>>>In answer to your question, taxpayers are paying for "handouts," of course. As we always have. Do you dispute the point I actually made, that redistribution is currently from the middle class to the upper class? The numbers are indisputable.
>>
>>One fallacy in the whole redistribution story is that it's called REdistribution. As if it was once distributed alright, fair and square (wanted to write squair just for the rhyme :), and then the bad guys came and did it again, for their own selfish reasons.
>>
>>IMO, it never happened. The original distribution, which is artificially "fixed" by whatever system you put in place, was never fair and square. It was, maybe, in some cases/times/places freely agreed upon between parties involved, but as a rule it was arrived at by force, political maneuvering, backroom deals, blackmail, manipulating the market, and let's not forget plain robbery (and then buying legislature to make it legally owned), spoils of wars, colonial robbery etc etc. The original distribution was surely neither too original nor fair.
>>
>>Redistribution happens whenever distribution leaves sufficient number of people seriously deurinated.
>
>Good morning, Dragon Man. We have some overlap of agreement but you take it a lot further than I do. I remain a capitalist at heart. Some people really are smarter than others, do work harder, and achieve more success, deservedly so. In most cases they come by their success honestly, not because of a corrupt system that has stacked the deck in their favor. So I completely disagree with you that the money was not theirs in the first place. They earned it. The issue is how much of their income they should share.

Are you sitting in for Marcia today?

The small, hard working capitalists (of which I was one, once) don't invent golden parachutes for themselves at the expense of their workers, don't pay themselves as CEOs ten or forty times more than they pay their workers - most likely because they know these workers personally and they just can't rob them blind. They are just a more successful brand of working people, and I don't see them as possible redistributors of the first kind (i.e. those who take too much), thus not causing much of a countertrend towards the redistribution of the 2nd kind (i.e. those who have been robbed want their money back).

The Marcia reference is here because of the deja vu I got for about 20th time here (years... it accumulated). Whenever I mention the big shots taking more than ever, and don't get too specific, the big shots are removed from the picture and it's somehow assumed that I was trying to take from medium and smallish guys to give the little guys. I'm not. The big guys (read: banksters, insurances, oil, pharma, big accounting, military-industrial complex, real estateers and other snake oil sellers) are seriously doing the redistribution of the 1st kind, and may, in time, cause the 2nd kind to be demanded. Or done violently. I just hope I wouldn't necessarily be present when they achieve that.