quoted (That’s Right Nate › Login) I thought I’d discuss my equally deserving father.

John Peele was not born to money. His parents were upper middle class at best. Born in 1934 John was part of what they call the greatest generation. Though he was too young for World War II and Korea and too old for Vietnam, John remained always a patriot and a member of several public minded organizations. When Martin Luther King marched in Chicago, it was my dad and his friends who helped make sure that the our neighborhood remained calm and safe by starting a citizen’s patrol.

My dad didn’t start off with a great job. He worked as a locksmith. He would go to houses that were foreclosed on and change the locks when the owners were away. Still my dad knew there must be some way to help those people even as he was changing their locks. He started helping people out by finding businesses that were about to go into foreclosure and buying them from the families that lived there. By doing this the banks got their money, the families didn’t lose everything and my dad made a tidy profit.

Because helping people is good business, my dad made a lot of money in a short time. He openned up a self-storage business for those people who needed a place to store their stuff when they lost their homes and the business took off. He made quite a bit of money, but he was always a man of conviction.

When my sister broke his heart by marrying a papist he let her know that she wouldn’t see a dime of his money. While it was a sad time for our family, that was just my dad’s way. He had strong beliefs and those beliefs got him through many tough times growing up in the depression.

My dad was a stern father, but a good one and a strong and supporting husband. He married his high school sweetheart when the loser she was dating couldn’t get the money together to ask my mom to marry him. He always treated her as a lady never making her work out of the home or even drive. They never socialized much as they were each other’s best friend. When my mom got hooked on tranquilizers it was my dad who helped her recover using tough love.

My dad finally died in 2004. When he passed away, he left me his business which I continue to run today. I look at my dad and how his desire to help people took him from locksmith to realtor to business owner and I wish I saw more of that gumption in today’s Americans. We are the greatest country in the world because of people like my dad.

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Nate Peele
www.Thatsrightnate.com
"Finally a journalist is not scared to question the truth"--TJ Baker Holm

No, "we" have not. I have. You have failed to answer. I'm just reminding you.

Pasting a label onto an idea isn't answering, either.

It seems to me that an acceptable gap size should be defined. Some will go to extremes such that the gap will grow ad infinitum or there will be no gap at all. Defining what's acceptable will help in coming up with solutions w.r.t. legislation in trade and in other issues. For the record, I believe the middle class is one of the many things that makes this country great. We can't afford to lose that.

"we" have covered whether workers in the US are slaves or not.

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"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his father has acquired too much, in order to spare to others who (or whose fathers) have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "to guarantee to everyone a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

-Thomas Jefferson

You claimed they were not because no one is pointing a gun to their heads. I pointed out that working under the threat of starvation is no less coercive than working under the threat of corporal punishment or execution. You have not answered.

No, "we" have not.

Luck is nothing more than preparation meeting opportunity.

I've never heard or read a single compelling argument for why those who "have not" should "have" if they're not willing to work for it.

Your comparison of slaves and workers today is retarded, and unworthy of response...

But Steve, you're confusing two questions that really aren't the same.

One is: "Why is any particular person poor?"

The other is: "Why does poverty even exist in the first place?"

The rules of the economic game, which are largely set by government, determine how many people will be poor and how crushing their poverty will be. Who, exactly, those people will be, is determined more by their own actions and abilities. The government doesn't specify that of two children born in the same lower-class circumstances, one will work his way through college and become a professional, while the other will end up homeless and on the streets. But it does determine that one of them will be homeless. Which one? That's up to them.

Whey I was a boy, although we still had poverty, we also had factory workers making a middle-class income and living a middle-class lifestyle, including my father, who was a machinist but managed to send me to college. Today, you can't do that on a working-class income. Have the people doing the work changed? Are they less hard-working, less responsible, than their predecessors in the '50s? No. The rules of the game have changed, that's all: the big winners are winning bigger, and the working class has gotten the shaft. As for the poor, well, that hasn't changed much. It sucked then, and it sucks now. But the poor are only a small portion of our society, the real losers of the game on the bottom. For most Americans, who aren't either the big winners or the real losers, the rules have gotten worse, and they suffer accordingly.

