Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilwilson | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately that requires that the tax you apply to the rich has incidence on the rich. And of course it doesn’t because they have the power to pass the cost on and they do.

Therefore “tax the rich” logically means “give the rich the power to choose who actually pays the tax”

As it turns out the best way to “tax the rich” is to increase the number of competitors (Including, if necessary, publicly funded competitors. ) in their markets and squeeze the profit share down towards the zero theoretical minimum.

Or “euthanise the rentiers” as somebody once said.

View on HN

I find it fascinating how robust ideologies are. They have to contain countless responses to thousands of ways of questioning their coherence.

In this example, to the concern about a power imbalance there was an immediate, trained response of „it can’t be done” - there’s simply no way to diminish the concentration of wealth.

It’s fantastic because you acknowledge that the imbalance is there and that it’s problematic - that can’t be argued. So instead you argue that it’s inevitable.

Intricate web of beliefs. Stable and resilient to any challenge.

This phenomenon applies to any widely held ideology: if it weren't robust to challenges, it wouldn't remain widely adopted (for some subtle definition of "robust").

Ironically, dismissing an argument with an ad hominem--like calling it a "trained response"--is also a mechanism that makes ideologies resilient.

You might be under the impression that I'm trying to argue myself (you mention "dismissing an argument") and employ an ad hominem as a rhetorical tool. Not so!

I'm well aware that discussion or debate isn't an effective way of having a person question their ideology.

Ironically, by ascribing this dark pattern to me you could also be seen as employing an ad hominem, because it casts me as a dishonest, disrespectful person.

Alas, I am a human full of contradictions and vices. If it helps you maintain your mental composure, do feel comforted by my perceived malice :)

You sound just like those Sophists that Socrates was warning about.

It hurts to be disparaged like this… I forgive you, but please don’t address me anymore.

I don’t believe this qualifies as an ad hominem. The person was not attacking the individual but rather making an observation about the dynamics of ideological thinking.

The ad hominem is assuming that the person suffers from mindless ideological thinking, and that they're parroting something they heard instead of using their brain. To paraphrase, "yeah well you're just a dumb ideologue...aren't they fascinating?".

It is fascinating.

Particularly as I explained the mechanism by which it can be done. Did you miss that bit?

What I find interesting is how rigid the "tax the rich" belief is, even when the obvious problem with it is pointed out.

Almost like the people who believe it in really want to LARP as Robin Hood and won't hear any objections to the contrary.

The Western world used to tax the rich much more than what we do now (check out income tax level under Nixon for instance, and it's not just about income tax). And as a results, they were much less powerful (the robber barons had disappeared for multiple decades before making a come back during the modern days gilded age).

It wasn't because of the tax levels. It was because there was tight immigration rules that were enforced and plenty of job opportunities.

When you have a system that deliberately uses unemployment as its escape valve, then the costs just get passed on until somebody loses their job and can't do anything about it because there are not enough jobs to go around.

I'm not talking about unemployment (which is relatively low nowadays anyway), I'm talking about the extreme level wealth concentration, and it has nothing to do with immigration (well, except that a former illegal immigrant is now half a trillionaire while paying a much lower tax rate than the average American, but it has nothing to do with him being foreign born and I'm pretty sure you weren't complaining about this kind of immigration).

It is absolutely astounding to me that practises that are literally done elsewhere right now are (still) consistently considered impossible in the US.

Complexity in the tax system will be gamed by people who have the resources to do so (and those are not poor people). That means if you want a controlling force that affects everybody (e.g. to avoid runaway values in how rich individuals you are) you need simple rules that can't be gamed.

In society those simple rules also have the added benefit of being more broadly accepted since they are more broadly understood.

But if someone asked me to build a system that could be gamed by the rich I would aim for as much complexity in the rules as I can get away with, each piece added with a good marketing slogan, in effect resulting in the CEO paying less taxes than their poorest worker.

This seems unfounded. How exactly would e.g. a hedge fund manager "pass along" their income tax?

It feels like you're confusing this with corporate taxes.

They put their wages up, and then the firm demands greater returns from their investments to pay those wages and those investments then sack a load of people to increase the returns.

> and squeeze the profit share down towards the zero theoretical minimum.

Nitpick. Zero is not the theoretical minimum profit, you can have negative profit.

Zero is the profit predicted by basic economic theory in a market equilibrium.

It's the stable theoretical minimum in aggregate. Negative profit operations are eliminated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com