[mhartl]

Second, that the people at the top have made out like bandits over the past few decades, and that now everyone else must pick up the bill.

I have no idea what The Economist could possibly mean by "pick up the bill" in this context. They know as well as anyone that wealth isn't conserved. If my company makes twice as much money next year as this one, I've added to the world's wealth, not subtracted from it.

[danssig]

I think everyone understands that companies are creating wealth. The question is: who is capturing that created wealth? Right now the scales are heavily skewed toward the 1% capturing a lot more than they traditionally did.

[mhartl]

"Capture" is a loaded term. It could be that "the 1%" are simply creating more than their previous share of wealth. Clearly, some of them are looters, but lumping the looters in with the creators does the latter a tremendous disservice.

I think both The Economist and the Occupy Wall Street protestors are conflating two distinct groups: those who get rich by creating wealth, and those who get rich by diverting the revenues of the state into their own pockets. The latter group consists of special interest groups—and certainly includes virtually the entire banking and finance industry. What most of the protesters seem to misunderstand is that their target shouldn't be capitalism, but rather special interest groups—and the system of government that allows such groups to thrive. Unfortunately, the latter is a problem so big it's hard to grasp, and solutions aimed at the actual source are, to put it charitably, off the political map.

[danssig]

>It could be that "the 1%" are simply creating more than their previous share of wealth.

No, the 1% are generally company executives. The company is indeed creating more wealth but right now executives are taking a very large portion of that created wealth and actual workers are getting a very small (relatively) portion.

>those who get rich by creating wealth

Here you probably have in mind people like Zuckerberg, the google guys, etc., but this is a small minority. Most of the guys getting capturing so much wealth are just executives. They're creating wealth cut are they really creating hundreds or thousands of times more wealth than the people actually doing the work?

>to put it charitably, off the political map.

Anything that would actually help is off the map. People want sound-byte fixes. Something you can describe in one sentence. What is actually needed is a multi-pronged approach to encourage the right kind of change. Personally, I would like to see a law that says companies must disclose full compensation for every employee. They don't need to say who gets what but they would need to list each position and what the total comp was for it (this could be made a bit more generic so it's harder to tie to exactly who gets what). The free market works for buying products because we see what the product costs and we see what everyone else charges. With wages it's hard to pin down exactly what market rates are. If this data were forced to be disclosed I think it would strengthen workers' position in negotiation, hopefully driving labor prices up (and hopefully this combined with market competition would force executive salaries down closer to realistic numbers).

And that's just one thing, we would need a great many changes to encourage markets to correct after years of various interest groups doing what ever they can to distort markets in their favor.

[rapind]

I assume it's a reference to bailouts.

[mhartl]

You're probably right. In that case, I think it's absurd to equate "the 1%" with "the recipients of bailouts". The latter is more like "the epsilon%", with the understanding those aren't the top epsilon percent but rather merely bankers who are recipients of government largesse.

[rmc]

A lot people think there is only a fixed amount of wealth around.

[paganel]

> A lot people think there is only a fixed amount of wealth around.

A lot of people also think that the economy/creation of wealth can only go up, by only focusing on the last 200 years or so of economic history. I call it "blind faith in economic progress", which was fine to believe in around the 1880s or so, but anymore.