No
The health of an economy is, in fact, based on what its producers are doing. If you want to call that "business," fine. But it includes everyone who is producing instead of simply living off other producers.
Those damn parasites, the unemployed! They deserve their suffering, dammit, because they...because they....uh, well, I'm sure you can point out the character flaw or moral deficit that led to their just punishment by the implacable divinely-ordained forces of capitalism.
I hope you were able to copy-and-paste all that Tom, and didn't have to write that nice outline of conservative economic dogma from scratch. Though I'd say that spewing dogma isn't far removed from copy-and-paste, is it?
The effort's wasted, because most of it doesn't relate to what I wrote, and the one part that addresses my post was most egregiously distorted. 180 degrees distorted, in fact:
You cannot "distribute" wealth, fairly or unfairly, unless the "distributor" controls or owns the wealth. Robert's desire to "flatten" the wealth curve implies such centralized control, and one or more persons empowered to decide (on what basis?) when someone has "too much" or "too little." You can't make an economy "fair," by your definition, without enslaving somebody.
Bullshit. I went out of my way to say explicitly that I'm not talking about "flattening" the curve--that is, reducing its slope; I'm observing that its shape is highly nonlinear.
A truly healthy economy is characterized by full employment and a relatively linear (but not flat*) distribution of income and wealth. Our present economy has neither characteristic.
(*--Communism's ideal is a flat distribution of wealth curve. The promise of capitalism is a rising but linear curve: "reward proportional to effort" or "reward proportional to smarts". What we have in America today is nearly a hyperbolic curve similar to that enjoyed in various banana republics and other oligarchies. Welcome to the plantation.)
In fact, the steeper the slope the better, so that a given amount of effort pays off well. A linear curve with a steep slope indicates a relatively frictionless free market system.
A highly nonlinear distribution-of-wealth curve is symptomatic of an oligarchy warping the playing field to its own advantage. You might say that the distribution-of-wealth curve is the two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional playing field. Specifically, the curve is near flat for most of its lower range, then shoots into the stratosphere at the high end where the effects of oligarchy take hold.
And when I said that the US was in the company of banana republics, that wasn't hype. The US ranks in the lowest quarter for equality of distribution-of-income, in the company of Uruguay, the Philippines, Madagascar, Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Costa Rica, and all the other genuine banana republics. (Source: UN Human Development Report, 2001. Scroll waaaaay down the page.) Please explain why the US economy is producing an outcome identical to that of some of the world's most outrageous oligarchies.
BTW, what are you guys going to do when the employment numbers start going up again?
Look for gainful employment again, you ninny. Why do you think I have little patience with dogmatic theories that don't match reality?