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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing redistribution of wealth.  Never particularly been a great idea when it has been implemented throughout history but nonetheless there are plenty of shills and folks out there who will continue to espouse this notion as some sort of saviour.

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: US economist weighs in on globalization. Quoting directly: "Globalization may have been viewed as a powerful force for worldwide economic growth." By the way, this person apparently came to Thailand; I urge those who are watching this video, go read that article in detail." Quoting directly: "Globalization may have been viewed as a powerful force for worldwide economic growth. However, according to Eric S Maskin, Adams University Professor at Harvard's Department of Economics in Cambridge, Massachusetts," - now just an aside here real quick, there was a time when I personally, especially as a kid I had always wanted to go to Harvard. I looked up to Harvard; I thought very highly of Harvard, in many ways I still do, but a couple of things there, as a kid, for those who are unaware and I have had a bunch of people recently, trolls etc. throwing all kinds of hate my way, trying to put up my past as if it is something terrible. Look I'm always happy to defend myself, not with idiots on the internet but I am always happy to defend myself and my past. Truth be told, I dropped out of high school a year early in my junior year and as a result of that, I wasn't really all that overly eligible if you will to go to any of the so-called prestigious universities back in the United States. In retrospect this was a good thing because I got, all of these degrees in my opinion are just as prestigious as any place else I could have gone because quite honestly the underlying education was as good or in my opinion better than anything I have seen especially in most recent times coming out of the so-called Ivy League. Most notably again there was a time I had a huge amount of respect for Harvard University. Recent weeks have shown that apparently they are perfectly cool with having a plagiarist lead up their entire institution and apparently they cannot define simple words when asked by Congress. Again I am not going to get into deep level discussion on that but everybody knows I think what I am talking about. There was a recent committee hearing in the Congress and they brought forth these Presidents of these Universities and Institutions that could not answer basic questions. It was almost like watching circular double speak in action, Orwell's notion of doublespeak. Then on top of it, to top off the cake, they had a literal plagiarist who, they have clearly gone back and looked at this person's body of work and they are sort of undeserving of their accolades really, it seems, and again I just think it is worth noting because these emissaries of the Ivy Leagues come out here to old backwater Thailand if you will, to tell us how the cow ate the cabbage and I have to ask the question "Thailand? Are we even listening to this because I don't think we should be", and I will explain why further as I go along. Quoting further: "Its evolvement has also brought, (and "its" being globalization) has also brought several economic challenges especially a rise in income inequality and market failure due to carbon emissions." First of all "carbon emissions". I am not interested in hearing that nonsense anymore okay? I mean go talk to a solar physicist about climate change and if carbon has any impact on that. And by the way, we are carbon-based life forms. It scares the hell out of me when I see International leaders talking about how we need to go to net zero carbon. Does that mean we all have to die? I'm asking that question seriously because the verbiage that they use would seem to imply that. Leaving that aside though, something I find interesting having watched for the last roughly two decades as "globalization" was rolled out as our great saviour to the world and now they are starting to talk, "oh well globalization leads to income inequality." Well yeah, a perfect example is China. When you take some guy who last week was a peasant that was out on some collective farm and you tell that guy "hey you are going to run a factory now" and again some of this is telling him, some of this is market economics; Deng Xiaoping I believe said "we have to open the window, some flies come in", that kind of thing. Yeah again there is market dynamics in play but if you are not okay with the Communist Party in China, you are probably not going to own a big factory, let's just leave it at that, but you take that person and you put them in charge of the factory that builds widgets and they now control the means of production - yes there were some things about Marxism especially diagnostics about capitalism that have some merit - but leaving that aside you put that person in control of the means of production of a big company and yeah there is going to be in a quality; I mean 5-year-olds can tell you that. If you put somebody in charge of making something, he's going to have all the stuff made, or control it. I like how 20 years ago we never thought about these possible ramifications and now we need to worry about it. It's classic problem-reaction-solution, except the solution of 20 years ago is now the problem they are using to say we have got to do all this new stuff.

