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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

There is no consensus on what is "fair" to tax, you can find people arguing from 0% to 100%. And if we're talking about measures of fairness. A much better measure is something like trying to maximise the median living standard without sacrificing any one demographic.

> And for those particular people you're talking about the answer is very little, next to none...

So... where are the real resources coming from then? Because if these people aren't using them to support their living standards they must be doing something else. If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something.

Because I agree that the taxes aren't going to come out of the wealthy's living standards, but the implications of that in practice are not good.

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> If we give one person enough money out of the tax pot to pay rent, that means the resources were redeployed from somewhere else that was about 1-rentworth of something.

Yes, and that "somewhere else" is others' excess profit.

That excess profit comes from (a) inventing or investing capital with a return or (b) paying less for goods / labor than they can be sold for.

Capitalist profit has always been equal parts ingenuity and fucking other people over, and as most often implemented makes no discrimination between the two.

The bargain by which this has traditionally been squared is "the person who made the profit gets to keep some of it" + "they pay the rest in taxes to support the society they're successful in and depend on."

Unfortunately over the years this has continually been eroded by capital's invasion into democracy, with the express purpose of neutering the latter part of that bargain.

Those who would be hit with a wealth tax are incensed by it precisely because it would be less avoidable than the myriad of loopholes that have been engineered into income taxes.

And in terms of real resources - who do you expect to have less and what do you expect them to have less of? Because "excess profit" is an economic concept, not a real thing.

By using progressive taxes, either wealth or income, those who benefited from the current system get to keep some of those excess benefits, while keeping less than they would under a no tax system.

No, I mean real resources as in tangible ones. Although in this case I'd also be interested in redirected labour even though that isn't really a tangible asset. Like if you were explaining to someone who didn't speak english and you had to point at the things that the wealthy control that you want to tax away from them, what real objects do you point at?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource#Tangible_versus_intan...

Why does tangible vs intangible matter?

For the last ~3000 years of human history, wealth has been liquid via some form of money.

Excess profit is a stupid fairy tale told by the bearded idiot. It is literally impossible to not retroactively 'exploit' somebody. Not just in the practical 'need to know what the end user will do with it to avoid them making an excess profit' but if the value changes over time they need to somehow predict that perfectly or else be guilty of exploitation. The notion itself always assumes that the capitalist should get absolutely nothing because he isn't doing "real work" and then ignores how things fall apart without them, or how much that the worker would have to do to substitute for them.

Ironically the communists have managed to out-greed the capitalists through this one fantastical concepts. Capitalists accept that they need to pay people to get their inputs and try to make the most of it one way or another. Communists are kept up at night at by the thought that somebody else may have made a penny off of their labor, and think that they need to murder them for it.

The "excess" in "excess profits" means profits greater than what a fully-competitive, perfect market would allow.

No one would be paying Apple or Google 30% of their revenue if there were infinite alternative app distribution options.

The essence of post-capitalism is that a lack of market intervention allows monopolies to not just grow (probably fine in limited niches with regulatory bounds) but also to rent seek without investing and adding value.

So yes, profit is a motivational force that has outperformed all others to date in aligning individual action with market desires.

But the excess profit era the US has been sliding towards for decades is not a free market.

When was the last time a large corporation was forcibly broken up?

> A much better measure is something like...

Yes. Focus on outcomes.

Pick a target amount of inequity. Act to hit that goal. Adjust as needed.

For example, I advocate restoring our gini coefficient from the current 0.48 (?) back to 1970s era 0.35. People smarter than me will figure out how to best measure inequity, ideal targets, and implementation details.

Arguing about all the misc tax rates, purposefully ignoring the macro, is an obfuscation strategy to prevent taking any action at all. Straight out of the CIA's field guide on sabotage.

There is very little debate that you should be taxed proportionally to your total wealth; I.e. that the rich should pay more than the poor. In fact the only people trying to debate this are the rich who want to avoid paying back towards the society that enabled their success.

> I.e. that the rich should pay more than the poor

How else could it work? The poor don't have enough money to tax them. That's why they're poor. Schemes where the rich don't get taxed are systems that tend towards the 0% tax for everyone end of the spectrum.

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