A permanent underclass is required for the United States' capitalist machine to function

Don"t worry, I didn"t take the sophists remark personally. :-) But personally I would say those who use rhetoric, or even sophistry, to try to trick people are merely endeavouring to win them over in the same way anyone would in challenged conversation, or even in something such as a debate! :-) It doesn"t really have any bearing I wouldn"t say on capitalism, especially if you say the monetary factor was only a "bonus" after all anyway. I"m quite sure my referenced table is genuinely authoritative and, being for the service of both student and student"s parents alike, takes into consideration all aspects of a university"s merits, and most emphatically not merely cultural considerations. Please do tell, after all, where you would draw this arbitrary line of class distinction between Oxford and Cambridge at one end and Bolton and London Met at the other. I"m surprised you took the bone I threw you regarding the worth of a man"s labour and then threw it away yourself. So even intellectual capacity isn"t a good guide? Interesting. OK, so you think it"s just because the banker can"t work independently but according to governmental guidelines. Well even the road sweeper is following those. Oh, but the stakes are higher I suppose for the banker, but you"ve already discounted any liability by saying the work is not autonomously independently. So, maybe because you think the banker only works for the upper class? Well, I have a bank account, I have a banker that looks after my money, and, I"m sorry to tell you, but I"m bouncing around somewhere down around the working class level I"m afraid. I wonder, whose streets is the street sweeper cleaning? He doesn"t come down my working class street too often, probably concentrating on your upper class wouldn"t you say? After all, that"s what the "under-class" is there for isn"t it? Well, better pay him the same as that banker then since you can"t really find for me any defining difference between them. I"m sure Mr. Street sweeper will be very grateful to you for your failed argument that allowed him such a wage. :-) I thought quite a fundamental aspect of capitalism is about making money *through* productivity. If, as you say, it has nothing to do with productivity, how do you think the money is going to be made? It"s true the upper-class wouldn"t care about a poverty gap, but the argument was, remember, that the under-class was required to maintain, not the upper-class (which I"d also dispute), but American capitalism at all. Unfortunately you seem to further describe perceived means of maintaining a divide, without ever really explaining why it is necessary. Even the means seem dubious. Inequality is encouraged because it will provide an excess of labour? Did you mean excess labourers (otherwise it sounds like workers are working harder than they need to all the time)? The former might suggest you mean increased production. Really? Drawing money out of the lower economic echelon helps increase its productivity? The latter would mean the excess of labourers due to redundancies and such like, with surely concomitant reduced production. So it"s hard to square that circle. But either way it would allow the lowering of wages further? Really? I can"t see how. You can only get it down to minimum wage and the closer one gets to it the less likely your employee is going to continue to work for you. Rich parents; rich kids; rich school; rich future. Sure, that happens a lot. Status quo? To a degree perhaps, but, so what? I thought you were just arguing that you needed an upper and lower-class and the one cannot be without the other. Would it matter then if there was a non-ideological revolution (just a greedy one) and the under class rose up and became the upper class, and the upper relegated to do the lower"s chores? Still the same system isn"t it? So that"s why I didn"t really address your status quo very much. It"s irrelevant. So I conclude by suggesting that unfortunately the opportunity to justify the statement that an under-class is required for capitalism to function has been lost, largely by distractions about how the current American model is perceived to operate. A better tact I"m sure would have been to suggest how it might operate, or fail to operate, were there no such under-class, but I think I have demonstrated sufficiently that even within the same American model it operated better when there was no under-class per se, merely an accommodating structured society of workers. But lastly, time for our periphery debate, which I find quite fun, since I still won"t budge. :-) Unlike "hot" and "cold" which are subjective definitions found somewhere upon the continuum of temperature, "light" and "dark" are disparate concepts. "Light" is simply "light" and "dark" is an absence of light. Within a star there is light without any evidence of darkness to define it in any way. Within a non-volcanic planet there is a complete absence of light - there is just darkness. Light can be varied just as water can be varied in quantity, but if a container has a quantity of water, it does not need to define that quantity by the amount of any particular gas which is also in the container. On Earth a half filled container would likely contain air in the other half, but "water" isn"t defined in any way in relation to "air". When the universe ends however there will be no more light, and it will be the end of all days. Quite an apt place to end I think. :-)