My case in point: in 2012 the Koch brothers made 11 billion in profit yet still laid off over 25% of their workers in Green Bay, many middle aged. Now they need to find retraining, find a job, and still support their families. Most ended up losing their homes or at the very least downsizing. What CEO has every lost their home, needed to be retrained, or lost their life savings trying to make ends meet after a business went under or they got fired?
What I heard from Obama is that one man cannot make a successful business without good workers and good workers should be recognized for their contribution to the organization. Currently the climate is that only the CEO is of any importance and should take advantage of their workers any way they can.
I just think our society has gotten to the point where it's really easy to get richer if you're already well-off, but too difficult to make ends meet for most people. It wasn't always that way, we used to have the strongest middle-class the world had ever seen, but now 1% of the people have over 30% of the wealth. They might be smarter but they're not THAT much smarter... and nobody makes that much money without a lot of "little people" doing a lot of the work.
In fact, and I know this is sacrilege for some people, but I honestly don't think any one person can physically do enough in a single lifetime to actually rightfully "earn" a billion dollars. Millions, maybe. If they have a billion dollars it means somewhere somebody --probably a lot of somebodies got cheated and there's something wrong with the system that created that disparity. It's not even their fault, it's just the whole setup is continually skewed to funnel money from the middle class to the uber rich. And anyone who wants to make sure the rest of us have any opportunities at all is called a "communist" by their PR firms.
Oh, and:
The purpose of the image I posted wasn’t to say that Republicans are more likely to be rich, or more likely to have inherited it. It was simply to point out that Ayn Rand and Jesus Christ are pretty much 180° diametric opposites, and that the Republican Party should choose one and stick with it.
Republicans follow the "objectivist" ethic of Ayn Rand, who despised Jesus and any teaching that intends to help the needy. To these Republicans, the needy are lazy, stupid, and unworthy of government assistance. What may surprise many is that these Republicans also profess to be Christians!
Jesus Himself said, “Ye cannot serve both God and mammon.” Ayn Rand was pretty much the prime worshiper of mammon (money above all else) in her day.
Were I still the Bible-believing Christian that I used to be, I would strongly suspect that the modern right-wing “Christianity” espoused by so many in the Republican Party is none other than the Second Beast, aka the False Prophet, prophesied in Revelation, that would pretend to be Christ-like yet deceive its worshipers into worshiping the First Beast, often mis-called “the Antichrist” (John the Revelator never actually used that term in Revelation — I suspect that he used “Beast” to refer to both because they were entities that were not Persons but which would be considered to be like unto Persons — Aggregate Personhood in the USA makes both corporations and non-profits such as political parties and churches into pseudo-Persons under the law! See also Citizens United).
Another Bible prophecy warns against those who would call good evil, and evil good. Ayn Rand called altruism evil, and selfishness (er, “enlightened self-interest”) good. Jesus flatly said that altruism was good and selfishness evil, repeatedly.
High five, COMALite J!
What’s really ironic is that Mitt Romney has said on national television that the poor are to blame for their own poverty. Not only the teachings of Jesus, but also the Book of Mormon, flatly forbid that!
In the Book of Mormon, in Chapter 10 of the Book of Mosiah therein, good King Benjamin (the last King of the Nephites) is giving his great speech to them, and starting in verse 16 or so, he flatly states that not only is it sinful to blame the poor for their own poverty, but that anyone who does so and fails to repent of it stands in dire danger of losing his salvation!
Here's the full quote.
"Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build
that. Somebody else made that happen."
When he said, "you didn't build that," he was talking about roads and bridges.
You're totally right about inventors. Google the phrase "died in poverty" and you'll find tons of inventors, artists, writers, business pioneers etc who contributed so much to us and the "free market" at the time rewarded them with basically nothing --though lots of people got rich later on from their work and innovation.
Even Bill Gates came from a pretty well to do family. Henry Ford was able to stay home and tinker in he garage. Thomas Edison came from wealthy parents. Not having a start like that is more unusual than winning the lottery. People like Bill Clinton and Obama are the exception rather than the rule.
We who believe that successful people always get help from others are not saying that successful individuals do not play a key role (sometimes the key role) in attaining their success (not always honestly or morally, unfortunately); we simply repeat the fact that no one succeeds on his own.
No rational person would assert that an American billionaire would have become fabulously wealthy in Afghanistan had he been born into an Afghan tribe with few assets.
The second part of your statement is known as projecting in psychology. "Conservatives" (not the kind of conservative I was reared to be) today resort to accusing people who believe in our collective duty to practice the Golden Rule of dividing the American people. If fact, it is GOP propaganda, paid for by the likes of the Koch Brothers, that seeks to pander to angry whites and fuel their resentment.
The aristocracy for all of recorded history has kept itself in power by a carrot-and-stick approach to governance. It rewards those who knuckle under and punishes those who stand for their freedom and the freedom of their fellow men. In the USSR, for example, a family that had a record of proper deference would be placed higher on a waiting list to buy a sought-after commodity; anyone caught complaining or protesting went to the bottom of that list.
I know you do not wish to return to the corrupt polices of the GWB/Rove era which enriched Wall Street at the expense of the American people, yet, in order to have the pleasure of gloating over an Obama defeat, would you support a return to a similar era (but on steroids) under Romney/Ryan/Rove?
Incredibly, I have repeatedly read and heard "conservatives" justify their Ayn Rand selfishness by rationalizing to themselves that people are poor because they are lazy and want to be take care of by people who have money. Since most of the poor have jobs (that pay so little, one person must often--if possible--hold down two or even three jobs), we do ourselves a great injustice by asserting that they are poor because they are lazy. Lying to ourselves to justify withholding life-giving sustence to our fellow man is a deed bred in the heart of Satan.
Jesus' words never left me to infer that I should not want our collective resources to include feeding the hungry and clothing the naked if they were lazy. He never even suggests that the needy are in want because they are lazy.