E
So Ford produces a mustang and... this guy doesn't buy it... and then they raise prices? Is that how it works?
The price of a Mustang hasn't actually risen relative to the other things that have also risen. However, salaries have not risen at all. It's not this one guy, it's the billionaire class in general.
See, when it comes to employment, you are the product. The employer is buying your time, and it's a supply and demand market. The reason a pro QB gets a ton of cash is because there is a huge demand for his services and the supply of people like him is small. For regular people, there's a ton of people able to do most jobs, and there's fewer and fewer jobs to go around, ergo the cost of labor drops.
However, in a healthy capitalist economy, the product of labor needs to be shared with the employees in order to keep the wheels moving. Billionaires have become billionaires because the money that was supposed to be paid to people who got them there has, instead, been sequestered (banks, capital investments, etc.). When you get into the billions of wealth, the lack of movement in that money is extremely detrimental to the world as a whole. $1billion is the equivalent of being paid $10million a year for 100 years. Or, it's the equivalent of 1000 people earning $million a year, etc.
(as an aside, look into the "velocity of money" for more info on why this is a problem)
As an example, my first real full time job paid me $27000/year. That's a step up from the job I had as a car detailer, which paid $20,000 a year. A nice house was about $120,000. So, lets say I had a little extra and we round up to $30,000 (for easier math). House to Income is 4:1. The same kind of house now, in that same city, is about $$480,000, so that same "first job" should be paying $120,000 a year. If we use my crummy car cleaner job as a reference, houses were 6:1, so that crummy job as a car detailer should now pay $80,000 a year. ($480,000/6). However, that car detailer job is now a minimum wage job and pays, wait for it, just over $20,000 a year (30 years later).
What's worse, those house prices are also not reflective of a free market, but they are high because of, again, of the ultra wealthy. Toronto, like Vancouver, is a haven for sequestering money. Foreign buyers were bidding up to a $1million over asking for properties. That drove up prices in Toronto, driving people out of the city and driving up prices in the suburbs, the people from those cities, had to buy houses in further outlying suburbs, etc, etc. This is happening is many places around the world.
This dude is in real estate in Hong Kong. Properties there cost more than (US)$1500 per square foot. So, something the size of a jail cell is about $75000. It hasn't become this way because of a normal free market.
So, back to the mustang, it's not the Mustang that got more expensive. It's the labor that keeps getting cheaper, and where there used to be labor laws (and taxes) that kept those billions circulating in world economies, that actually protected the basis of healthy capitalism, the lax policies labor and taxation allow billions to be sequestered. On top of that, since the wealthy get wealthier, the price that the market will bear on luxury items, such as a Shelby GT350, go up. The gap just keeps spreading.
I'm all for people succeeding through effort (heck, I am one of them). I am all for millionaires. I'm actually in favour of people having hundreds of millions in personal wealth. Those levels are good and healthy and will keep us all happy. However, multi-billionaires are a problem.
(Full disclosure. I currently work in real estate. My parents earned their retirement mostly through real estate investment. That profile pic? It's the founder of a beer company I am part owner of (Joseph Bloor Brewery - it's new and just becoming somewhat successful). I have spent a lot of time over the last several years around investment companies, their investors, etc, etc. People with real coin, but also people who actually do work (legally) to earn that real coin. As part of being in this world, I had to be exposed to a lot of finance, economics, etc, training, so I could grasp the hows and whys of investment, etc. specifically to be able to better wade through the process of growing this company. It opens your eyes like Neo in the Matrix)
Greed is good, but it's no different than anything else that can be too much of a good thing. This topic is a Pandora's box once you start getting into it.
And it still looks like and old Corvette.