Introduction

In politics and life, we are all-too-often taught that we live in a world with a fixed amount of resources, a pie for example, and that if we want some it must come from someone else’s portion, leaving them with less. Even worse, we are told that if someone else, Jeff Bezos at Amazon or Sam Walton’s heirs at Walmart want more, that it must come from us, leaving us with less.

That deliberately false and dangerous thinking is the subject of today’s 10-minute podcast.

Continuing

There are parts of life where the resources, the prizes, are a fixed size. If you want yours, then someone else gets shorted. But those are the exceptions, not the way life is designed to be lived. Sports is an example of an exception. If you win, get the pie if you will, the other person or team must lose. That’s called a Zero Sum Game. Overall, this means that if you are going to win, someone else must lose. Like in sports or gambling. If you or your team is going to win, for example, a basketball game, the other person or team must lose. You go +1, they go -1; the sum of the two is zero. Same with gambling: if you are going to win $100, someone else needs to lose $100. Again, a zero sum game.

Unlike sports or poker, life is not a Zero Sum Game. If we have a good job and get a raise, the amount of the raise does not come from our spouse. It adds to the wealth in our family. The pie just got bigger. And that’s the secret. Depending upon how we run our personal lives, and how we handle our politics, all of the pies, personal, governmental and global, can either get a whole lot bigger--or kinda stay the same size, eventually, perhaps, even shrink. Even without being eaten.

With capitalism, the pie has a strong tendency to get bigger; there’s more for everyone. The question that always comes up is whether the expanding pie is distributed fairly. Okay, Will, what does “fairly” mean? Does it mean that everyone gets the same rewards? Does it mean that you get only what you earn? Or does there need to be a governmental policy that mandates a certain level of redistribution of capitalist profits? That’s what we have now, and that’s called taxes. And we redistribute those in a variety of ways. All societies that tax also redistribute wealth and income. Some do it more than others. The only question is how much and to whom.

Capitalism is the best wealth producing engine the world has ever seen. And we must have a moral compass to steer it. All economic systems are amoral at best, and need a human-driven moral compass. How capitalist-driven income and wealth are redistributed is clearly important, but not the subject of today’s blog/podcast. By the way, the Scandanavian countries are capitalist economies, with heavy taxes, including on the middle classes, and heavy redistribution. Those countries are not socialist.

Today’s Key Point: Politicians and other sources are telling us two self-serving, dangerous lies: 1. If Sam Walton’s company, Walmart, which he started on a shoestring, makes money, they got it from you.  2. If you want to improve your life, money must come to you from the “1%” via taxes for you to have a fair shot. These lies are yet another way to pit us against each other to their advantage. This kind of class warfare, along with identity politics and intersectionality (teaming up certain identity groups against others) are designed to force us to choose sides. And the ones pushing these dangerous lies are betting that more people will buy into their falsehoods and vote for them than not.

Let’s take lie 1 first. On the rare times that I shop at Walmart, I get a fair deal. And as the saying goes, “A fair exchange is no robbery.” The same thing is true when I use electronics to buy from Amazon. I get a fair deal, so I buy. Walmart and Amazon both win when I buy, as do I.

Onto no lie 2.