However, theres no political will, because those with money, can lobby better than those without.
Ironically America rejected the monarchy, and yet has replaced it with an oligarchy.
It's a timeless problem insofar that it dates back to ancient times while remaining unsolved today.
IMHO it is not right to try to make people that earn more than us the target to be sacked. I think it is a bad thing. It is not a matter of you have less or you have more . It is a matter of respecting people who make money legally or inherit it by the will of their own relatives or whatever. I do not think anyone should be entitled to put hands into that for any single reason whatsoever unless that money has been stolen or made in illicit ways. That is the only valid reason IMHO.
At the point where the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny fraction of members of society becomes detrimental to the functioning of our society it is necessary to redistribute before society stops functioning.
How you feel about isn’t very important.
We shouldn't have to wait for society to nearly break down in some catastrophic way before we try to make things better.
Some sort of society will continue to "function", but it is likely to be a worse society for everyone, even the ones nearer the top of the wealth curve as they will constantly be worried about being robbed etc.
In fact, I would say there is plenty of evidence that too much redistribution impoverishes societies and, on top of that intervention, there is always a layer of corruption, way more than in more free countries (free as in non-economic intervention to wealth).
Wealthy people get to choose which jurisdiction they submit themselves to. That's just how the world is.
There is no other way. You are not going to get anything for free in that chain. Every step in the chain, from employing to get products to work to deliver your stuff are paid in one way or another.
Your argumentation is incorrect.
By the way, what is equity? If you come spoil me because I make money, what kind of equity is that if you do it to me just because I make money? Equity would be to not spoil anyone. Trying to punish them on the basis that they make money (or that they make little, I do not care) is not equity. It is something else.
When it is detrimental? Who decides that? I am against monopolies. Telling from offices all the others what to do or not when they are not harming anyone is also a monopoly. Governments are monopolies in many areas.
What makes you think that with fewer regulations there would be even more uneven wealth? I cannot reply to this, since it is just fiction, but fewer regulations means more services, which unfavors monopolies and drops prices for services. Making people more elligible for acces to those services as well.
I am saying this very naively without reflecting on the effects it would have on the economy, the inflationary forces and the overall corporate productivity. So I realize my view is mostly a romantic utopia, but nobody should be allowed to hoard billions, especially by inheritance.
When I say "you pay for your own schooling through taxes" I'm saying that most countries have tax systems where citizens contribute according to their earnings / net-worth, a share of the costs of running all of the parts of society that aren't privately owned - or some approximation of this idea.
This means that if you're paying your taxes, the implication is that you're paying "your share" of running education for society and someone did that for you when you were a kid. Maybe you're paying for iPads in 2022 for other people's kids where you only had chalk, but some other schmucks also paid the doctors salary (unless you're in the US I guess? not sure how that works there) that delivered your birth and nobody expected you to hand over a dollar bill as a newborn to pay for yourself.
Pay-it-back vs. invest/pay-it-forward have quite different political implications, and the fact that society does and always has been in pay-it-forward mode gives lie to the earlier commenter's claim that subsidies are slow but fatal.
What proceeds?
There won't be too many proceeds because people would simply stop working at that point. I'm far from being taxed at 100% (~50% marginal all in) and my motivation to increase my pay is already very low. I optimize for fewer hours worked at the same pay now.
Do you think that's because you're already making enough money to put you at or near the top tax bracket? Sounds like your lack of motivation is because you're already making enough and don't need more, not that the government might get an extra 8% out of you.
The math is pretty simple. Everyone has 24 hours in a day. I get paid X to work Y hours. My free time Z is 24-Y hours. It's not worth it to trade any more of my remaining Z hours just to have >50% immediately taken away. I don't get any more hours in a day by working more. Instead, I increase my hourly income (the accurate value of my labor) by cutting Y to 1/2 or 1/3 while still making X. I work less, have more free time, and government doesn't make more from my labor than I do. Easy. (Note: If I were to magically find a job that paid twice as much with the same crazy good work-life balance, I would of course take it regardless of marginal taxes. But such magic is hard to come by and not worth the risk at this point.)
Advanced version: on top of the marginal rate being 50%, I live in an expensive place where not only does it get taxed higher as if I'm uber rich, but I get to pay more for all of my expenses. It's like a double fuck you. Even less motivation. This stuff is real and anyone who's in my position has given it some thought even if it's not so formulaic, hence the outflow of people from CA to cheaper, less tax-y places.
There’s a net migration of rich people into CA (and there always has been). It’s the lower income that move out because they simply can’t afford CA. Rich people can afford CA and so they move here.
This isn’t really a political point. I like living in California (for now) and wouldn’t move to either of the other states just for the savings. Not worth it.
2) Nothing wrong, just stating the facts.
