I am not really sure how to address the video that was seen on www.warongreed.com. For eight minutes four people discriminated against a man because he was wealthy. This is unfair and I do not think that this tape should be out on the Internet. When you Google Henry Kravis no mention of his charities come up or what he has done good, it all has to do with this website, www.warongreed.com.
Let’s take an in depth look at this terrible greedy man:
1.)Kravis funds the Henry Kravis Leadership Institute ([1]) that sponsors the leadership studies programs at his alma mater,
2.)He is a benefactor and a past chairman of
3.)He previously co-chaired with Jerry Speyer the influential Partnership for New York City, founded by David Rockefeller in 1979, and now sits on its board of directors.[2] He created the New York City Investment Fund, a non-profit organization to create jobs and new business in
4.)He is a Trustee of the Council on Foreign Relations in
If the movie can be subjective so can I. Instead of babbling for eight minutes comparing five totally different lifestyles maybe there could have been some real conversation something that we could have learned from! Instead we were exposed to racist propaganda.
Yeah it sucks that some make more money than others but what I have learned in this class is that is life. Some people work harder, longer hours, have more education, more drive and so on. Is it fair that a person who went to Wharton undergrad and NYU MBA school makes more money than a person with a high school diploma? Yes, I do think that it is fair. What do you think? If you work hard you will be repaid in the long run. We live in a society were education is important, the more education you have, the more chance you have at making more money. In the video, who do you think has the highest education? My guess is Henry Kravis.
Henry Kravis is a man that worked very hard and to demean him like that in the video is disrespectful and caddy. Life sucks some people make more money than others. I do not see this as inequality, does that make me screwy? I see nothing wrong with this man making more money than the people in the video. Maybe there is something wrong with me. These guys on Wall Street work 20 hours a day have no life, no family but have a lot of money, plain and simple.
Oh course people hate Me. Kravis because he wants certain tax breaks. Here me out. The four people in the video felt that they should have certain tax breaks and so does Henry, any common thread? Yes, all of these people work hard for their money and do not want to see it go away. If anything you would think that people could see this common thread and it would bring them closer together. But I guess not since the four people will be taxed more than Mr. Kravis.
Don’t you think that greed is good? I would like to close with the famous words of Gordon Gekko: (aka Micheal Douglas's character in Wall Street)
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good.
Greed is right.
Greed works.
Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind.
And greed -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the
If i am totally off on this please let me know. I would love to learn the other side here. I want to see why i am wrong. Why these four people are right, please inform me.
4 comments:
You've made a couple of the essential points in defense of gross income inequalities, and it's good to make those points. Let me go over them with you.
First, when wealth is concentrated, it becomes able to take advantage of "economies of scale" and achieve marvelous things. This can be done in the public sphere, through taxes and public spending. It happens in the private sphere, through corporations and pooled investment capital, and it happens in the non-profit sphere, when donations and grants combine to allow amazing things to happen. Why shouldn't it also happen with individuals, so that a few of the wealthiest persons or families can do tremendous things (like have beautiful homes built) with concentrated wealth? Must concentrated wealth always be in the hands of large groups rather than individuals or families?
Second, everyone who creates wealth, earns wealth, inherits wealth, or takes rents (including interest or capital gains) from risking wealth deserves to keep some for personal use, but also is ethically compelled to give some of the wealth back to the general society to pay for "common defense and general welfare" or law, law enforcement, public goods such as streets and food safety regulatory enforcement, and so forth. After people have paid what they owe to general society, then what is left over is purified, isn't it? If our society says that the wealthiest people must give a portion of their earnings back to everyone else (pay taxes), then on what justification can we complain about the enormity of the portion that they keep?
When you Google Henry Kravis no mention of his charities come up or what he has done good, it all has to do with this website, www.warongreed.com.
That must have been true when you posted this, but now, almost three weeks later, after the dust has settled, a Google search for "Henry Kravis" brings up only two hits related to the warongreed.org campaign among the top ten hits.
For eight minutes four people discriminated against a man because he was wealthy. . .
