The smirking chimp is a site dedicated to not just insults of President Bush but also of promoting radical left-wing nonsense like the article "When the rich make too much money".
It never ceases to amaze me to see someone write, without irony on a computer, built by companies started by people who are now "rich" full of components made by companies whose founders are "rich" running computer software made by companies whose founders are "rich" complaining how unfair it is that there are rich people and how it endangers us all.
How many people do you know whom you would happily claim to be worth 100 times what you are worth as a human and a citizen of a so-called "democracy"? How does the worth of people like Kenneth Lay and Warren Buffett stack up against the worth of people like Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln? Have you ever considered the certainty that relative human worth does not have one damned thing to do with what you own or how much money you have accumulated?
Above is a quote from the article that is written without a hint of irony. Apparently, being a politician or diplomat has more worth than Warren Buffet. Who defines how valuable a human being is to society? Apparently in the liberal utopia, learned academics like Dr. Lower.
But before we are assigned a human worth value by the academics, I would ask -- how much has our life changed in just the past 100 years thanks to people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and so on? What would our lives be like today without the tiny percentage of people who go out and truly change the world?
If the government were to tell me that I had a maximum cap I could earn, then my answer would be "fuck you" and I would simply stop working. I have a wife and 3 kids. Sure, I employ 50 people but if I'm not going to be able to benefit beyond a certain point from my efforts, then I'm not going to work beyond that point either. How would that affect the 50 people that work at the company I run? Probably not very well. But being forced to work without compensation is slavery and I won't be a part of that.
I could retire right now if I wanted and live comfortably. I'm not driven by money or wealth accumulation, but I certainly expect to enjoy the fruits of my labor (see Draginol's new car). I expect to one day be able to afford a lot more than what I have today. That isn't what gets me up in the morning (making cool stuff does) but there are plenty of days when my job isn't fun and having goals that involve materialism do help (well, I sure don't enjoy having to deal with employee issues but on the other hand, I can afford to buy a nice lake house up north).
One of the things that drives people like me is the desire for new experiences and new frontiers and many of those new experiences take a lot of money because, as I've written before, money can buy time to allow people to experience more in the limited amount of years they have on this Earth.
The problem with left-wingers is that most of them are inevitably divorced from reality and have no conception to how we got from serfdom (where the "goverment" did put hard limits on how much one could earn) to where we are today in a fairly egaltarian society where the child of a single parent with no economic advantages can grow up and live the American dream.
Too many left-wingers think jobs and opportunity simply exist on their own and are not connected to anyone. But our society is a reverse pyramid. You remove the handful of movers and shakers from society and it would collapse in a hurry. Supply and demand deterine where we are on that pyramid -- not some group of learned academics.
You'd think that academics would see the obviousness in this. After all, one presumes they have some grasp of history. Yet, when they espouse short-sighted proposals like this which would, in essence, return us to a social structure more resembling feudalism (except where our lords are "elected" rather than born into) it's hard to take their words very seriously.
It's ironic that a site that has so much venom directed toward the current elected political leader that they would, if they had their way, redirect so much power and wealth into the hands of such leaders and away from people who made their wealth from the voluntary choices of millions of people.