Sunday, October 9, 2011

A Personal Goal

Until I watched the commanding heights, I would have been classified as a Keynesian. I was all in favor of the government helping those that were handed the back end of the opportunity stick at the expense of those who are fabulously wealthy.This was mostly because I felt people with massive wealth as a whole would not want to help those less fortunate. I no longer feel this way, my feeling is that it should not be the government that forces them to use their excess wealth for humanitarian needs , it should be the rich people themselves. If a market is to work people must exchange goods and services like money, labor, or materials. When there are people with much more money then they could ever spend on themselves, why do they not spend it on others? I feel that if the rich took more initiative in using their wealth for a common good such as creating new businesses or development foundations , then their would not be such a heated debate over whether they should contribute their fair share relative to others in their society. If wealthy people were personally invested in making the world a better place , they would have much more of an incentive to allocate their own wealth in a much more productive and economic fashion.Through out history you can see monarchies and dictatorships that tried to hold all the wealth of a society, but since they control so much wealth their respective economies fall apart because the dictator did not do a good job of redistributing that wealth on his own terms. One of my favorite quotes pertaining to this is by Andrew Carnegie when he said:
"I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution."

He was a man who came to understand that someone who takes it as their personal goal to use their immense wealth to achieve long lasting good has much more of an incentive to achieve success in doing so, and it in economics we can really understand the miraculous effects of incentives.

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