There have been many attempts at taking from the rich and giving to the poor, and the result was always everybody was worse off except the people who ran the government.
I am not an anarchist.
> privilege you enjoy
Privileges anyone enjoys living in the United States. That's why millions are always trying to come here.
This is a 19th century regalian viewpoint (which is fine). Taken to its logical conclusion, education and healthcare services should not be provided by the government. I think that this is a wildly unpopular viewpoint, and is really unlikely to lead to good outcomes in our kind of society.
FDR's New Deal raised taxes on the wealthy, and gave to the poor. Seems to have done America well. Post-war Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan land redistribution did well. And of course, there's the Nordic countries. Norway happens too have oil, but that doesn't explain Sweden and Denmark.
Capitalism not natural order; it has rules and winners and losers. It's actually more like sports. With sport, the goal is to create entertainment by rewarding physical excellence, mental excellence, and successful risk taking. Similarly, the goal of capitalism to create a better society by rewarding physical excellence, mental excellence, and successful risk taking.
What happens to a sport when players cheat or exploit the rules to win? It's no longer entertaining! When the best players can no longer win that's boring. And, in sport, when that happens the rules are changed or enforced better to bring it back in line.
Capitalism is the same. We are reaching the point where we are no longer properly rewarding excellence that is benefiting society. So the rules need to be enforced and rules need to be changed to bring that back in line. Inequality of this magnitude shows that rewards have outstripped the benefits to society and needs to be corrected.
The best we can do is learn from natural expriments like Finland and Estonia being about as rich before ww2, then by 90s the gap got massive since one was forced adopt more redistributive policies. Same with North / South Korea. Here we have at least some hope of extracting causality
Disagree about the billionaire bit. Accumulates too much power too narrowly. Then one can subvert the market and rule of law. It seems the line lies somewhere between a hundred million and billion dollars at the current value of a dollar.
I am happy and eager to make exceptions on a case by case basis if that billion dollars have been made in exchange of tangible goods and services.
Why being tangiable so important? E.g. a billionare made it on physical music CD cs one made it on music streaming? As long as it's legal, why prioritize physical form?
Ignoring this aspect of the way the world works is living in a fantasy world, no less fantastic than a communist utopia.
Oh! I chose my word poorly. Streaming is very much "tangible" in the sense I had intended. "No regret transaction" is perhaps a better term than tangible, for the notion I am trying poorly to capture.
Let's take Walter Bright. I would love him to be a billionaire if he isn't one already. He made many delightful "goods", (to entertain oneself with and also to pay one's bills writing programs in a language so pleasant *). No party in the transaction would regret such a transaction, even in hindsight.
There are legal ways to accumulate wealth, however, without exchanging any goods and services. For example, HFT (ought to be called low latency rather than high frequency), speculation on the stock marketd. Derivative markets, for example, are zero sum, for one to win someone else has to lose. The wealth accumulated by such means has not been created, merely redistributed.
* Wish more companies used D though, so that it's actually feasible to earn your keep writing in D.
Sure, HTF is zero sum. I just think that focus on it is excessive. 99.9% of businesses are not. Regret would be nice to include in consideration but I doubt one can reliably measure it in practice
Also, disagree on options and futures market. They do provide important economoc function of price discovery and insurance against risk
"The derivatives market is, in a word, gigantic—often estimated at over $1 quadrillion". The stock market would be puny in comparison. This is quite well known so was quite surprised by your objection.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/052715/how-big-deri...
The derivatives market is much larger than the stock market, both in sheer trading volume and total face value. While global stock markets represent a total value of roughly \(\$120\) trillion, the estimated notional value of the global derivatives market easily exceeds \(\$500\) trillion to \(\$1\) quadrillion.
https://share.google/aimode/EAEGnOouA5dvj9leC
Derivative markets are necessary for price discovery but when they tower over in volume over the market whose prices it was supposed to discover it is serving a purpose that towers over its justified/motivating purpose.
It has rarely (if at all) worked out for any other country though. One or the other super power will make sure that does not happen.
US scuttling Iran's nationalisation of their oil being one example.
Even without geopolitical meddling, landfall discoveries of wealth at national scale has been frightfully difficult to manage well or to realize the value of. Your currency strengthens, your other industries lose out the on the price war, your economy gets skewed and sensitive to the health of one sector. In general it has been a curse than a boon.
Norway has so far pulled this of phenomenally well.
In most western nations, the “people who run the government” get paid a salary similar to a good software engineer (or maybe a doctor), and progressive taxation lets the government fund social services including free healthcare and tertiary education.
Rather than use Stalin as a straw man, maybe try take your nation in direction that helps people, rather than away?