Under totalitarian systems like communism or nazism, citizens are assets (or at least the well-behaved ones are).
That's why they were prevented from leaving the old soviet bloc, and why things like this happen in China.
That's why they were prevented from leaving the old soviet bloc, and why things like this happen in China.
No government wants to lose all its people - since without people, there is nobody to tax.
In fact, giving up US citizenship is already made rather difficult - you typically have a huge tax bill to pay, and many people cannot afford to pay it, so cannot leave.
This is already somewhat of an issue for American immigrants moving to Europe. Some banks just refuse to open accounts for them.
If anybody in such a society wants to get anything done, they have to build a coalition and sell others on the thing they want to do. This is a very, very good thing.
Aside from “privatizing profits socialize losses”, why would the government care about fewer people paying the same percentage of their taxes? That makes no sense. Their budgets would contract with the demands.
Plenty of reasons people might want to leave a country en-mass, and some of them can't be fixed with a new government.
Trying to restrict the free movement of citizens here would throw the country into hellish anarchy, why would any “power that be” attempt that? The cost would wildly exceed any benefit.
Isn’t labour having most of a stake a more communist leaning system?
These are people with real power in the system, and even if it's not a majority, it's really almost impossible to be a tyrant when there's lots of minor centers of power spread very wide throughout society.
Even for "the rich" who own the majority of assets - there are millions upon millions of such rich people in the US. They will never all agree on everything.
When you say most people have a stake, are you saying 51% or above of people have a stake? Can you quantify that to clarify your point?
40% of Americans rent. Do they have a stake?
Seems like a pretty simple statement to back up. Weird that you won’t.
A whole bunch of people sharing power near the top is good for avoiding tyrrany yes, but it doesn't stop normal people from being treated as assets, which was the claim being made.
No, under a democratic system, citizens are not assets. Whose assets would they be?
Surely someone who has gotten rich won't want to tolerate the state's complete control and will find ways around it. I suspect it's not sustainable.
China is so far a counterpoint. And the terrifying thing is that this is not at all a settled question. If you throw enough technology at surveillance and social control, as the Chinese do, the state might be able to become an actual Big Brother state with pervasive control over the daily life of its citizens. The Chinese government is working _hard_ on this.
The Chinese undoing will probably come from more mundane reasons, such as Xi becoming a dictator and the usual decline that comes from these types of governments.
> Surely someone who has gotten rich won't want to tolerate the state's complete control and will find ways around it. I suspect it's not sustainable.
Jack Ma...
> Jack Ma
I think once you have lots of people like this guy (and much less rich people than him) bribing and elbowing their way to special treatment, it might undermine the concept of a totalitarian state to the point where it loses it's credibility with the bulk of the population. Even the strongest government needs people to believe in their power for it all to work.