The least we can do is agree that money is a societal construct, and if money grows all by itself then the gains should be fully taxed and given back to society.
> The least we can do is
Putting it like that implies that there's a direction we should all be moving in. Presumably you have determined what this direction is and have determined that it is right for humanity.
Others may disagree.
> agree that money is a societal construct, and
Money is a simple technology that has gained wide... currency, but that doesn't mean it's an airy concept that can pop out of existence at any moment. It represents energy, effort, ingenuity, work.
> if money grows all by itself
You ever done a day's work? You ever start a business, make an investment, borrow or lend money? Nothing related to money happens by itself, except decay.
> then the gains should be fully taxed and
Again with the direction that you have determined that we should all go towards. Maybe not everybody wants a government with absolute power?
> given back to society.
Huge leap of faith here to suggest that taxes = giving back to society. The government certainly represent a good chunk of society in the form of numberless bureaucrats (some of whom are needed and useful) employed, and of the voters who are happy with the government. But there's a significant conflict of interest here; not one government has ever distributed its budgets perfectly. There's always the desire to increase headcount, to allocate more power to itself, to further its own goals.
None of this means OP has grounds to argue for economic totalitarianism.
Money is a technology people use. It has a literal physical presence that was invented and improved over time from rocks to bits.
I will concede that it's the wide acceptance of money that gives it it's value.
But the same is true for the wifi protocol and a billion other things that are also not a social construct.
Either way doesn't matter as far as OP's original argument.
The fact that people give it a certain status is inherently social. It has no utility except in transfer from one person to another, giving it to your pet fish is meaningless to the fish and burning it for fuel utilizes it quite differently.
Armies stand out as a social technology. EDIT ^W^W^W^W my bad, that link was irrelevant.
a : the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area : ENGINEERING sense 2 medical technology b : a capability given by the practical application of knowledge a car's fuel-saving technology 2 : a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods, or knowledge new technologies for information storage 3 : the specialized aspects of a particular field of endeavor
If its as vague as "applied concepts for practical goals", Catholicism is also technology.
Yes. A very effective one. Up there with the wheel for staying power; I imagine the Catholics are proud of what they've built.
So when the OP is flirting with arguing for tearing it down, there are three alternatives: 1) reform but stop short of tearing it down (legislation has done this several times before), 2) propose an alternative system that has a realistic way to preserve modern life, or 3) admit that you're going to destroy modern life in order to attack wealth inequality.
For 3), you're going to find very few people who are willing to go along with you. For 2), if you can't convince us that your plan is realistic, we're going to assume that you really are at 3).
As for 1), you're going to have to get it through Congress. It's been done, as I said, but usually after a major crisis. You probably don't have the urgency in voters' minds to drive it now, and Congress isn't great at passing anything right now. (Am I the only one that thinks that "can't pass a budget, which is the basic job" should mean "fire them all"?)
Aggressive. The OP would be in a very unusual position if they haven't done most of those things.
You don't have to do much to make money grow at about 8% per year on average, if "not much" is defined as something else you can do while maintaining a full time job and raise a family. That's faster than wages grow, so get enough of it you can literally stop working. Granted "not much" is not the same as money growing on it's own, but it's a good enough approximation.
> But there's a significant conflict of interest here; not one government has ever distributed its budgets perfectly.
I don't think that was the claim. The claim is that governments distribute wealth more evenly that a corporation would, which I consider to be self evident.
Also I notice you mentioned government money paying bureaucrats, but didn't mention it spends money building roads, hospitals and running schools. In fact the vast bulk of the money goes to the latter. If a democracy is functioning well, meaning it has an informed electorate and fair voting, the governments are under considerable pressure to deliver as many of those services as they can for the dollar. You do that by shrinking the bureaucracy as much as possible.
I suspect you also believe corporations do things more efficiently that governments. In reality study after study has shown government bureaucracies are about as efficient as corporate ones. About the only thing that clearly does better than both is a competitive market (as opposed to a free market). One outstanding example of this comes from comparing the cost of going to a USA hospital versus one in just about every other country on the planet. It's an interesting comparison between hospitals in the USA are invariably run privately, whereas in the rest of the world they are partially funded by governments to varying extents. Turns out in just about all systems where the government has a say in how hospitals are run, they delivery more services for less cost.
What if these things are offloaded to a secondary party, in exchange for a portion of the returns?
By taxing those earnings you reduce the demand for the shares which then reduces the amount of money the original workers can raise by selling shares.
The secondary market provides incentive to invest in companies.
Why is it that people of certain political persuasions always seem incapable of thinking through second and third order effects?
I am certain spending could be better allocated, but should corporations and billionaires be getting a free ride when they are gaining so so much from society? What are the downsides to taxing them more?
Billionaires and corporations are a misdirection, the actual policy that they will push is to raise taxes on people making upper middle class salaries.
Sometimes this is physical, like manufacturing machines that can be used to produce material goods that people want. Sometimes it is virtual, like the monopoly on force that forces people to pay taxes.
And that is for me - there are people who inherit fortunes, who by virtue of having fortunes, and who invest in anything sensible, even an index, will never need to work and contribute, and are virtual kings. This is a hard kink to iron out in capitalism.
In addition those who have fortunes and decide to work hard may direct that work into getting more unfair advantages (lobbying, for example, to ban better mousetraps) rather than doing stuff for the greater good (making better mousetraps). I think this too is a problem.
Capitalism + government intervention + free speech/debate might be as good as it can be for now, until abundance.
Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.
No it does not grow on its own. It usually shrinks, actually.
Non-currency assets can "grow" though
Nobody thinks that money isn't a contract.
Calling everything a "social construct" -- or, rather, calling anything a social construct is meaningless. Everything is a social construct, even "I" as a concept.
I'm not completely sure about the answer to those questions, but they all derive meaning in a different way than money does. I think calling money a social construct just highlights that as far as mutually agreed upon meaning being focused on an abstract concept goes, money is pretty high on the list of having lots of meaning and being very abstract.
Even something as minute as considering a collection of atoms an "element", i.e. organizing things into discrete clusters, is a social construct.
The human brain has a CPU limit so it has to cluster things to interact meaningfully with material reality.
Glimpsing beyond this is nearly impossible because it goes outside the bounds of our abilities, but you can scrape at it if you abstract it enough like I'm doing here.
For example the adjective rich. Which means people with money. Rich people being rich due to their relationship with pieces of paper is fetishism.
They are people in a scheme of relations of production with others, namely, workers.