How?
How so?

I'm not confusing anything.

Poverty exists because some people are unwilling to do what they have to do to make themselves not poor.

The basic impetus behind any discussion like this is "we need to take from the rich and give to the poor". You look at the plight of the poor, while completely disregarding the merit of the rich.

You make the assumption that many of "the rich" have inherited their money. Tell that to Bill Gates. Tell that to Donald Trump. Tell it to countless others who inherited little, worked their asses off to become ridiculously rich, and see if you're not met with, at best, bemusement.

I'm not rich, and I'm not poor. I live in a nice three-bedroom home I bought nine years ago. I have a good job that pays me in the low six-figures. I have three fully-paid-for vehicles. I have nice things in my nice home, and I worked my ass off for every single one of them.

What I see you attempting to do is create a sense of guilt among those who "have" in deference to those who "have not". I'm not saying they're not in a shitty situation, I'm just saying that you're going to have to come up with something that's pretty fucking convincing to compel me to believe that their situations are beyond their control.

Every time someone talk about a "wealth gap", their solution is always to narrow it by giving from the rich and giving to the poor. This creates nothing. I would much prefer to see those in less-than-desireable situations do something to better their situations. It's better for everyone all around. Why you're incapable of grasping concept that is beyond me.

Now, if I've completely miscalculated where your head is at, fine.

What do you think should be done to narrow that gap?

Wrong. That's not why the condition of poverty exists. That's why person A, instead of person B, occupies it.

That's not an assumption, but it's also irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether they made their big bucks by inheriting it, by being more capable and industrious and ruthless than others, or by a combination of both (which is almost always the case -- Bill Gates, for example, DID inherit wealth; he also multiplied what he inherited). The question needs to be asked how much wealth should anyone be allowed to amass.

Quite aside from questions of fairness, there's also the question of what's good for society. It hurts the economy have too great an extreme of wealth. It depresses consumer demand, and keep the economy underperforming. It is also a moral stain on any society when any of its people, particularly any of its children. go hungry, lack medical care, or have no place to live.

If the rules of our economic game allow the condition "poor and homeless" to exist, then there will be X percentage of the population -- also determined by the rules -- occupying that condition. The only thing the rules don't determine is exactly who will make up that X percentage. That's where personal ability, ambition, and willingness to work come in. But the whole system is competitive, and the rules of the game dictate there will be only so many big winners, so many moderate winners (like you), so many struggling people, and so many losers. Change the rules of the game, and those percentages will change, as will the consequences of winning and losing.

How about a little history, and how about we expand consideration from the truly poor to include the working class, those above the poverty line but unable to live the life you're living? As I pointed out earlier, my father, working an industrial job, could live a middle-class lifestyle. That's not possible for working-class people today. Why? Was my dad somehow better than working-class people today? No, the jobs for the working class were better in those days, and he had one.

It's not just what you do. It's what the rules of the game dictate, too.

That's leaving out of consideration the fact that a lot of the really poor are mentally ill, drug addicted, mentally or physically disabled, etc. and truly can't improve their lot.

I explained that earlier, but I'll outline.

1) Put the government firmly on the side of labor in the capital/labor conflict.

2) Reserve free trade agreements for other countries that respect labor rights, and stop encouraging the flow of capital to countries that don't.

3) Restore a more progressive tax structure.

If we do all that, and also deal with the resource shortages we are starting to face, we will restore a much more progressive and broadly-distributed economy such as we had in the 1960s. (But without the racism and sexism.) That will leave only the problem of real poverty, such as can be alleviated with responsible social-support programs for those who can't support themselves for reasons of mental or physical disability, etc. There won't be that many of those, so it will be fairly cheap.

he was born middle classed

You sound like someone who's okay with someone pursuing the "American dream", as long as they don't dream too big...