What is the right answer on "how much taxes should these 45 people pay"? How much pain + suffering should they be responsible for helping/healing with their funds that the lower half experiences due to lack thereof?
Business was doing just fine, and nations had enough income to provide generous and growing services. Wealthy people kept working. CEOs went to work quite happily. Wealth still concentrated at the top, just far, far less of it.
This only really broke with the arrival of the 73 oil crisis.
Seems like a return to something along those lines is long overdue to trim some of the excess greed.
Thirty or forty years of the Reagan/Thatcher small government, bonfire of regulation and taxes and we're not yet anywhere near the halcyon days of a new golden age. Their prescription? Bleed the patient an eighth time, it's the only remedy still in the book.
Lower taxes made some sense after the pain of the seventies oil shocks, and the myriad problems they caused, but now it's not even slightly credible. The amazing thing is how many are still taken in.
This isn’t inevitable, despite the framing they spend many dollars to convince you of such.
Makes it very analogous to the scene after 2008, and the attempts at "fixing" the 08 banking crisis economy by not fixing the system but treating the symptom, or even climate change response. The 1920s wealth distribution and economy was structured to set the scene perfectly for the great 1929 crash and great depression. It remains to be seen how closely we track those...
It took a global depression and the two decades leading through WW2 to fix. 1945 on was a very different era. And we forgot - or deliberately threw out - every single lesson and regulation.
A progressive corporate income tax. Small businesses will finally have an advantage to big ones and there will be no need for captains of industry to lead behemoths the size of Amazon.
State that after X million dollars in bank, societies is not interested in making that specific individual richer.
I have yet to see a good, non-ideological argument as to why this would harm the economy.
Someone unwilling to work correctly even for the maximum amount is probably someone we don't want to have in a position of power.
State you can't have more than X dollars in the bank. Okay, can I use my money to buy things (e.g. property)? Should you value my property at the market value as "dollars in the bank"? What if I buy my property and it appreciates, would it get confiscated? Would police come to my home and forcibly move me to a home below the cap?
Can I own or invest in a business? Do we mark that at "market value"? Who sets this market value? What happens if my business does well, too well in fact and now my market value is more than the allotted amount.
It's impractical and its not entirely clear what "million dollars in the bank" really is. The fact is that very few wealthy people just have money sitting around in a bank. And when you try confiscating other types of wealth you realize how impractical it is. Income cap becomes equally complicated when you count income as money a business you own made and reinvested in itself
It’s not succinct to suggest that the wealth hoarding cannot be taxed. It’s not wild. It’s not untenable.
The onus of taxation being thrust upon the individual has been following a characteristic curve since the Great Depression. It was happening prior to that, with only WWII levelling it out.
Wild and untenable ideas are only wild and untenable because of the suffocating ideology that instructs you as such.
People, in general, do not work for free.
Also I have a huge doubt that billionaires keep working for the money incentive. Once you get that rich, it is not about money anymore.
Billionaires are not magical unicorns, and in fact are byproducts of nothing more than birthright, chance, and a culture that cultivates them.
The question is numeric. Obviously any system is going to be disproportionate in some way. The question is whether it's OK as it is. The answer for liberal democracies of the last three quarters of a century has been some variant of "this is fine, rising tides lift all boats".
But at this point that's becoming increasingly hard to justify. In fact by most measures the boats stopped rising about 20 years ago, yet the people in the yachts off shore have continued climbing higher and higher.
So the answer to your question is "more than they are now", almost certainly.
The deeper problem is that wealth is power, and power can be leveraged into greater power. I can't see any way to fix that except a culture where it just really bothers people to see any differences in power.
In hundreds of years, if we manage to eliminate all suffering from lack of food, health care, etc, the next thing might be to eliminate the suffering of lack of social influence.
No, the deeper problem is that wealth comes from power. And you can't eliminate all differences. Trying just shifts the difference that makes a difference elsewhere.
Your imagination is limited, especially considering that there was no class system when people were painting caves in Chauvet, nor was there one for the 20,000 years after then. One class of heirs parasitically expropriating from a class of workers is a new phenomenon for humans, over the long term. Capitalism is even more short lived.
> wealth...their funds
Talk of inanimate things is just an obfuscation of theirs (and yours). There are no signs pointing down from the heavens that some heir owns this or that. It scarcely matters any way.
The heirs who do not work have a social relationship with those of us who do work. We work and create wealth, they expropriate surplus labor time from us - if we are carpenters turning $150 of wood and material into $200 every hour, we keep our created wealth as wages in the beginning of the day, at the end of the day we are working only for the heir. They expropriate all the wealth we create toward the end of the day. The important thing is the labor time and social relationship, not the expropriated product of labor.
> helping...responsible
They have no role in such things. History is replete with revolutions and the overthrow of economic systems. Their role is like the czar and his pretenders in Russia - to receive the bullets and bayonet thrusts of the Bolsheviks who were replacing them.
