That is not what that means. What it does mean is that somebody who earns more on the high end doesn't come at the expense of those on the low end.
Hence your not a zero sum game argument, sure. Except that it's not about whether it's a zero sum game or not. That's simplistic reasoning. You can have a non-zero sum game where, nevertheless any excess accumulates to certain players and not others. A classic example in actual games is monopoly. Technically, Monopoly can be zero sum, if all of the money is gone from the bank, except that I've played games of monopoly like that (because we were missing a lot of the money, not because we actually used up the normal amount of money) and we just printed more money in the form of a tally sheet, so not really. In monopoly, depending on exactly how you play (such as what you do with free parking money and other fines, and also mortgage loans), the amount of total wealth among the players increases throughout the game. The more rounds, the more wealth. However, the end point of the game (if anyone has the stamina to make it that far) has all the wealth going to just one player. Non-zero sum, high wealth inequatality. Real life does not have to be like that, but the reality is that, in the US, real wealth of both the mean and median average person is going down while the wealth of the upper end is going up. So the zero sum vs. non zero sum argument is meaningless.
Anyway, to revisit "...somebody who earns more on the high end doesn't come at the expense of those on the low end." It is more correct to say that somebody who earns more on the high end does not _have_ to come at the expense of those on the low end. That statement would be true. The original statement is not true because it implies that someone earning more on the high end never comes at the expense of those on the low end, and we have all of history to show us the inaccuracy of that.
Yes, they would. You're creating a false dilemma here. It doesn't have to be one or the other, it can literally be both. Again, it's not zero-sum.
You're obsessed with the straw man that others think that this is a zero sum game. We do not. Once again, whether it is zero sum or not has nothing to do with it. Players can lose out on their total share against other players in either a zero sum game or a growth game, even in cases where the growth is unbounded. You shouldn't even need any familiarity with game theory to know that. The false dilemma (zero sum vs. non-zero sum) is coming from you here.
Anyway, in response to a statement that, if it is the case that income inequality not somehow being bad, that therefore the wealthy should have no problem giving up their wealth, your response is "yes they would." but no further explanation than that. It seems like it should be simple, if it's not bad thing to have less wealth than others, then no-one should care about having more wealth than others, then they should have no problem giving their wealth away. That's the argument you disagreed with from another poster, yet you have not actually come up with any direct counter-argument. Now, this may come down to semantics. Clearly, those with wealth who jealously guard it do thing that wealth inequality is bad if it means them having less wealth than others. So, in that sense, their unwillingness to give up their wealth means that wealth inequality is bad to them, at least with the scope limited to their personal selves. They may of course think that wealth inequality is perfectly fine for others as long as they themselves have more wealth. There is the broader question of course of whether wealth inequality is morally wrong. There it is not, per se, morally wrong. Someone works harder, they earn more, they get more. Og the caveperson forages all day, going further, Og gets the opportunity to eat better. Very straightforward. Very simplistic as well, however. There is nothing inherently wrong with people having more wealth. To use a non-caveperson example, I am perfectly happy with, for example, the salary of the highly skilled surgeon who saved my life (and by extension all highly skilled surgeons who save people's lives) being very well paid. It makes sense that they make more than the burger flipper at a fast food restaurant.
So, I think that's the real disconnect here. Wealth inequality is not inherently bad. However, it has to be recognized that, in the modern worldthe, massive accumulations of wealth warp the economy in ways that affect the ability of others to accumulate their own wealth. One obvious mechanism of this is the "golden rule". Not the one about doing unto others, but the one about "he who has the gold makes the rules". That is not a joke. It is clearly a very real thing that wealth leads to the ability to change the rules of the game to increase the accumulation of wealth. That's just one effect. So, semantically speaking, when people talk about "income inequality" they are using it to encapsulate all of the known ills that are typically seen with extreme income inequality because, at this point, they are practically synonymous. Which means that you can argue all you want about how it's not fundamentally bad for some people to have more than others, but you're just arguing at cross purposes, because that is not what most people really mean (I will grant that there are some who really do mean that, of course).
Define "great". I mentioned a car earlier, so let's go with a car analogy. 30 years ago, you bought a Dodge Neon. I didn't even have a car back then. Only one of us had a car. 20 years ago, I bought a Toyota Corolla of some model year that didn't even exist when your Dodge Neon was made. You still have your Dodge Neon. Sure, yours is and always was a turd with wheels on it, but you can still drive it to work. I can drive mine to work, but it's a lot nicer. So yeah, in comparison, you're not doing great. But you know what? When I got my car, you didn't have to give yours up. Nobody did.
I really can't see myself buying a Dodge Neon. It might be easier to use "person X" and "person Y" rather than unnecessarily using "you" and "me". Also, I am a bit confused by thirty years ago and twenty years ago? I get the ten year difference, but why does this example arbitrarily have to be decades in the past? That aside, I don't really see the point of the analogy as it relates to the discussion. I mean, at different points in time, specifically related to cars, the position of the two subjects wasn't great. One did not have a car and the other had an old car that probably had frequent issues, needed lots of repair, low gas mileage, etc. That seems to to agree with what I am saying, which is simply that not having enough to be comfortable is not great and it's not great to be on the low end of extreme wealth inequality.
But look on the bright side: You still have it much better than rsilvergun who drives around in the same Trabant he's had since he was 20 years old...
Uh. OK. Not even sure what to say with the rest of that, but it seems it's a bit unhinged. Of course, that may be colored by observation of those people who seem to have a frankly insane fetish for attacking rsilvergun. I mean, it's not like rsilvergun even posted on this thread.
