Samira wrote:
In terms of whose earnings benefit society more, the answer is "the middle class".
Rich people do not spend as much proportionately to their wealth as middle-income people do. You don't need a million pairs of pants just because you can afford them. You don't need more food than your family can consume.
A healthy middle class is the key to prosperity for everyone. Unfortunately the middle class has been weakening for about forty years now, and the whole trickle-down fiasco just about nailed the coffin shut.
I agree with the whole "healthy middle class" bit. However, I'd caution against the implication that contribution is only measured via consumption. It's why I mentioned earnings, and not sales. While consumption is the most obvious way to view this (I do X for you, and you pay me Y, so Y is the value you place on what I did for you), we can actually view any earnings as a measure of "contribution" to society (well, with some exceptions). It's just harder to see how the interest the banker earned off lending money to people is a "contribution" (but it clearly is, if you stop and think about the value of lending to a society). It's even more hard to see how the gains in say a mutual fund contribute to society (but they do - usually).
I just feel the need to make this point because otherwise we end up reinforcing the false assumption that what "the rich" do with their money doesn't benefit anyone but themselves, which in turn is used as an argument to just tax away more of their wealth. There is no such thing as "idle money". It's always doing something. And that something, if it results in increased earnings, almost always does so as a result of some value benefit for others in the economy (which, admittedly is not the same as "the society"). Someone (or usually a large group of someones) values whatever you did sufficiently to generate those earnings. We can sit around and debate what that was and whether we think it's of value, but at the end of the day, the only really good way to measure this is by that economic valuation.
Any other method is arbitrarily subjective, and massively subject to ideological influence (and really really dumb mistakes). We can say that handing out food at a soup kitchen constitutes a greater contribution to society than just doing your job as an executive of some company somewhere, but if everyone handed out food at soup kitchens and no one worked as executives, we'd have a total mess on our hands (as in economic collapse). Contribution is not just charity. In fact, it's quite arguable that the most important and numerous contributions to society are those done as part of an economic exchange. It's what makes societies livable.
If everything was free, we'd soon have nothing. Ponder that for a bit.
Edited, Aug 5th 2014 6:47pm by gbaji