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Comment by greycol | Hacker News Reader

You can implement policies that tax more than just income. So no not regardless of policy but yes where policies don't exist to reshape a system where capital (i.e. investment in automated production) inherently takes more of the wealth than labour it will inherently lead to an agglomeration of capital.

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Today, if sanitation workers go on strike, they rapidly end up with a negotiated settlement. If we had self driving garbage trucks that didn't need them, what political leverage would they have? The same too goes for other industries.

If police have advanced surveillance technology and drones, even violent protest becomes very hard.

What pressure is there to cater to people who are powerless dead weight on the economy?

Voting is still a thing. You still have to convince people that just voting for what they want is less important than carefully considering the affect their votes will have on billionaires.

How long will it remain a thing when the voters have no leverage? King Louis didn't set up the French Republic out of the goodness of his heart. He set it up by reducing the amount of weight carried by his neck.

Voting happens because economic power implies political power. People must be kept satisfied for things to keep running.

If that deal gets upended, I don't think the economic dead weight will be treated well.

Is there an economy in absence of those people’s wellbeing?

If AI works out, possibly. The entities involved in commerce can be automated, with companies autonomously serving the needs of other companies.

I know some people who are investing based on the expectation of this being the future.

Driving isn't the hard part or expensive part of a garbage truck. Sanitation workers have to hoist haphazardly-placed and badly-packed garbage cans. Some municipalities have cans that can be lifted by arms on the truck, though many don't, and even where they exist not everybody uses them.

I guess it depends on the city and type of garbage. In the last two large cities I've lived in, the garbage trucks are staffed/driven by one person, and pickup is a robotic arm that picks up the container and dumps it into the top. The truck and drive ignore non-standard containers.

I wished, unfortunately the companies are going to complain that doing so will stop them to have enough money to innovate compared to other countries, or that they are too small to compete. (At least it's the current speech of the lobbies in EU for example).

But instead, ever since the brief federal surplus at the end of the 90s, we've done multiple multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for the highest earners. Bush tax cuts + 2x Trump tax cuts (most recently in the BBB). In each case after fudging the projections beforehand to claim it will reduce the deficit somehow, then the deficit grows by a massive amount.

We've been reshaping the system to redistribute trillions to capital owners via government IOUs that will eventually come due. Inevitably, this will be "solved" by cutting benefits to workers while insisting no other solution could possibly exist.

Like, you know, undoing these relatively recent handouts to the ultra rich and restructuring policy to the benefit of workers.

That's the Starve the Beast strategy. It's been going on for at least a few decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

> You can implement policies that tax more than just than just income.

Umm, no you can't. Otherwise We would have done this already. In a world where the rich would be even richer, this would be even more impossible.

I'm sure you're suggesting that it's politically infeasible to implement policies that curtail the worst excesses of capitalism, but in case you are saying it's not feasible to tax anything but income, then the words 'sales tax', 'vice tax', or the hilarious (because of resulting inverted pyramid buildings) 'footprint tax' are easily searchable examples. The footprint tax being a cautionary example of unintended outcomes. Interestingly New Zealand law states you can't try to get around taxes on technicalities, which depending on your view on how government can abuse power is either great common sense or the sound of authoritarian klaxons peeling the end of freedom through airy-fairy arbitrary laws.

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