In our ongoing series of discussions between me and a group of radical left-wing quasi-marxists, we learn a great deal on the differing viewpoints on how wealth is created and the role of government in our society as well as the contributions of different groups in our civilization.

My position is that wealth is created through labor. But the value of that labor varies widely. One person can produce a lot more wealth with their labor than another person can. This is the foundation of why some people are very rich and other people are very poor in the United States.

Needless to say, the far left disagrees:

This is more or less horseshit.

Wealth is the result of the application of labor and capital to land. Capital is defined as "the stored or saved proceeds of labor."

The type of wealth you are talking about does not result from either labor or the application of capital in the form of stored proceeds of labor to land (resources). The type of wealth you are talking about results from the private monopoly ownership of resources.

It could not possibly result from the application of one person's labor and capital to resources. Through private monopoly ownership of resources, everyone else is deprived of the opportunity to apply their labor and capital to resources--so they have to go to work for you. This allows you to expropriate the labor products of others on a continous basis, claiming the proceeds of others' labor as justly your own.

The kind of wealth you are talking about has nothing to do with "working harder" or "working smarter", and everything to do with a whole complex system of private monopoly that allows the few to own all the resources and, as a corollary to this equation, to own all the non-ownership class of people--as slave labor.

To which I responded that the super rich make enormous sacrifices and take significant risks and typically work much harder and longer than most people which produces exponentially more wealth.  In the same way that interest is compounding resulting in someone who starts saving at age 20 having 5X more saved up at age 60 than someone who started only 10 years later, financial rewards work very similarly. Someone who takes risk and works hard and succeeds at a venture is going to get exponentially more than someone who does not.

The above is how the world actually works. Some may not like that it works that way but that is, precisely, how things are.  This is where things really start to go down hill. Because the left won't accept that reality is what it is. On fringe sites like the one linked, they have been in their echo chamber so long that many of them believe their desire is already reality.  One person literally said "Labor produces wealth. People provide the wealth. Wealth is therefore controlled by the people." No. It most certainly is not.  They may wish that wealth is controlled by the people (people in this case meaning the masses).  But in reality, wealth is controlled very disproportionately by what I refer to as the motivated class. 

This becomes a real problem because so badly do some of these people want to believe their utopia is how things really are that my failure to grant them their premises results in a lot of "you're profoundly ignorant".  Because ignorance in their mind is based on not having reached their conclusions on how things ought to be.  If I weren't ignorant, I'd be agreeing with them.

In response to the assertion that the super rich commonly take great risks, work very hard and make enormous sacrifices the response was:

This is the goofiest justification I've ever heard for paying someone a lot of money.

Try taking care of three kids who are sick with the flu for a few days, cleaning up throw-up all night, and making midnight trips to the laundry room to wash the soiled sheets--and dialing up ask-a-nurse at 3:00 a.m., while you are throwing up on your own shoes. See how fun that is.

The poorly paid among us are doing stuff like this after working all day, but there will be no ocean vacation house, and no accumulation of money for relaxing vacation time.

I will go a bit further and say that, if you wouldn't do what you are doing without being paid astronomically well for it, maybe you should ask yourself why. Could it be that what you are doing is a shameful piece of pure bullshit?

Incidentally, I have 3 kids. Have taken care of my kids when they're sick.  I tried to point out the law of supply and demand again: The number of people who can clean up puke is high. The number of people who can run a large organization is low.

The response I got for that was:

I can roll my tongue in to a neat circle. One of my daughters can touch the tip of her tongue to her nose. Yet another can curl her tongue into an interesting fleur-de-lis configuration. I can't see how the the remarkable abilities of the pro basketball player or CEO have any more economic value than these rare and beautiful tongue-curling abilities.

She also added:

I see a lot of big, ugly buildings inhabited by a bunch of troglodites, all working away a shit they see no use in and derive no pleasure, self-determination, or benefit from. I see the mass of people in the US suffering from starvation from eating lard-soaked cardboard. I see schools that don't educate, and families with no time or energy for their kids. I see people with no health care. I see people who are one month away from homelessness--like, MOST people.

These fabulously creative and talented wealthy people have not produced wealth, but poverty.

Another person chimed in:

PSST, everybody - Draginol is a Randite.

That's where he(?) gets all his(?) "Pro-Capitalist" drivel. He(?) is probably also not yet 30 years old, and still believes that someday he(?) too will be one of the super-rich.