You do you think "discriminate" is really what these people were doing? Were they attacking his character? Were they dishonoring him? I heard them say he was earning too much. They think he is overpaid. They also seem to dislike his method of earning money. You can say that Mr. Kravis is a person who helps keep our economy streamlined by taking over inefficient companies and making them efficient, and this adds value to those companies, and the result is that those companies can better satisfy customers, and compete with success in the global marketplace. If Kravis or someone like him hadn't stepped in, the companies would have been doomed to eventually go into bankruptcy, or so the argument would go. That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at his work is to call it "corporate raiding" or "junk bond flimflammery" or heartless slash-and burn pillaging.
Whether what Mr. Kravis does to earn his money is creating a net gain in terms of human happiness and the general well-being of society is an interesting question. It's an empirical question, that we could probably try to answer in a neutral and unbiased way by adding up all the economic, financial, social, emotional, and environmental results of his work, the good and bad, and determining how things turn out. The warongreed.org people haven't done that. But they are making the case that if someone did do all that work, one would find that Mr. Kravis is a person who does more harm than good. And this, according to the filmmakers, ought to be considered in an evaluation of whether Mr. Kravis is overpaid or appropriately compensated.
Were they going after Mr. Kravis personally, or were they going after the idea of extreme wealth, and using him as a representative example? If someone is going to stir up emotions against a social problem it is usually a good tactic to make the problem personal. To personalize an issue, you must present stories about real people and real situations. In terms of social change tactics, the warongreed.org people were doing a fairly straight-forward tactic to get people upset about a perceived injustice by personalizing it and presenting people with a concrete example of a case that can seem outrageous.
In my earlier comment I mentioned that there are sometimes advantages to concentrating wealth in the hands of individuals or families. The individuals can take advantage of all that wealth concentration to do efficient and effective things with it. Since it's private wealth, they can do put it to use without the constraints of government or large groups. This way, people can be daring, can be more responsive to needs, and can experiment with their wealth in funding social change agents. People can also support the reproduction of ideologies and systems that will keep them and their heirs wealthy and powerful. And so, Kravis gives money to schools that produce elite leaders in our society (Eaglebrook School, Deerfield Academy, and The Loomis Chaffee School). By the way, I also give money to a similar school. Kravis also donates to cancer and heart disease treatment and research, serves on various civic and educational boards and committees, and generally remains engaged in civic duties and politics (he was a big supporter of Bush #41).
Someone disposed to like Kravis will say this is exactly what wealthy people should do, and Kravis is setting a good example. Someone disposed to dislike Kravis or extreme concentrations of wealth will cynically say that this sort of civic engagement helps perpetuate power and inequality, and people like Kravis are acting in their own self interest in doing all this charitable giving and community work.
There could have been some real conversation something that we could have learned from!
I think the propaganda here was making a case that extremes of wealth are not ethically acceptible. The film was arguing that people at the top end of the income distribution are overpaid, and have too much power, and we as a society should change our economic and political system to limit the extremes of wealth and power so that rewards are more justly distributed to those who deserve them. The film did this emotionally with visual images rather than with reasoned and logical argument, an inherent problem with the media of music, film, and television. (see Niel Postman's work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, for example, By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions).
. . . we were exposed to racist propaganda.
I've seen the film a couple times, and I don't remember the racist stuff. Did I miss something? What do you see that is racist? Do you see something anti-semitic in the Warongreed.org film?
...some make more money than others but what I have learned in this class is that is life.
I don't think the people who made www.warongreed.org are against inequality in general. They seem to be against extreme inequality. I have no idea what the filmmakers would think of a system in which the top 150,000 American income earners received $500,000 to $1,000,000 per year rather than the $1,600,000 and up (a New York Times article in June 5 of 2005 described the top 0.1% of American households as earning a minimum of $1.6 million per year). Maybe an upper threshold of $1 million seems too high to them. The point the filmmakers are probably trying to make is that no one does any labor or any investment decision-making that justifies rewards in excess of some upper threshold of fairness. Beyond a certain point of economic reward, additional income is not really deserved. The fact is, many of the people who earn over $1 million per year are responsible for setting up the systems in which their rewards and compensation are determined. In other words, powerful and wealthy people decide how much money the powerful and wealthy people will earn, and how much they will pay in taxes. This may also seem unfair to neutral observers.
