How the luxury industry makes a fortune through deception | Hacker News Reader

How the luxury industry makes a fortune through deception

waremakers.com

3 pointsxvirk2 comments

All the more reason to enable people to signal their wealth (sexual fitness) and raise taxes at the same time - by repurposing "Sumptuary Laws." For example: If you want a car that's white, yellow or blue, no extra tax. If you want a red car that's a significant tax. If you want a purple car, that's a really big tax. Note that, with Sumptuary Taxes, you don’t have to be wasteful or conspicuously consume, or pour a large amount of carbon into the atmosphere in order to signal your wealth - the red paint and purple paint don’t cost much more than blue or grey. So this is also a very green proposal.

With Sumptuary Taxes you can show people you're rich and they're not and help the commonweal at the same time: showing that you're one of the responsible, caring rich.

(Sumptuary – related to the word sumptuous, of course.)

Sumtuary Laws were tried in England in the Fourteenth Century, but for almost the reverse purpose – merely to prevent poor people from wearing clothes that resembled the clothes rich people wore. This didn’t raise any revenue and was intended to save rich people money while increasing social barriers. The laws weren’t very successful and they didn’t last long.

"merely to prevent poor people from wearing clothes that resembled the clothes rich people wore"

Or Tyrian purple. Quoting Wikipedia: The production of Tyrian purple was tightly controlled in Byzantium and was subsidized by the imperial court, which restricted its use for the colouring of imperial silks.[7] Later (9th century)[8] a child born to a reigning emperor was said to be porphyrogenitos, "born in the purple".

How would the government convince people that a purple car is a sign of luxury, and thus worth paying the sumptuary tax?

The "Made in Italy" mark (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Italy ) is more strict than the EU laws, which allow shoes which are only finished in France/Italy to be "made in" those countries.

If people were interested in real authenticity, as this article suggests, then why aren't they looking for such marks already? Or are they?

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