And then another:

I've read all your posts here and just can't go on. You are SO full of shit!
I, too, have been saying for years that it would solve a lot of problems if they would simply put a cap on the amount any one person or entity can accumulate.

What is the point in owning more than you can hope to spend in a lifetime? He who dies on the biggest pile is still dead. I think the caps mentioned in the article were a bit overly generous.

You say people need incentives, and you are right - most do. Some are just naturally motivated, and those who are motivated are certainly going to be worth more than the ones who must be enticed with incentives. Ambition deserves to be rewarded, and lack of....well, then it all rolls downhill. But, even those who must be enticed deserve a fair enough compensation to live amenably.

Those who are highly motivated certainly deserve more, but there should be limits. There is something obscene about that kind of greed. It becomes greed after you have reached that point at which you know you are going to be comfortable for the rest of your life (whatever your degree of comfort may be - for some it's a summer house and a yacht, for others it's less) and that more is not going to improve your quality of living. THEN it is obscene to continue to accumulate, and....he who has the most has the POWER! Unfortunately, then this is the person who governs us, and is most unfit to do so, being set apart from us, as he is by his wealth . This is the man who say "I'm THE king, we'll be doing things MY way".

Another person adds in response to my comment about the rich earning their money:

Such as being born with silver spoons in their mouths?

No one here seems to have addressed that yet The vast majority of the richest people, those we are talking about here, have done SQUAT to earn their wealth.

Which as most people around here know is false. The origin of wealth for the richest people in the world is well known. The majority of the wealthiest people o the Forbes 400 earned it on their own. But that didn't stop another person from agreeing and adding:

Very few of the very rich are making a lot of money because they are some kind of unique snowflake.

They are making a lot of money because their families are wealthy and well connected, they belong to the right country club, know the right people, went to the right schools, and their narrow and blinkered backgrounds have assured their loyalty to the values of "their set."

If people really got high-level jobs in business because they were smart--why, some of them would be smart. Apparently you are unaware that these characters are so incredibly stupid and venal that they are, as we speak, in a fair way of reducing the global financial system to a smoking ruin.

Another agreed, adding:

Draginol makes an assumption that there is a meritocracy in the US, and high social mobility. There isn't either of those, the rich have pulled up the drawbridges. In the US now, it is "to those that have, shall be given....".

Another person objects to the rich because of the affect on society:

The rich pay no taxes. You cannot improve the lot of 300 million Americans by handing the nations wealth to a handful of ultra wealthy. It just doesn't work that way. You must have taxes and by their very nature they will take more from the rich than the poor. There is no good reason for excusing multinationals and the very rich from paying tax by resorting to paper shuffling and tax dodges.

At this point, I have been called ignorant by several different people. One person tells me:

You have zero knowledge of facts of any kind, not the smallest familiarity with economics, or the slightest understanding of history, government, or sociology--or even ordinary common knowledge about the physical objects in your environment.

When I say that having the government confiscate the wealth of the richest people would not make society better, the response I get is:

That $$ would be going towards infrastructure, roads, bridges, water treatment plants, deficits, healthcare, schools and educations, fire depts., etc. that would enrich us as a society. It seems you are misreading this as $$ above the cap goes to specific greedy individuals in elected gov't, vs. gov't actually being all of us and all of our collective commons. You really don't see how surplusses used for the public's greater good will make our society a better place?

I respond with this:

No, I don't think society would be better off if the government confiscated the wealth of the rich. Because government squanders resources. It is a far less efficient mechanism for social good than the private sector is.

The things the government has cobbled together (like an interste highway system, failing schools that get immense amounts of money per student, etc.) does not give me confidence in the government's ability to make good use of capital.

By contrast, most of the things we rely on and enjoy on a day to day basis comes from the private sector. Cars, airplanes, computers, the Internet (and no, Darpa was not the Internet before someone tries to bring that up), affordable housing, massive medical advancements, mass communications, televisions, etc.

The government is just another corporation. One with a monopoly on force. It's not some magic public good organization. It's just a big inefficient corporation whose products and services we're forced to purchase.

But at this point, the conversation has largely descended into people name calling me and telling me how stupid, ignorant, greedy, fascist, naive and selfish I am. 

That is, when I respond to their arguments (such as explaining to the woman who argued that her daughter's ability to curl her tongue seems to her as valuable as being good at basketball that if she can get people to pay her daughter for that talent, then good for her but in reality, society decides how valuable things are through their voluntary purchasing decisions are).  But I think you can get an idea of what their values are and what their economic philosophies and view of an ideal world is.