I'll re-write your proposal:
"Once a person reaches something like $10M net worth they start donating huge sums of money to the charities they have created and who has their family members on board. One of them fully restored and is doing the maintenance on an authentic Gulfstream aircraft from the beginning of the century! An other one has created a school for the (still minor so he can’t claim his $10M yet) heir and a fund to send one student (chosen by the family) to Harvard on a full ride should he be accepted".
There's probably a way to work around this by making it non-voting stock or something, but it's still an inherent dampener on growth, because there's no incentive to grow, and on RnD, because there's no concentration of capital. A silicon fab is worth billions; does your system imply that the only way to build one is to either arrange a consortium of 10,000 people or government funding? HN exists because of PayPal; should the PayPal money have been spent entirely on free services? How are you going to stop the black market[0]? What are the alternate routes to power in your society, and are they better than acquiring money?
You can envisage worlds where this does function, but there's a lot of work to put in regarding the specifics, and doing the work makes you realise their might be a lot of downsides.
[0] Around 80% of North Koreans' income was once acquired through the black market: https://web.archive.org/web/20110924095232/http://www.atimes...
That's how most large stuff gets built now. "a consortium of 10,000 people" is a corporation. There are lots of them on the NYSE etc.. Government funding also happens a lot.
Federal Tax rates in the USA when Intel was founded were 70%.
I get the gist od the argument, but to call it ownership is perverse. It’s like insurance companies and their ~$300 salvage fee they charge if you have an accident and the repair cost is greater than the ‘value’ of the vehicle. They argue if they pay you for the full value of your vehicle, they are in effect buying the vehicle from you. If you decide to keep the vehicle, they will attempt to claw ‘salvage value’ or the amount they get from a junk yard. So far I’m 1 for 1, arguing the vehicle has to be for sale for ownership to pass to another.
Another thing I find perverse is the expectation of continual year to year growth—-to infinity.
Amazon SWE: "richest man in the world" Jeff Bezos
Meta SWE: billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg
Netflix SWE: billionaire Reed Hastings
Microsoft SWE: "richest man in the world" Bill Gates
Then we get into the "mere" hundreds of millions.
They created those jobs, and obviously they're very, very wealthy.
Start with your vote, kids: use something else, do not buy from them. It is what I would do, in fact, if I had that thinking.
Well, I started by saying that the only jobs were yacht captains and butlers (slight exaggeration) and was told that many of the jobs were things people on this message board had. So, yeah, that's what the topic is.
I think you are pretty cruel to people that produce useful things for others. You are saying that people who offer something valuable for others should be mercilessly punished.
What you are saying is that people that contribute less than these people to society should be gifted with the effort of people that are useful to the society, making the wealthy (I mean licit wealth, of course, not criminal one) a means for others to live in better conditions.
Also, you are proposing to violate the principle of people being equal under the law. If I earn xyz, they spoil me, if I earn "too much". If I earn nothing and do not contribute in any meaningful way (even to sustain myself), then I am a blessed person that can get things for free.
Not a good arrangement to create wealth for others, if you ask me. Besides being terribly unfair.
-Anatole France
Turn it up to $100 million instead of $10. What you call unfair, is obscene, that outsized level of influence that one person should be able to have on society. The problem is the sheer amount of wealth so far beyond what a single person could use up in one life, while others languish and go hungry. Capitalism is merely a way of organizing society. The cruelty doesn't have to be the point. In order to incentivize the rich, we give them money. To incentivize the poor, we take more away. Who then go hungry. Is that the American dream? That I should be able to afford $1,500 bottles of champagne while my countrymen starve for not working hard enough?
If you are a worker you are exchanging comfortability for risk. You will make less, for sure. I am myself employed. But every month I get the bill. If you do not want that, risk your capital.
I wonder if it is so bad to work so hard for others, why don't more people build a business? There must be something we are not being honest about here, otherwise everyone would build one.
By the way, noone that makes their own wealth are to be blamed of the bad luck of others. I think we should help those people you mention. Those people starving. But voluntarily or offering them the chance to cooperate with the society. Unless they have some handicap, if they do not want to cooperate it is not me who is to be blamed. In that case, it would be them who are the person to look at for trying to live from others. And for that, it does not matter I can afford that champagne or not.
Besides that, the fact that people like that exist does not mean other people are poorer. I could open a website now and get rich and I would not be making anyone poorer, just making myself richer. And probably others, to operate the website itself.
Once government "takes" all of the capital "for the presumed good of society", government will very rapidly become the enemy. Corruption will grow and grow, and society will be in the position of a corrupt, all powerful government.
It does not work folks. Read history, don't relive it like a bunch of idiotic sheep
(If you're just talking about reducing it that's fine, but we already do that massively with the tax and transfer system, and I think you guys have estate taxes too.)
