r a hettinga wrote begin pgp signed message hash shaNUMBER at NUMBER NUMBER am NUMBER on NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER geege schuman wrote most of them seem to have ivy league educations or are ivy league dropouts suggesting to me that they weren t exactly poor to start with actually if i remember correctly from discussion of the list s composition in forbes about five or six years ago the best way to get on the forbes NUMBER is to have no college at all can you say bootstraps boys and girls i knew you could sure discussion in forbes rigorous research that especially when the data in their own list contradicts them i continue to look at the list and all the inherited growed entries i guess if i read it enough times my vision will clear given that an undergraduate liberal arts degree from a state school like say mine is nothing but stuff they should have taught you in a government run high school you ll probably get more of those on the forbes NUMBER as well as time goes on if we ever get around to having a good old fashioned government collapsing transfer payment depression an economic version of this summer s government forest conflagration caused by the same kind of innumeracy that not clear cutting enough forests did out west this summer that should motivate more than a few erst slackers out there including me to learn to actually feed themselves the next category on the forbes NUMBER list is someone with a terminal professional degree like an mba phd md etc from the best school possible why because as of about NUMBER the best way to get into harvard for instance is to be smart not rich don t take my word for it ask their admissions office look at the admissions stats over the years for proof i at on point looked into stanford business school after learning that tuition was NUMBERk no financial aid was available and part time work was disallowed this smart person decided that i was not willing to spend the NUMBER application fee non refundable during attendance at my local business school i was told repeatedly i should have gone for it to quote a prof northwestern mba it has nothing to do with the education you receive in general european and canadian business schools are better and more innovative its the connections he used the words american nobility meritocracy american style was invented at the ivy league after world war ii even stanford got the hint and of course chicago taught them all how right practically nobody who goes to a top NUMBER american institution of higher learning can actually afford to go there these days unless of course their parents who couldn t afford to go there themselves got terminal degrees in the last NUMBER years or so and their kids still had to get the grades and biased by intelligence test scores to get in invented being the right word dubya went to yale and hbs i guess practically gets you around that problem the bizarre irony is that almost all of those people with terminal degrees until they actually own something and hire people or learn to make something for a living all day on a profit and loss basis persist in the practically insane belief like life after death that economics is some kind of zero sum game that dumb people who don t work hard for it make all the money and if someone is smart works hard and is rich then they stole their wealth somehow btw none of you guys out there holding the short end of this rhetorical stick can blame me for the fact that i m using it to beat you severely all over your collective head and shoulders you were apparently too dumb to grab the right end i went to missouri and i don t have a degree in anything actually useful much less a terminal one which means i m broker than anyone on this list it s just that you of all people lots with educations far surpassing my own should just plain know better the facts speak for themselves if you just open your eyes and look there are no epicycles the universe does not orbit the earth and economics is not a zero sum game the cost of anything including ignorance and destitution is the forgone alternative in this case intelligence and effort i will however admit to being educated waay past my level of competence and by the way you discuss economics so have you apparently its interesting but in this part of the world nova scotia a recent study found that college graduates earn less than graduates of NUMBER year community colleges trade schools they did decline to mention that the demand for some trades is so great that some of them are demanding university degrees to get in just for the record the average salary for a university graduate including advanced degree holders here is c NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER us no wonder half of san francisco has set up here we have a whole whack of call centers that have arrived here in the last couple of years i think they hire some entry level it people for around NUMBER NUMBER us an hour which of course fits perfectly for me my entry level job in NUMBER paid NUMBER NUMBER an hour the fundamental difference is that most of the jobs that require a trade are unionized in other words in this part of the world for the vast majority of people union dues are a better investment than tuition the counter argument to this is that many college graduates leave for better work elsewhere but the counter counter argument is that we are the thin edge one of several really prison labor in the us would be another of third world wages and work practices coming to north america i worked at a company that had a NUMBER year wage freeze the fact that they could maintain that and prosper just says volumes about the economy in this part of the world i met many people there like me who felt that was fine i can vote with my feet they didn t quite realize that just about every large employer in the area has similar or worse policies anyway eventually they started a union drive during the vote retired employees were brought in by the employer rumours were that they were paid the going rate for a vote around here a bottle of rum and somehow allowed to vote the union filed a grievance which was denied by a minister of labour who hey guess what used to be a vp at the company that s free labor markets at work the business continues to prosper as i was told when i was there it is a cash cow as long as the joa joint operating agreement with the competing paper is in place and if you think that any of those wonderful american companies out of some free enterprise belief in competing for the best talent are going to do anything about that sorry most of them received generous subsidies in return i m sure for an understanding about the labor markets here btw if we ever actually had free markets in this country including the abolition of redistributive income and death taxes all those smart people in the forbes NUMBER would have more money and there would be more self made people on that list in addition most of the people who inherited money on the list would have much less of it not even relatively speaking finally practically all of that new money would have come from economic efficiency and not stolen from someone else investment bubbles or not that efficiency is called progress for those of you in the people s republics of berkeley or cambridge it means more and better stuff cheaper over time a terrible petit bourgeois concept apparently not worthy of teaching by the educational elite or you d know about it by now in economic terms it s also called an increase in general welfare and no virginia i m not talking about extorting money from someone who works and giving it to someone who doesn t in order to keep them from working and they can think of some politician as santa claus come election time much as i like to accept what you say i do believe in free markets i have difficulty finding any except of course for labor markets which governments go to great lengths to protect well unless the supply is tight it was a great run with the technology industry producing most of the self made billionaires on the list but now we ve got a government sponsored monopoly and the concept of more stuff cheaper which it has always promised seems to be disappearing a particularly galling example is high speed internet access an article i read a couple of years ago that it is an area where the pricing approaches of the it industry cheaper better or you die and the telecom industry maintain your monopoly through regulation and get guaranteed price increases through the same regulators meet sadly to say the telecom industry seems to have won the whole entertainment industry riaa palladium thing seems to be another instance where actually giving value to the customer seems less important than using regulation to reduce competition and substitute products in order to produce profits for the favored few in short then economics is not a zero sum game property is not theft the rich don t get rich off the backs of the poor and redistributionist labor theory of value happy horseshit is just that horseshit happy or otherwise to believe otherwise is quite literally given the time marx wrote capital and the manifesto romantic nonsense i usually agree but when there s a republican in office i feel like they re the biggest believers in the manifesto in reverse create a reserve pool of labor reduce the rights of that proletariat you ve just created with bogus law and order policies concentrate capital in the hands of a few ideally people who can get you reelected and the economy will take care of itself oh and lie use the word compassionate a lot i guess i tend to believe that a certain amount of poverty reduction actually helps a modern capitalist state the basic economic tenet of the republic party seems to be the more homeless under each overpass the more efficient the rest of us will be and the facts are for most people in the western world are declining standards of living declining benefits disappearing social safety net greater working hours essentially since the entrance of women into the work force not blaming women in any way they have a right to work but its now NUMBER wage earners in each family and still declining standards of living is the reality again to quote that wonderfully liberal document i keep coming back to the cia world factbook on the us economy since NUMBER practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top NUMBER of households owen 