A valid and consistent position, Deboss.
It's also a foolish one, in that it fails to optimize human populations. You get decreasing returns from concentrations of property that your formula doesn't recognize; 20 people who have shelter, medicine and enough food and free time to stay healthy and well-adjusted can achieve more than 16 starving vagrants plus 4 people who can eat until they're obese and have a big house all to themselves and Lay-Z-Boys to recline in while playing X Box.
The more equal wealth distribution is, the more leisure man hours the total population has. These are hours people will spend on aesthetic/cultural/entertainment activities, making life enjoyable. These are hours people spend on higher education, and will enable more people to pursue careers in the sciences, furthering human knowledge and directly increasing our quality of life. These are hours they will spend informing themselves about the world around them, creating the kind of informed and active citizenry necessary to democracy instead of a bunch of gullible dupes any con man or politician can fool. These are hours they will spend exercising, which along with an equal healthcare program to go with that wealth distribution, increases everybody's health thanks to that lovely phenomenon called herd immunity. These are hours they do not spend on poverty-caused crime, because if you've got enough to get by you don't need to sell drugs or commit robberies. And if you care about the economy, then don't worry, those hours will also be used by some to work a second job or run a business or otherwise create wealth.
I want too much. Being greedy just doesn't pay for me.
EDIT: Ummm, are we off-topic?
edited 20th Jan '11 11:07:39 PM by RadicalTaoist
Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.You actually receive bonuses from resource concentrations since it allows for more resources to be spent on technological development, IE cities vs farms.
We are however off topic as you pointed out.
Fight smart, not fair.Certainly, you do. However, if those resource concentrations are unevenly distributed, then you have social inequality and injustice, which benefits nobody except for that small portion of the population on top.
A billion dollars evenly distributed over ten thousand people gives each of them an upper middle class income and access to most of society's resources. A billion dollars in the hands of one man, with 9,999 people living in squalor, benefits exactly one person, who can't even sustain his own standard of living because there's no skilled labor force to provide his luxuries. Ever read Yertle the Turtle? It's a great kids' introduction to the problems inherent to uneven distribution of wealth.
Back on topic, when that one person seeks to benefit from his wealth at the expense of society at large, it is to society's benefit to remove it from him, by force if needed. Those who abet this process should be rewarded, not censured. But we have lived for a long time under the "mystique of the rich", where they are allowed to be not only materialistically superior to the masses, but morally as well.
edited 21st Jan '11 7:57:26 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Oh I see, you see human beings only as tools. A rather sociopathic mindset if you ask me. Do you think people should be legally entitled to set kittens on fire? After all, kittens are the property of their owners, and have no useful skills or knowledge at all—they eat, they shit, they look cute, that's it. But killing kittens for no reason makes people angry, because the feelings and experiences of creatures themselves have value. This goes especially for human beings, who have fully developed emotions and thoughts, not to mention human attachments to other people, and are generally understood to have some sort of rights, because all humans are essentially the same creatures when it comes down to it and thus certain humans are really not more valuable than other humans. The value of a human life cannot even be assessed by conventional means; it's one of the reason why society is so harsh on people who kill other people. You're looking at human beings merely as objects that fulfill some sort of purpose, which the vast majority of people consider repugnant, and for good reason.
Out of Context Theater: Mike K "'Bloody Pussies' cracked me up"