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To: Sarah Barracuda
“We don’t build the economy from the top down. We build it from the bottom up.”

Before workers can get jobs at factories, those factories have to be built. Taking money that would be used to build factories and giving it to people who would work in them if they existed, won't do anything to create jobs. Instead, it will immediately deny jobs to those who would have been hired to build the factories, and in the long run deny jobs to those whom the factories would have hired.

The reason capitalism leads to prosperity is that people who invest capital in such a way as to produce more wealth, end up wealthier than those who don't; this in turn gives those people more capital, with which they can then create even more wealth. Consequently, large amounts of wealth get created, leaving just about everyone better off than if wealth were equally distributed such that only a tiny amount of capital be available to the people who would be effective at using it to create new wealth, and only a small amount of wealth would get created on an ongoing basis.

Note that many people, even Christians, seem to regard as axiomatic the notion that happiness should depend on "relative" rather than absolute wealth. I would regard such a notion as anti-Christian. Christ in a parable expressly rebuked workers who were happy working for a certain wage, but were unhappy when they saw how others were paid. There is nothing wrong with aspiring to improve oneself to be as wealthy as one's neighbor, if keeps such aspiration in proper perspective, but there is nothing right about harboring hatred toward one's neighbor as a consequence of his superior wealth.

Note that while most of the "Seven Deadly Sins" represent healthy things taken to excess, covetous does not. There is no such thing as a healthy dose of covetousness.

29 posted on 09/23/2012 4:36:36 PM PDT by supercat (Renounce Covetousness.)
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To: supercat

Although ultimately of course whether a new company continues growing and creates self-sustaining jobs is a function of customers’ ability and willingness to pay for the company’s products, not the entrepreneur or the investor capital. What good are the tax breaks if they just go straight into the bank (where it either sits and earns interest) or get invested overseas or in companies that already have strong demand to sell products and create jobs ?

The company’s customers are who buy the company’s products that in turn creates the need for the employees to produce, sell, and service those products. If those customers go broke by tax policies that reward “the 1%” at the expense of everyone else, the demand for the company’s products will collapse. And the jobs will disappear, regardless of what the entrepreneur does.


32 posted on 09/23/2012 5:18:52 PM PDT by erlayman
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