Let's Fix This Country
the economy

Socialism? They Must Be Kidding

This riveting video turns the income and wealth of all strata of Americans into a vivid set of graphics that is nothing less than astonishinng in showing how badly skewed is America in favor of a small segment of our society.



Not to be missed (sound on). This is one case where we all really should forward this to everyone we know to get rid of the nonsense we hear about creeping socialism. We are in the midst of the extreme opposite.

7 Comments for “Socialism? They Must Be Kidding”

  1. Andrew Hewat

    I would hope that Mr. McCLane is one of the 1%. Otherwise, he is like too many citizens of this country, full of ideology and short on self-interested awareness.

  2. Is it a zero-sum game? If the top 1% had/earned less, does that necessarily mean that the bottom 40% would have more?

  3. It’s obvious by the words that were chosen and by the tone of voice used by the speaker, that the opinion being given here is one that expresses the politics of envy that is typically espoused by politically left-leaning folks. I find this is NOT the ‘balanced’ or ‘neutral’ point of view that you claim to present on this site, and I suspect that ‘fixing’ the country as you claim to want to do involves a re-distribution of wealth to make it more ‘fair’ and ‘egalitarian’ for the people, right?
    I have to ask, what should we do to redistribute this wealth that is any different than all the other attempts that have been tried so far? Do we really think that by taking from the rich and giving to the poor we will have an economy that is then fair and balanced?

    I suspect that this new economy will only be fair and balanced for a short time and that, after a time, the wealth curve will return to what it is now, and this is because most of my fellow humans do not know what wealth really is. It flows right through them and ends up in the accounts of the rich again. That’s how it got there in the first place and remains there now and even grows there as we speak.

    What can we do to cause a re-balancing of the wealth? The rich will resist with all their power giving it away or allowing it to be taken, and the poor will not be able to hang on to it once they have their hands on it. Do you really think there is a way for us ‘ordinary’ humans to get our hands on the wealth of that top one percentile guy at the top? He the power and ability to not only get wealth, but to keep it. He has more power to retain his wealth than the government of and by the people has to take it from him. He can dodge and weave and hide and go covert better than those of us who think it unfair that he has all that wealth and power.

    I believe that the ‘egalitarianism’ that you are espousing in your video of charts is as naive as all the other socialist experiments that have been and are being tried on this planet. I suspect that you are blinded by the politics of envy and that you don’t really understand the true meaning of wealth and what it means to actually have wealth.

    I believe that if you do succeed in some sort of wealth redistribution you will be killing the goose that lays the golden egg and that the freedoms and standard of living that we have enjoyed for over 200 years will become a memory.
    I believe that when you remove the incentive to be profitable in your enterprise by taxing or otherwise seizing the profits, you doom us to the same miseries that we see in most of the socialist experiments we have seen so far. The graph doesn’t level out as nicely as in your video – the spike on the high end drops but the level of all the other percentiles do not rise in proportion. Much wealth would be ‘lost’ due to inefficiencies and competencies and the loss of incentive to be productive.

    I don’t believe that the bureaucrats in government are smart enough to know how to efficiently allocate resources to make the economy more egalitarian. I believe that, once they have that top one percentile of wealth, corruption will ensue and that we will end up with another tyranny as has happened with most socialist experiments on the planet so far.

    Why do we think that the results of wealth redistribution will be any different here than it was in Cuba, Venezuela, or the Soviet Union?

    I think that the ‘fix’ that this country really needs is to teach our children to be entrepreneurs and inventors. How to manage money. What wealth really is, how to create it, amplify it, and hold on to it. How to spend it and give it away in an effective, generous, and truly helpful way.