Most of the rest of your blog entry seems to be arguing that inequalities are inevitable and justifiable. For example, people who work hard and have usefully applied themselves in good training programs ought to receive more rewards for their work than the people who who are lazy, or work part-time, or drop out of school. But, these points you are making are not really part of a serious argument about income inequality. The only people you're arguing against with such logic are those utopian thinkers who want to abolish property and income alltogether and make everyone equal in terms of their powers of consumption. There just aren't many people espousing such schemes any more, so your arguments are less convincing than they could be. It may be that you are trying to characterize people who want to make reasonable arguments about limits to income inequality (arguments with which we may disagree and argue against) as being unreasonable utopians. When you are arguing against utopian fantasies of total equality perhaps readers will assume that those who want to limit the extremes of wealth are in favor of total equality (even when they are not).
These guys on Wall Street work 20 hours a day have no life, no family but have a lot of money, plain and simple.
No, that's not my experience. I know people who work in New York in investment banking and money trading. A person rather close to me was a CEO of a charitable fund for a while. These people I know who earn tens of thousands of dollars each month, or millions of dollars each year, do work hard, or at least they did at one time. One worked long hours, that is true. But, she didn't actually work so much more than I do. I work about 1,900 to 2,000 hours per year, and one of these persons I know who was earning a couple million each year was working perhaps 2,300 hours or 2,400 hours per year. She was working 20% to 25% harder than I do and earning 3000% to 4000% what I earn. Another person who was earning money for something useful she made or invented was earning approximately $350,000 per year, but was actually only working about 300-400 hours per year to maintain her income-generating thing. The person who was earning millions of dollars is not quite three years older than I, and she has already retired, and has plenty of time with her three children. Even when she was working 50-hours to 60-hours per week she was able to take off for five or six-day stretches for holidays with her family a few times each year. Actually, it was partly pressure at work to not take time off for those little vacations that pushed that hard-working top-earning person to retire.
I personally share your displeasure at making a personal attack on someone because of their wealth. I can imagine someone attacking either of those wealthy people I know, and how unfair such criticisms could be. On the other hand, if people kept the argument impersonal and simply showed the wealth those people enjoy and compared that to the relative poverty of people who work equally hard, that could be a case against a system that produces such inequality. I've done farm labor and I know people who have worked in meat-packing plants, and I know that sort of work can be compared to intense mental and financial work.
But, as I said in the earlier comment, the filmmakers are making propaganda, and in propaganda, it's important to personalize an issue.
By the way, I'm an eighth-generation direct descendent of one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in East Anglia (around Norwich). In the second half of the 18th century people were outraged at the excesses and power of my ancestors and their friends. But, within five generations the fortune was pretty much gone. While the wealth was concentrated in our family and my ancestors were powerful they did some good things with the money. My ancestors sponsored and helped a young landscape architect who became influential, they had built a mansion that served for a short time as the headquarters of the Royal Air Force, and they left some charitable funding that provided succor to prisoners and the poor. The Ives Trust is continuing to help a few poor families and orphans in Ghana and Sri Lanka and Tanzania today. Yet, to concentrate all this wealth and power, many shepherds and weavers and dyers must have been underpaid or subjected to various injustices. I don't know whether their miseries and deprivations were ever balanced by the good works of the Ives family or the many advantages my family has enjoyed down through all these years.
Greed is good?
Well, there is the idea of the invisible hand. If we all pursue our own best interests, and we have perfect free market conditions (we have perfect information as consumers and workers, and we can quickly and effortlessly switch where we work or purchase things), then everyone acting on their own best interest will produce a general improvement in conditions for all. Yes, there is some empirical evidence for this theory.
There is also a tragedy of the commons problem. Sometimes people ruin everyone else's good times by pursuing their own best interests. We can't all be freeloaders. Sometimes when everyone is sitting down to watch a parade and a tall person in front stands up to get a better view, then everyone else behind the tall person must stand up as well to improve their personal views of the parade. In the end, everyone is less comfortable, and most people have much worse views of the parade. The invisible hand doesn't put greed to work for good in every situation.
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