See also: "Inequality for All" and "Where to Invade Next?"
Burning coal has been a tremendous help to society, but that doesn't mean we should continue to do it when we find better alternatives for each of its use cases.
Can you name some of the advancements unions have brought to employees in the US over the last 10-20 years? Does that outweigh their anti competitive nature that has led to companies moving manufacturing out of unionized areas entirely?
At the end of that day, you will drop to your knees, and thank god for those lefty unions. At the end of a few years, you just might be able to afford a house.
Actually San Francisco has a lot of union jobs, and they arn't moving to China.
Personally, I think people in tech will look back, and wish they had some Union protection. It's the one profession I'm shocked hasen't completely moved overseas.
What's the better alternative? America is better now because got rid of a lot of unions? Yes--a lot of products are made where your boss can get maximum ROI. They are made overseas for a lot of reasons, including lax laws concerning every aspect of that widget. Employee health/happiness/economic viability--who cares. Enviornment--who cares. Ability to pay taxes--who cares. Who cares as long as it's cheaper. Sometimes the cheapest is not the best for society as a whole?
"of the advancements unions have brought to employees in the US over the last 10-20 years?"
Not what's possible. Also local trade unions are not really involved in federal immigration policy.
Let's look at the BART. It's one of the worst and most expensive transit systems in the US. It costs $4 to ride it from SFO to the nearest caltrain stop a couple of miles away. Part of the reason is that the train operators can easily rake in 6 figures with overtime for doing something that could easily be automated or made more efficient with centralized control at a minimum. The bay area has given up affordable/useful subways to subsidize a bloated union-based operation.
>Personally, I think people in tech will look back, and wish they had some Union protection. It's the one profession I'm shocked hasen't completely moved overseas.
You're gravely mistaken if you think unions protect jobs from moving away. Labor costs that greatly exceed the market rate are the primary reason the jobs move elsewhere.
>Actually San Francisco has a lot of union jobs, and they arn't moving to China.
Oh? Point me to all of the union heavy manufacturing jobs in SF. You will find that difficult because they don't exist anymore. The only union jobs that are left here are ones that have no competition because they are local (e.g. your electrician example).
The heirs, the parasites who live off the labor of those of us who do work are the ones who have to explain what good their parasitism is doing in this day and age. We who work and create wealth and who organize ourselves don't have to justify our existence to these parasites and their myrmidons. They need us, we don't need them.
You know, you certainly don't have to like entitled rich children of millionaires, billionaires, and industrialists. I certainly don't. But this rant confuses me for a few reasons. First, if we have a system where people are allowed to own capital and that's legitimate, doesn't inheritance just follow? I mean, what's the alternative you're after here without heirs? When Steve Jobs died, should the government have taken his shares and distributed to all current Apple employees? (And if so, according to what formula - proportional to pay? time served? the product of the two? equal division?) And why stop at just the shares - what about the shares of other companies, and his houses and cars and any bars of gold he bought with salaries or shares he'd previously sold? Where's the line? How much is the line? Do we redistribute everything to company employees? What about people who own multiple companies? Or maybe being at the company is no part of it - should the government have just auctioned off his estate for the general fund? Doesn't the government already sort of do that when it collects a roughly 50% inheritance tax? Is that not enough? How much exactly is enough? I could go on... Also, all that notwithstanding, morally: isn't that one of the things human beings work for, a good life for their children and grandchildren? If you respect the original industrialist, can you respect this? (If you don't respect the original industrialist, why are we attacking his heirs?)
Second, are they really even all that big of players in the large-corporation ownership scene writ large? Even in the absence of taxes, big inheritances will spread themselves out over several generations unless all rich kids are only children.
> They need us, we don't need them.
Then quit and found your own company.
No, it doesn't necessarily follow. We could have a system based on the idea that people should benefit from their own efforts. You can own capital, well done you, and you can even choose to give your property to other people - it's yours, after all - but giving involves one person losing the benefit of it. Inheritance involves people holding onto things until they don't need it any more, and have no use for it, and whatever happens to it next affects them not at all, but they still want to be able to dictate what happens to it. We could jack up inheritance tax to basically 100%, and still have a society in which people can own capital and we encourage people to benefit from their own efforts.
I've no doubt some people would try to cheat the system, but that requires the taxman to look the other way; we already have situations in which people have tried to cheat by obeying the law in paperwork only, and a taxman paying attention can get them.
There already are cases in which people try to come up with clever contracts to attempt to dodge inheritance tax, and the taxman has been known to tear it up.
No, it wouldn't. You could easily structure this contract such that the person on the receiving end has no control until the original owner dies.
I did say that people already tried this sort of thing and that the taxman has come down on them in the past. This has really been tried and really not worked.
You're hypothesizing a world where inheritance isn't a recognized thing and asserting that in such a world, it would be impossible to effectively recreate inheritance with clever contracts. I'm telling you that you're wrong. It would be trivial in any world where contracts and transfer of ownership are accepted to recreate an inheritance system.
We have laws already against people trying to dodge inheritance tax, and when people try to do that, it is frowned upon. In this world, should inheritance tax effectively become 100%, and based on the knowledge people have now, I see no reason why society would not notice people trying to break the law by clever use of contracts to recreate the inheritance system. This is something that already happens; laws come into being, some people try to break those laws, it is frowned upon. This happens already. Fact.
"It would be trivial in any world where contracts and transfer of ownership are accepted to recreate an inheritance system."
This would be some other world entirely. Sure, in that world that you're hypothesising, you can have whatever you like. I'm talking about this world; the world in which we already live, where we have hard evidence of people already trying to dodge inheritance tax with contracts and getting busted for it, and hard evidence of new laws being created and people being busted for breaking them. You have no such evidence (hardly your own fault; your world doesn't exist), so I find your argument less convincing. I will find any argument based on hypothetical worlds where you simply assert whatever you like as fact to be unconvincing.
If you have no facts and no evidence to present, the usefulness of this conversation is at an end.
To the contrary, inheritance is a weird construct. Dead people don't have property rights--inheritence is a whole mechanism to get around that.
Of course if we got rid of inheritance people would just make inter vivos gifts.