    • In Response to Your Comments

      Sir: Normally, we do not debate our readers, but here the comment is directed at us, not just the content of the piece. You impart to us far more than is in our few sentences, which say only that the data make it irrefutably clear that claims of creeping socialism in this country and phobias about “socialist experiments” are arrant nonsense. We are way at the other extreme. Somehow the few words accompanying the video have led you to assume we are beset with “envy” (“disgust” would have been the better guess), whereas our concern is that the huge imbalance of wealth is corrosive to our democracy.
      As for redistribution, that is what has already taken place, but in the opposite direction, courtesy of a preferential tax code for capital gains and dividends that have distributed ever-greater wealth to the wealthy.
      Incidentially, nowhere do we claim to be “balanced” or “neutral”. Along the political spectrum we come down on one side or the other, depending on the issue. – Editors

      • Dear Editors,
        Thank you for your patient and honest response. Just as in the article, the words you use in your response indicate a bias towards egalitarianism at least and socialism at ‘worst’. This proves that your proposed ‘fixing of this country’ involves the redistribution of wealth. Don’t you see that this will kill the goose? If we succeed in this redistribution, who will then invest in new enterprises? Who will then have the incentive to work hard to produce new wealth via increased efficiency and inventions? The government? The people?

        As stated, the article pans the fear of creeping socialism. It proposes socialism via diagrams of ‘equitable distribution of wealth’ and the denigrating of the wealthy as an ‘unfair’ distribution of wealth. This is counter to our heritage and our economic model of capitalism. Your opinion that the distribution of wealth is unfair and corrosive to our democracy is socialistic propaganda – the very kind of speech that we have heard from all Marxists.

        This isn’t a problem that needs to be ‘fixed’. When this nation was founded there was very little socialism. Now there is a lot more of it. Wouldn’t you call that ‘creeping socialism’? Granted it has been slow, but it has been sure, and the welfare mentality and the programs that it has fostered via government programs is now at the point of bankrupting most of our governments and institutions with unfunded mandates and inefficiencies. So now you socialists are eying the only thing left to take – the wealth of the wealthy.

        We live in a republic with a capitalist economic system based upon profits earned from investment in enterprise. This has produced the wealthiest nation in history. We all enjoy a higher standard of living than ever before because of this system. Considering the accumulation of those profits an unfair distribution of wealth again reveals your socialistic politics-of-envy point of view. Why is it unfair for some people to have more wealth than others?

        Throughout history here has always been a wealthy class of people. Our country was founded by wealthy landowners. There has also always been a subsistence class of people. There are now WAY more wealthy people per capita than ever before. How can you propose the idea that this wealth accumulation is corrosive to our democracy?

        Why didn’t you address any of the other questions in my previous rant?
        Like how do you propose to redistribute the wealth? Via higher tax rates on the wealthy?

        At some higher level taxation becomes confiscatory and destructive to profitable enterprise. Do we know what that level is? Isn’t is possible that we have already reached that level in our progressive taxation system? Even at the so-called ‘preferential’ rates?

        “The power to tax is the power to destroy,” wrote John Marshall. I’m afraid that ‘the peoples’ preference for socialism is corrosive to our democracy. And your opinions are supporting this predilection. This is the classic class warfare idea that Marx and Engels invented.

        This class warfare is a natural occurrence on this planet because it is based upon greed and envy. Mankind suffers from these vices because we lack integrity. This is why most attempts to ‘fix’ the situation via governmental intervention in the economic affairs of society is doomed to fail as history has proven. The people in the system are too corrupt to create a true egalitarianism. Corruption occurs because we generally lack the integrity to be truly fair and honest in all affairs.

        It’s bad enough that we have a corrupt capitalistic system, but history has proven time and again that a corrupt socialistic system is WAY worse than what we have now.

  4. I have passed this to others and have gotten several comments back. Those that have trouble believing this ask the question, How do we verify that this is true, unless we know who the Harvard professor is, and what data he is using?

    These people all have scientific backgrounds, and know that there is a lot of bad information transmitted via the internet. Surely, there are references somewhere?

    • In Response to Your Question

      This data has been reported widely over the last few years. It is its dramatic presentation in graphic form that has caused it finally to register so strongly. We cannot speak for exactly which sources the creator of the video used, but the data can be collected from multiple studies. You could look further for:
      Michael Norton, Harvard Business School
      Dan Ariely, Duke University
      Emmanuel Saez, University of California, Berkeley
      Thomas Piketty, Paris School of Economics
      The Economic Policy Institute
      Pew Research
      Also, we have covered this subject before. See this article.
      Thank you for commenting and we hope this is useful.

      – Editors, Lets Fix This Country

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