What Would Society Look Like If Extreme Wealth Were Impossible?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
- mostly, the ability to not pay their fair share of tax. I don't want to see them taxed 300% or whatever, I want them to pay the same marginal tax rate as normal people
- their outsized ability to finance politics. Political parties should have a fixed, transparent source of financing, from the state ideally, current system is basically legalized bribery.
- their outsizes ability to be politicians. Smart middle-class (or below, income-wise) people simply cannot afford to run for parlament and leave their career behind for N years. But this means politicians are overwhelmingly rich and skew the representation in supposed democracy
At least the first two are easy to fix.
- their outsizes ability to be politicians. Smart middle-class
(or below, income-wise) people simply cannot afford to run for
parlament and leave their career behind for N years. But this
means politicians are overwhelmingly rich and skew the
representation in supposed democracy
It astounds me how people don't want to financially reward our politicians in honest, transparent ways.
In an ideal world, I believe we should pay our politicians like stars while simultaneously having iron-clad controls on their outside financial influences. Wildly impractical for sure, but why not e.g.:
- Pay a US Senator $500,000 a year
- Assign two full time agents to him with full access to their finances down to counting the fucking loose change in the senator's pockets whenever they feel like it.
- Agent A and Agent B get a hefty bonus for spotting violations. Double the bonus for a thing the other missed.
- The iron-clad financial influence rules extend to 10 years after they leave office and include extended family members and friends.
Assume you were to set up solutions to the problems pointed out. The ultra rich would be immediately using their wealth and influence to better their position by working against the guard rails keeping those solutions in place. Why would they not?
Zuckerberg and other techno-royals are definitely ultra rich, and some aren't very nice people, but fundamentally they made their money in entirely legal and reasonable ways (through I'd argue in many cases tax appears to be underpaid).
I'd argue they were mostly lucky, and probably also competent. But I don't feel that their wealth is somehow wrongly acquired.
We can't have discussions around financial topics if we do things like describe any financial policy to the left of pure lasseiz-faire as "Soviet."
Robeyns proposes two upper limits on personal wealth.
Most countries with a solid social safety net should
bake a 10-million-euro (approximately $10.8 million)
cap into their social and fiscal systems, she argues.
As an ethical guide, individuals should limit themselves
to 1 million (perhaps $5 million in the less secure United
States, where one mistimed hospital bill could be enough
to thrust a household into bankruptcy). She also notes
ruefully that both proposed numbers are also less restrictive
than some philosophers’ ideal: In The Laws, for instance,
Plato argues that the wealthiest people shouldn’t be able
to have more property than four times what people with the
least have.
I understand perhaps, a little bit of what you seem to be grasping at. Whatever hard limits we set, people will game them. The first thing that comes to mind is that if we set a naively set a hard limit on personal wealth, people will hide their wealth in other ways.
Example: perhaps I am permitted to have "only" $10 million in personal wealth. However, my $100bn company "just happens" to let me use its $100 million yacht for 200 days per year and they also provide me personal chefs and so forth. So I have the lifestyle of a billionaire, thanks to the company I own, regardless of what my bank account says.
But... Soviet? Come on.
There are all sorts of highly theoretical and noble wealth redistribution ideologies made of handwavium like the one presented in the article. Doesn't matter if they're left or right or up or down, they inevitably collide with reality immediately upon receiving any traction, because they are dealing with the secondary or even tertiary consequences, not with the power imbalance which is the root cause. Dealing with that and setting up checks and balances requires actual dirty work, not navel-gazing discussions on the web, and there a lot of actors that aren't that wealthy and aren't centralized but still have disproportionate power (say, certain public activists, or extrajudicial secret services - for instance, my entire country is de facto owned by one, think pre-Church committee three-letter agencies gone rogue).
We also can’t have financial discussions if desiring an outcome is in anyway evidence it will happen.
Someone stating they prefer an arbitrary code of ethics and then decreeing that another set of actions will produce what they want isn’t useful.
With the next priority to level up so less-extreme lack of wealth can also be addressed, ideally by increasing opportunities to move ahead in real terms through consistent productive work, much more than there are any more now.
Mr and Mrs Howell from Gilligan's Island.
You want to go after people for amassing wealth in unscrupulous ways, I'm 100% on board. You want to go after wealth because they have it and you don't? You're probably my mortal foe.
you need to place the means of production under democratic control
But democracy is really hard work. The vast majority of people would rather let someone else do it so that they can play with the kids, hang out with friends at the bar, hit the gym, etc. instead. They don't even want to get involved with other democratic concerns, let alone try to watch over capital. And, frankly, who can blame them?
As such, that means that you are still going to need an individual or small group of people to take over the day-to-day control of the means. Congratulations, you just invented "private ownership".
But, it would require putting in the work to make happen. Which they don't want to do. People, and therefore democracies, don't like to put in work unless they absolutely have to. And in this case, why would they have to? There is really no good reason to put in the work. The people that could be recalled are there because the democracy wants them to be. Recalling them for no reason would be kind of silly.
Of course. I even said as much in the previous comment. But I also said there is no reason to put in the work. The work needing to be done was given away to other people for good reason and the democracy wants to keep it that way.
If that changes, things will change, but until then...
I witnessed more than five such privatizations in two different countries and they all ended up with the "investors" not even investing the minimum of what would have been necessary to keep the infrastructure operational. A decade later service quality is abysmal, infrastructure so bad that the state has to come in and help.
And these are only examples from postal services and public transport from the european regions I lived in, but I heard/read similar stories from nearly every of the 27 EU countries. The nations that still have exceptional services are the ones that didn't privatize them.
So if what I said is complete nonsense you surely have no problem pointing me to the wonderland where privatization lead to better services, lower prices and better service coverage — but we both know that never was the true interest behind privatizing anyways, don't we ; )
If you look at the worse services in your country they are usually the worse: from applying for a passport, to filling in pointless forms to high prices. Almost everything is better off in competition than making the natural market illegal.
That's a really good way to starve a couple million people. It's quite good to limit the wealth accumulation as well when people are only receiving rations for working from dawn to dusk.
There's a reason society's economic foundation resembles natural selection
we could also learn from ideas associated with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_economics. I'm not saying they are all good ideas, but they are worth testing out and looking for historical examples of where they worked or failed.
The problem is a pervasive culture of ignorance, idealism, inflation, and exploitation.