Quoting further: "He said that the job opportunities that have been created along with globalization tend to benefit workers with higher skills whereas the low skilled ones are left behind." Well only when you outsource all of your manufacturing, that is the point at which it becomes all high skilled labour; that's the problem you are seeing in the United States right now by the way. The giant "sucking sound" that Ross Perot talked about in the '92 election occurred. NAFTA was promulgated; all of the "low skilled", I like how it is "low skilled" and "high skilled". No, it's just manufacturing; blue collar/white collar, whatever you want to call it. All of those jobs sucked out to Mexico and then eventually sucked out to China, that is just how it went, again that is what you need to worry about. Thailand has been very good at this, that's why the protectionisms in Thai legislation and in the overall institutions of Thailand that protect the local worker have been such a godsend to Thailand. Now you won't hear that coming out of the press that is sponsored by corporations and large Banks especially International ones, because they don't want that. They want increased efficiency which means paying people as little as possible to get out of them what we want. Quoting further: "Hence, a more severe situation of income inequality arises." Yeah, when you just push down, when you leverage labour to the point where it can't make money, poverty arises. I mean again these are not really highfalutin notions you have got to have a PhD to understand. Every time I hear PhD I keep thinking of, there's some rap song from back in the old days Playa Hater’s Degree; I also like Robert Kiyosaki out there, interesting guy. He calls PhDs, I think it is Poor, Helpless and Desperate or something like this. In any event, I am not making fun of PhDs. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the academy but when I see people like this coming over here, telling us how to do everything, it just kind of rankles me.

That said, this is the key line from this. Quoting directly: "To redistribute wealth from people with high incomes to people with lower incomes is one of the things that should be done." No! No, it should not be done. It has failed miserably in every country where this has been enacted. Stalin once said "Communism is Socialism in a hurry." Socialism and Communism both fundamentally believe in the redistribution of wealth. By the way I would add another sort of addition to Stalin's quote, "Communism is Socialism in a hurry and Keynesianism is Socialism by subterfuge." That's my own little addition to that particular quote. No, redistribution of wealth is not going to help us. Where's the evidence for this. The evidence for this is in the West; the proof is in the pudding. Have a look at the United States, the once mighty economy that we now see kind of sputtering about rudderless and aimless. It doesn't even know what it needs to do within the market from the best that I can tell, and then the EU, I mean come on. The Soviet Union couldn't have dreamed of the powers that Brussels has within the EU. I mean when even the Brits say "errr" and I am not saying it was a good idea or bad idea for them to leave but I understood the argument where they were, "wow we are just being told what to do from some central authority" and those edicts may not make economic sense. You know what they are doing though? They are redistributing wealth and when you start redistributing wealth, it causes nothing but problems because then it creates a victim class who benefit from the wealth redistributed and it disincentivises your productive class to go out and create more wealth because if all that is going to happen is - and when they say "redistributed" means "we're going to steal from you and then give it to somebody else." Now we are not going to give it to them on a one-to-one basis. Of course, we need to take a cut in terms of fees and government fees and admin fees, that's why you see now in the United States these funding blocks that will come out of the legislative process that result in very little money actually getting to the place where it's supposed to go because again there are taxes, and government fees, admin fees.

Redistribution of wealth is a terrible idea; it has failed miserably throughout its history. If you want to look back at the record just look at the millions of people that died under the reins of Communism both in the USSR and in China, in Korea, in Cuba, in the places where it spread. Read Gulag Archipelago to see what happens when the primary mover of a society becomes 'each according to his ability, each according to his need' instead of ‘hey just leave people alone, let free enterprise do what it does and people will tend to self-organize in such a way that is most beneficial to the most amount of people’. That is the way that a functioning both economy and polity works not sitting around deciding who deserves to lose something and who deserves a windfall. That is a bad way to run both an economy and a society in any era.