So the notion that massive intergenerational wealth is innate to humans and natural is absurd. Or if it is innate and natural, then the lack of that is innate and natural as well. Most of behavioral modernity had none of this at all, it is a relatively new phenomenon, not "innately human".
It seems quite likely to me that as soon as we started crafting and carrying things around, we developed complex behaviors around who gets which things.
I saw it from my nephews recently. One was building a castle, like five floors high with some stuff. The younger kid comes and destroys it. His brother gets deeply annoyed and started to cry. Why? Because he spent time building it.
They are three and one years old. Do you think anyone taught them to get annoyed when the castle is destroyed? No, it is innate: what takes effort has a value for humans.
We did not have the level of wealth of today before, but every single human that puts time somewhere wants to be the ruler of that effort. That is innate I think. I saw it clearly with my nephew's reaction. Noone taught him that.
Looks like a good experiment to me.
Does your nephew now own the sand he used to build that castle? I would hope not, as I think we’d agree, many kids would suffer!
And likewise, many people believe so strongly in their ownership of money, that they don’t mind if others suffer.
Taxes are robbery. If you did the same to your neighbor under threat, you would end up in jail. If a mafia does that, they go to jail.
If the government does it, they do not. And they did not ask you to adhere to a contract. It works with reversed logic from what we do in real life with others.
There is no single logical justification to say it is not robbery. That is independent of whether what they do with that money is good or bad. A different discussion.
> And likewise, many people believe so strongly in their ownership of money.
Which represents just that you offered something worth that money to others, in the absense of threat or violence. So yes, now it belongs to them because of an exchange.
> that they don’t mind if others suffer.
Or even worse, some people subtract that money from us by providing no value, unlike the average of humans who at least sells something or provides a service and pretends that the people providing services or products are worse than the person subtracting in exchange of nothing under the threat of prison.
Also, it seems that to you the person being subtracted the money they earned and spent time to get it(could be money or anything else, I am talking about effort) do not suffer. I guess they do not have a soul or feelings or do not deserve the same respect as the others.
It is the cost to you living in society; a society which provides infrastructure such as roads, education, sanitation, and food. A society which provides customers and a marketplace to trade in.
The roller coaster of watching you add and edit this comment was truly an experience. Have a great day.
Of course that is robbery. Imagine they force you to eat in a certain restarant and you must eat there, because they decided so without asking. Now let us say the food should be 15 dollars and they charge you 45, without asking. This is what they do. It is totally, totally unfair.
Later they will come and tell you: hey, you can eat thanks to me! You owe me respect. When in fact, I could have gone find my own way and eat for 15. It is absurd. And robbery, of course. Noone asked me. That is illegal if you do it to someone.
It is as if a telco came and charge you a bill of 50 usd and you get mad and go and say: hey, I did not hire your services. And they reply: the contract is implicit. They would be in trouble.
I'm fine with you not paying taxes, as long as you leave my country and renounce your citizenship. After that, make whatever you want on a boat in the ocean or in Somalia. But no one who thinks taxes are theft ever does that, because they want all the benefits of society my taxes pay for.
There are a lot of government policies I think should be criminal, but nobody suggests that my only options are accept the policy or completely denounce society.
I think that the large telecoms are built on theft from society and that copyright laws are too extensive. Should I leave society to go live on Sealand?
To use an analogy, you're saying "look, not every restaurant serves your favorite food, why do you call people hypocrites who go out to eat at those places" and I'm saying "the people I call hypocrites are the ones who claim it's a moral imperative to refuse to tip or even pay the check who insist on going out to eat"
I don't follow your restaurant analogy. Someone can recognize that tipping is harmful to the wait staff, but continue to tip knowing that to do otherwise would only hurt the wait staff and not the restaurant.
With a government imposition you must pay, noone asks you, and, on top of that, you do not use those services most of the time. But if you use them, why they do not ask you if you want? That is exactly how real life works... except for government impositions.
I'm fine with you having to renounce your citizenship if your point is "taxes are theft" and you want to avoid them. If you wanna go your own way, fine. But then go your own way.
Or do you think you personally should be given a line-item veto to a $5 trillion federal budget? Cause that's unworkable both practically and morally.
Morally the right thing to do is to ask EACH person what budget they want to spend on what and have a BINDING contract on that.
When you buya house or sign a contract witha telco company you pay for what you were offered and you can claim any deviation for that. I do not accept it has to be different with a government.
Of course, I would not ask for using a road or health care. I buy an insurance, pay a toll for roads or whatever. And we would save money, at least in Spain, where taxes are abusive by all measures.
I am not claiming I should have roads and health care and all and that taxes are theft at the same time. I am saying that taxes are theft on the basis that noone asked me what to pay or not.
