Here's a little gem I found in a comment thread to an article on Yahoo about reducing the national deficit:
Raise taxes to pre-Reagan era rates. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet giving away big chunks of their fortunes to charity (even if it's your own charity) is certainly laudable. However, why was the tax system so lax that people got *this* rich? Even after giving a ridiculous amount of money to charity, Bill Gates still has as much money as the GDP of Equador. Does he work as hard as the entire country of Equador?
I know I probably shouldn't be wasting time arguing in the direction of somebody who can't even spell 'Ecuador' correctly, but the semester's over and I don't have to go to work for another three hours, so here goes.
First off, yes, Bill Gates works just as hard as the country of Ecuador, if not harder. I know it's difficult for you redistributionist, friend-of-the-working-man hags to believe, but being the CEO of a huge corporation is not all kicking back on the beach with a pina colada and letting your underlings handle everything. Yes, some CEOs of huge corporations think it is, but in the business, that sort of thing is widely referred to as "doing it wrong", and their companies ultimately do poorly because of bad leadership. Managing an organization is still work, and it's the kind of work that doesn't leave you alone, that has you keeping your Blackberry (or prototype Windows Phone in this case, I guess; hell, Bill Gates might actually have a cyberbrain already.) glued to your ear or spending holidays working out some upper-management kinks that most people wouldn't even understand the significance of. Just because he's not out there with a hammer and a sweaty brow doesn't mean it's not work.
Second, when did the country of Ecuador ever produce a software system that billions of people around the world use and buy products for? Bill Gates' obscene amounts of money didn't just fall from the sky; he took a risk, spearheaded a company to make things people wanted, and it paid off. He continues to profit from that initial risk. Even if the profit amounts to more than the GDP of a South American country, so what? Whose place is it to say that anyone has too much money, and that some of it needs to be taken away?
Lemme clue you in on a little secret, commenter; the world is not fair. Some people have more money than others. And you know how this usually happens? They provide things that other people need and are willing to pay for. Becoming that rich is not easy, by any means. For every Bill Gates, there are a dozen people who thought they were going to develop the next big operating system but never got it off the ground. And yet, why do you think people take risks in creating products? Because they want to be as rich as people like Bill Gates. Without possible wealth as a motivator, how many ground-breaking technologies do you think would have gotten off the ground? If companies didn't want to sell their products and make money, do you think they'd put as much effort as they do into making them useful and user-friendly? If we start penalizing the rich simply for being rich, who's going to want to take that kind of risk anymore?
It's easy to look at rich people and say they have too much money. And you know why it's easy? Because it doesn't require the least modicum of rational thought. People like you are the reason we have Commander-in-Chief Penismouth on watch. It all sounds pretty and harmonious until our society starts stagnating because nobody ever has to work for a goddamn thing.
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