You're right. The strongest/most aggressive person won. While there was no class systems, there was most likely considerably more bloodshed. I don't think we want to go back to a world like this.
"Capitalism is even more short lived."
I sure hope not. Forced egalitarian systems usually end up with everyone poor and a few wealthy people in government. I have this theory that the people suggesting these sorts of changes either think they are going to be at the top or just hate their life and want to watch the world burn.
While capitalism has its flaws, I don't really think any other system comes even close to pulling so many people out of poverty.
"if we are carpenters turning $150 of wood and material into $200 every hour, we keep our created wealth as wages in the beginning of the day, at the end of the day we are working only for the heir."
Nothing is stopping you from advertising your services and charging what you think you deserve for your services and keeping all the profits. That's capitalism for you.
"We work and create wealth, they expropriate surplus labor time from us"
You may be creating value, but wealth isn't comprised of just work. You act as if most companies are providing no value on top of your work, which just isn't the case.
It seems you are saying that "the rich are the ones causing the misery of the poor". If it were so, poverty wouldn't have decreased with capitalism. If it were so, you should explain why are there more poor people in countries without capitalism, and why so many people want to migrate to the US and so few people want to migrate to Cuba. https://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=508
You must not have read what I wrote. The important thing is the social relationship between those who work and the heirs who don't work and expropriate from those who do.
Also, you mention the US, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was in the early 1970s - that is not progress for people who work.
> so many people want to migrate to the US and so few people want to migrate to Cuba
The migration ratio between the US and Cuba is about what it was a century ago.
Where there is equality of value there is no incentive to exchange. "Also goods such as the soil, wood in trees, water power, coal beds, stone quarries, petroleum reserves, mineral waters, gold mines, etc. are often the subjects of exchange. And they embody no labor time. How then can Marx explain the exchange value of these goods? Surely the common element that governs the exchange values of these goods cannot be the amount of labor time embodied in them"[1]
If you are interested in seeing the other side of your beliefs you might like to read Böhm von Bawerk's refutations of Marx's theory of capital.
Are you against inheritance by heirs? Would the State manage wealth better than heirs or than the market? According to what I see in totalitarian states, I believe the answer is no.
Anyway, I believe there's room for improvement, I don't think capitalism is the ultimate system.
By the way, I think this article is pertinent regarding this topic https://mises.org/library/b%C3%B6hm-bawerk%E2%80%99s-critiqu...
[1]https://mises.org/wire/labor-and-capitalist-exploitation-boh...
Is anyone worst off because top 1% of 1% own more than the bottom half or whatever the number is?
Wealth creation is not a zero sum game.
Possibly yes.
While not a pure zero sum game, some parts of the economy are, notably the share between salaries and dividends in a company's profit. You can't raise one without decreasing the other. There is a point where too low dividends or two low salaries will endanger the company but also a wide range that is viable and where a pure zero sum game happens.
And while some amount of inequality is necessary to get a free market economy going, I have yet to see a compelling argument against a wealth cap or an income cap.
I am not advocating that, but as an extreme thought experiment, consider that confiscating the wealth of these 45 people would double the wealth of half the country. 45 people. I have a hard time imagining that the economic gain from these 45 people is on the same magnitude.
> startup companies and investors would be discouraged from locating in Germany,
That, I really doubt. As a founder, if you were telling me that I have twice the chance to succeed in a given place, but that I will never own more than 10 millions, I'd be pretty happy already. Sure, you won't attract the delusional founder who thinks he will become the next Bill Gates with his dating app for dogs, but isn't that a feature more than a bug?
> and the income cap wouldn’t raise much money anyway.
That's not the goal. It would not raise money directly, but it would have a lot of benefits for the economy, by redirecting money that would otherwise go to the top 0.1% into more modest pockets. It would cause redistribution without having to go through the state.
The article's actual content about German culture's modest approach to displays of wealth is far more interesting.
Meanwhile more democratic socialist countries like France, Vietnam, and India rank in the middle. While the full blown socialist countries and just undeveloped economies in Africa with their starving people are at the bottom. There was a study showing the poor have a higher quality of life in the US than in France, despite far superior social support gov systems in France, due to industry, growth, and low prices and high variety for staples, luxuries, and entertainment.
Germany, very much like the Japanese, have such a unique work culture it'd be difficult to take their social/economic policies as direct analogies to most other western countries. It just wouldn't work the same without their cohesion and always working hard and following rules regardless of the top down hierarchical systems.
The list also correlates heavily with economic success which is sadly a forgotten idea these days when people would rather obsess about the rich instead of asking how to make people less poor. Previously it most often happens through decentralized entrepreneurship and industry. The number of new small businesses has been declining for years. Not to mention the times in history with the most success had a skilled workforce whose ability/skills was closely related to market demand (often through early employment and apprenticeship rather than taking a preordained academic route). So much of the educated youth have degrees and loans completely disconnected from any economic reality... then they blame the economy for not adapting to them. While politicians tell them it's all rich people's fault they don't have state funded back up plans for their poor investments.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom