Letter Re: Myths About Income Inequality

Dear Editor,

In your post under Economics and Investing, you said: “It’s important to understand that when a person creates wealth, they are not taking more of the pie from you; they are actually creating a bigger pie. It’s really only government that forcibly takes from you.”

I wish to respectfully disagree.

If a merger and acquisitions corporation, such as Bain capital, buys out the company you worked for (Dade Behring, where I worked for over 17 years), slices and dices, sells off the profitable parts to foreign companies, makes you train the new foreign employees (which I had to do), and then terminates your employment with no other job prospects in your region for your skills set, they did indeed create a bigger pie from shuffling papers; however, it all went to them. I have seen no study that shows that the majority of mergers and acquisitions do anything but enrich the paper shufflers who made the deal.

If open border globalists, through buying out members of congress in both parties, create a government that refuses to enact and enforce proposed immigration laws or reduce legal immigration during our worst downturn since the depression, help depress wages via massive immigration over the last 40 years, and demand and get amnesty after amnesty, then they also create a bigger pie, but it nearly all goes to those employers who hire immigrants and the immigrants themselves. This leaves the rest of us to pay for our own dispossession.

If I am an international globalist corporation and I pass Nafta and Gatt, I create a bigger pie too by making our workers compete, for instance with North Koreans who are working right this very moment in a “free trade” zone in South Korea for 38 cents an hour. This also creates a bigger pie, but not for the workers who lose their job here due to the wonders of ‘free trade’.

Sir James Goldsmith, a wonderful billionaire capitalist, wrote a wonderful book called The TRAP, that warns of the harmful results of globalization and free trade. There is a wonderful and prophetic interview with him on Charlie Rose the year before he died in the 1990s.

A prophetic interview with Sir James Goldsmith in 1994 Pt1

I love democracy, capitalism and business, but globalism, massive immigration, and ‘free trade’ DO take money from workers and give it to those at the very top. Free trade and globalism means poor workers in western countries enrich wealthy people in poor countries. It is a racket and a sham. – R. M.

HJL Replies: Thank you for this response. This is obviously a topic that deserves more discussion. Unfortunately, since this is a new position for me here at SurvivalBlog, I am still learning the ropes and, at this time, cannot attend to this in a manner worthy of your response. I will, however, place this on my to-do, research further, and post an article on it in the future. In the mean time, I would enjoy hearing from any others who would like to chime in.