01-11-2004, 12:04 AM
Question: what if everybody played basketball like Michael Jordan do you think we would all make the amount of money he is making?.
If everybody played basketball for a living, we'd all be dead pretty fast. On the other hand, if Jordan had never played basketball, millions of people would have missed out on a truly incredible feats of human accomplishment, both entertaining and inspiring. The marketplace economy does a pretty good job of helping guys like Jordan find their calling without pushing so many people into basketball that other important businesses can't find workers. What would be the alternative? To have the government choose what job is right for each person and pay everyone equally? I don't see that working well in practice.
What it does not say is that not everybody together at the same time can make it, there is not enough money for everybody to be a millionair.
You have a hangup on money. Especially in the age of "electronic money" it would be quite easy to make everybody a millionaire. Just give everyone a bank account and deposit a million dollars in each, easy. The real issue is the creation of goods and services. There are not enough goods and services available to allow everyone to live like a millionaire. What spurns the creation of such goods and services? People doing productive jobs. What inspires people to seek out the most productive job possible? That would be the "American Dream".
Not everybody who is poor is lazy. I think most of them are not actually.
The poor in the United States are usually poor by virtue of their own bad decisions and/or laziness. For those who fit this category there should be (and in many places are) programs available to help move them into the work force, and the true exceptions to this should (and generally do) at least have their basic needs covered by government and or private institutions. But the worst thing to do is to take the poor people who are capable of working and give them goods and services with no strings attached. That is essentially encouraging them to be unproductive leeches. Rehab them into a job... perhaps on a Sony Wega assembly line.
If everybody played basketball for a living, we'd all be dead pretty fast. On the other hand, if Jordan had never played basketball, millions of people would have missed out on a truly incredible feats of human accomplishment, both entertaining and inspiring. The marketplace economy does a pretty good job of helping guys like Jordan find their calling without pushing so many people into basketball that other important businesses can't find workers. What would be the alternative? To have the government choose what job is right for each person and pay everyone equally? I don't see that working well in practice.
What it does not say is that not everybody together at the same time can make it, there is not enough money for everybody to be a millionair.
You have a hangup on money. Especially in the age of "electronic money" it would be quite easy to make everybody a millionaire. Just give everyone a bank account and deposit a million dollars in each, easy. The real issue is the creation of goods and services. There are not enough goods and services available to allow everyone to live like a millionaire. What spurns the creation of such goods and services? People doing productive jobs. What inspires people to seek out the most productive job possible? That would be the "American Dream".
Not everybody who is poor is lazy. I think most of them are not actually.
The poor in the United States are usually poor by virtue of their own bad decisions and/or laziness. For those who fit this category there should be (and in many places are) programs available to help move them into the work force, and the true exceptions to this should (and generally do) at least have their basic needs covered by government and or private institutions. But the worst thing to do is to take the poor people who are capable of working and give them goods and services with no strings attached. That is essentially encouraging them to be unproductive leeches. Rehab them into a job... perhaps on a Sony Wega assembly line.