Wrong to guillotine the richest 400 Americans?

[nursebenjamin]

If the richest 400 Americans own more wealth than the poorest 50% of American households,[1] would it be wrong to guillotine those 400 Americans and redistribute the wealth? Living in poverty kills way more then 400 Americans per year. We could actually save tens of thousands of lives by sacrificing these richest 400. Would it be wrong to do so??

[bluethread]

The great majority of that wealth is not in cash.

This speaks to an important point that appears to have been overlooked by many on this thread. The title of this OP does not speak of wealth but of riches. The explanation presents riches as equivalent to wealth. Though the usage of the terms tends to overlap, it is my understanding that the term riches is more closely associated with static resources such as nonIPO stocks or stored commodities. Wealth on the other hand appears to be more closely related to active resources.

The two schools of thought regarding the relationship between the two are supply side and demand side. The supply side states that the rich should be encouraged to put their resources to good use by allowing the wealthy to receive a greater return for having put those riches to good use. The demand side states that the rich should be encouraged to put their resources to good use by confiscating from them the resources that are not in good use and distributing to those who will put them to good use. The OP appears to also makes it a capital offense(pardon the pun) to have riches and not wealth, as defined above.

The confusion of active assets with passive assets leads to a misunderstanding of who the "rich" really are. In the current taxation debate, rich is defined based on income. These are not necessarily the "idol rich" but the wealthy that drive the economy. Even if one is a demand sider, confiscating assets from these people is counter productive, because it penalizes working capital and rewards, or at least ignores, idol capital.

If one believes that there is no harm in confiscating idol capital, and beheading those who hold such, who is to decide what is and is not "good use". Given the current examples of government expenditures, simply dividing the "idol assets" equally among the populace would be more helpful to the economy, though one is still left with determining what is and is not an idol asset.

[Abraxas]

If the richest 400 Americans own more wealth than the poorest 50% of American households,[1] would it be wrong to guillotine those 400 Americans and redistribute the wealth? Living in poverty kills way more then 400 Americans per year. We could actually save tens of thousands of lives by sacrificing these richest 400. Would it be wrong to do so??

If you are a materialist atheist, probably not. See the 100,000,000 victims of the Communist experiment.

There are no 100,000,000 million victims of communism. These numbers have been debunked more thoroughly than those who claim the moon landings were a hoax. Further, you have been made aware these numbers are fraudulent at multiple points in the past, your continued reliance on them is telling.

What is telling is your denial of the facts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_ ... _Communism

The Black Book of Communism was so inaccurate two of the authors tried to get their names taken off of it. TBBoC was a compilation created when the main individual, Stéphane Courtois, went around to the highest estimated death toll for communism academics he could find anywhere, and had them write up a series of articles which were amalgamated into the book which he called TBBoC. He then wrote a preface claiming 100M, as you are doing. In response to this, two of the academics he chose specifically because of their tendency to produce the most high ball figures possible for communist death tolls, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, tried to have their name disassociated from the project because they felt he was obsessed with the 100M mark and that his methods were dishonest.

Further, other researchers have pointed out if you accept his methodology for calculating the death toll of communism, capitalist India by itself dwarfs the entire history of communism at 150 million dead. TBBoC is simply not a reputable or reliable source.

[Alueshen]

The top 400 Control about 1.2-1.5 trillion in wealth (Source IRS).

If the number of people you'd have to kill is the issue, you could just wipe out the six heirs of the Walton family that have more wealth the bottom 30%.... /sarcasm off

I didn't take the OP that seriously, but lets remember that not everyone in the top 400 agrees with the system we live in now. Warren Buffet is an example of a person who thinks that more of his wealth should be paid in taxes.

But in reality if you wanted to make more money available to be used by government, you could just raise capital gains, that sits at 15% today, back to pre-1980's levels, somewhere between 25%-38%.

Since a majority of a person's income in the top 1% (who control 38%-42% of America's wealth) comes from money earned on their investments this is probably one of the simpler solutions and no one has to die.

We have a problem...If we create rules that place more money into the hand of our Government and our Government is controlled (ok heavily influenced) by the very same people the system has taken the money from, how can we have a reasonable expectation that the money won't just find it's way back into the very same hands?

We have separation of church and state, I think it's time to promote the idea of the separation of wealth and the state.

It's not possible to have enormous wealth inequity and democracy.

Much of the statistics for wealth inequity can be found here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_ine ... ted_States
and
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html