*Video* Should we ban billionaires?

Talk radio host Thom Hartmann brought Austin Petersen, Editor of The Libertarian Republic back on his show Thursday to claim that banning billionaires would restore the American economy from thirty years of “failed Reagonomics”. The progressive host claims that billionaires are “hoarding cash” and their wealth should be redistributed to the lower income brackets. After several attempts to have a formal discussion on the state of the poor, the conversation unfortunately devolved into a shouting match over the plight of the Native Americans, property rights and the massacre at Wounded Knee.

“The problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money.” -Margaret Thatcher

EDIT: Quick update. Some people have requested my sources for the data that I cited. Here’s the excerpt below that was from research provided by Austrian economist Steve Horwitz.

“If we could track individual households, we might be able to know what happens to poor people in, say, five years or ten years or fifteen years. And in fact, we do have that data. One set of data shows that between 1979 and 1988, 86 percent of households that were poor in 1979, were no longer poor in 1988. A second set of data from the University of Michigan shows that of households that were poor in 1975, over 95 percent of them were no longer poor by 1991.

One of the most important things to understand when we talk about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is this idea of income mobility. The reality is, for most Americans, that they start off poor and they slowly become richer over time. And in fact, if we look at that data comparing 1975 and 1991, what we find is that the average income gain for rich households over that period was just about $4,000, but the average gain for poor households over that period: $28,000.  

So what really happened between 1975 and 1991 is that the rich got richer, but the poor got richer a lot faster than the rich did. So whenever we talk about rich and poor, we have to take account of this issue of income mobility. So how can it be that most Americans are getting richer when we know that there are still plenty of poor people out there?” http://www.learnliberty.org/content/are-poor-getting-poorer