The proof that things are terribly managed, at least in my country (Spain), is that we have a 120% GDP debt.
We are making new-born be born with a debt. Is that the right thing to do? For me that is immoral, unless you are that kind of person that thinks that we do a default and done, which would mean you are not a person that has a word to be believed. So what are the alternatives?
I will give you some clues: Taiwan, Singapore, Cyprus (Greek part, of course), Estonia, Georgia, South Korea, Switzerland: and probably also many of the places you call a tax haven.
You can go to Somalia if you feel like.
In Spain if you earn 60,000 euros, which is not so much, in my area they tax you 47% from your salary + what your employer already paid to the social security. At the same rime they are raising the retirement age and do all kind of sh*t bc we have a Poncy system for retirement. Of course, politicians get max retirement after 8 years (for normal people it is 30 I recall). Some of them, like ex-presidents, have an income for the rest of their lives.
But hey, the money is to build roads and pay retirements and health care. Please someone explain to me this is not theft because I really do not get it.
The difference with a country like Singapore, with all its bad things (I lived there before, among other places) is that the level of corruption is lower, the taxing lower and the budget is managed seriously. Here... this is not even funny.
And it’s not robbery if you’re getting something from it everyday, which you clearly are because you’re posting on the Internet and drinking clean water.
My point is to have control on what to pay or not. When not paying, of course, I have to pay it by myself. But noone is entitled to tell me how much and in which conditions unilaterally.
Governments and stated should NOT be an exception.
Good luck.
The duty of the governments is to kidnap and monopolize services on the basis that you owe them something because they provided you that, when, in fact, there are alternatives.
But even if they were useful on their own right, you could optionally pay or not in the taxes (that would not be taxes actually) and acquire or lose the right to use certain services.
Why they do not do that, and later accuse you of bad citizen wanting people to die, to not have education or that you cannot use roads? Because they are desperate to justify their own existence and by kidnapping these services they have their justification to exist.
I don't mean to be snarky, but putting it in more business terms. For some services the service provider offers several alternative plans, some have only a single one-size-fits-all plan
You're anti fire department?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/steal
"to take something without the permission or knowledge of the owner and keep it"
As far as I know, they do not have my permission to get my wealth.
From RAE, in Spanish, robar:
"Quitar o tomar para sí con violencia o con fuerza lo ajeno." -> To extract or remove for oneself with violence or force other people's property (ajeno in this context refers to property in spanish)
So yes, it is an objective definition of what stealing is, because you pay under the threat of jail, not by mutual agreement, as you do when you purchase something.
"
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/high-income-earners-tax-ra...
Taxes are so nominal, that the haircut is almost non-existent. Beyond theory, I’m very well aware as my close friend inherited a property portfolio, and is now set for life.
Unfortunately, most are not as lucky, and therefore we should not rely on the inheritance lottery to act as our social security.
We should not be entitled to steal the effort of others. Every person can do what they deem right with their things.
It is not a matter of how much. By that reasoning I could make legal hitting people, even if it is bad, as long as I do not kill anyone. Would that make hitting people better? I do not think so. The action is still hitting.
The same way, the action is still stealing wealth for whatever reasons. Not a right choice.
Also, by having more offer available, prices are dropped. That benefits everyone, making them automatically wealthier, since now services are at the reach of more people at a lower price.
I do not see the problem. At least, not so far.
Indiscriminate redistribution by force has a long history of failure and it makes places poorer, not wealthier.
Resources are indeed finite, but value is not. The wealth of new ideas, figurative and literal, is practically infinite. Your statement sounds very much like the zero sum fallacy.
Só, the choice is simple: you can pay more taxes now, or just hope that the masses won’t do a revolution and send you to the guillotine all the while you scream about your god given constitutional rights to property.
Or people who provide services go to the strike and stop producing. What would happen?
A civilized person would try to contribute to the society without promoting violence to steal other people efforts.
If individuals wish to operate outside of limited liability, un-shielding all their assets to the consequences of their actions, then they can keep all their revenue/earnings.
I think it's BS that limited liability orgs commit acts that damage the environment and others, pay dividends to share holders, salaries (and bonuses) to officers and employees, and then go bankrupt when they are then being held to account for their actions and leaving little to nothing to their victims because there is no ability to claw back the money they paid out.
Quid pro quo. They get limited liability for being regulated. Don't like being regulated? Then forego limited liability.
If you want equality of opportunity, you need to fight furiously for complete free speech and complete freedom of trade. The change has to come from the individual bottom up.
If those two facts constitute "significant advantages", then the obvious answer is "none of them", but that doesn't seem a productive place to draw the line.
IMHO by far the best "significant advantage" you can have is a shrewd, practical brain combined with low levels of blind arrogance and some kind of "people talent". In normal peacetime conditions, people like that tend to rise fast.