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Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

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Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#271

Post by drieddust »

aminok wrote: post #263
drieddust wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoting from the article you are referring to: > He recommends a global wealth tax and, for the United States, top income tax rates of 80 percent on income above $500,000 or $1 million to combat inequality and 50 or 60 percent on income above about $200,000 to combat inequality and grow the government. First of all I haven't read the book yet so can't comment on the numbers.This limit can very well be a million or a…

>This limit can very well be a million or a few millions. An income tax rate of 80 percent on any income bracket is extremely heavy according to my definition of a 'heavy tax', as is a tax amounting to 2-10% of the value of privately owned assets. His proposal is of the typical disastrous socialist variety that show an utter misunderstanding of how capital is formed. >You are circumventing the basic question. From wh…

> If we are going to change the fundamental premise of the example, and assume a scarce natural resource is being appropriated, then society could certainly charge a fee for the act of appropriating the natural resource.

and from your comment elsewhere.

> The homestead principle is based on the notion that if something is unclaimed, and someone adds value to it, they should be able to enjoy the full benefit of that value-added thing.

What resources are not scarce in your view? If a forest is unclaimed and then I should be allowed to claim and cut it to produce valuable furniture and keep all the profit to me. Noting available on this earth is unlimited or free.

> A sound principle is universal, and not arbitrarily stop being morally applicable due to considerations relating to the sum involved. There is no sound principle for a tax on income or private property.

Universal Principal is progressive taxation, and tax rate is determined by scale of operation. An individual making furniture out of unclaimed wood cannot be compared to an industrial scale operation resulting in deforestation and they cannot be taxed on the same rate.

> Now if the iron ore miner pays the fee, mines the ore, smelts the iron, and fashions the iron into an incredible machine, you have absolutely no right to what the machine produces. An income tax is not a tax on using scarce natural resources, or a charge for damaging the environment. It is robbery against someone successfully generating economic value. It is a human rights violation.

Ok what this hypothetical machine is going to produce?

You have also chosen not to reply back to other data points so I will leave the argument here. What is your on Warren Buffet's observation or tax rates vs. employment data.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#272

Post by aminok »

drieddust wrote: post #271
aminok wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This limit can very well be a million or a few millions. An income tax rate of 80 percent on any income bracket is extremely heavy according to my definition of a 'heavy tax', as is a tax amounting to 2-10% of the value of privately owned assets. His proposal is of the typical disastrous socialist variety that show an utter misunderstanding of how capital is formed. >You are circumventing the basic question. From wh…

> If we are going to change the fundamental premise of the example, and assume a scarce natural resource is being appropriated, then society could certainly charge a fee for the act of appropriating the natural resource. and from your comment elsewhere. > The homestead principle is based on the notion that if something is unclaimed, and someone adds value to it, they should be able to enjoy the full benefit of that v…

Charging a fee for appropriating natural resources can be fully justified, but whether a fee is charged comes down to practicality.

Example: it's not practical to charge every individual camper a fee for every piece of obsidian they find. While scarce, the amount of obsidian they stand to find and take is so small, that the cost of enforcing the tax would far exceed the cost to society of them depriving us of the natural resource. Moreover, the amount they're taking is so small that the actual fee they would have to pay society to compensate it for the appropriation of this natural resource would be close to zero.

>What resources are not scarce in your view? If a forest is unclaimed and then I should be allowed to claim and cut it to produce valuable furniture and keep all the profit to me. Noting available on this earth is unlimited or free.

You should have to pay society for the value of the trees you're cutting down, and the cost you're incurring upon society through the harm the tree-cutting does to the rest of the forest. Society is also fully within its rights to reserve some areas of the forest to maintain the ecosystem.

>Universal Principal is progressive taxation, and tax rate is determined by scale of operation.

There is no universal principle behind an income tax. You yourself said it doesn't apply to petty transactions involving me trading a clay figurine for sea shells. It's not universal. It's arbitrary gouging of those with the most to tax.

>An individual making furniture out of unclaimed wood cannot be compared to an industrial scale operation resulting in deforestation and they cannot be taxed on the same rate.

Morally there's no qualitative difference. 1 billion individual furniture makers cutting down 1 tree each does exactly the same amount of damage as one company cutting down 1 billion trees. It's the natural resources that should be taxed, not the people.

>Ok what this hypothetical machine is going to produce?

This hypothetical machine produces information. It's a computer. It sells computations. It is powered by solar panels that are on land that I'm renting from the government.

I've paid for the cost of the natural resources I'm using (iron ore and sunlight I'm using up). The iron ore and energy is legitimately mine. You have no right to the value I generate using these inputs.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#273

Post by turar »

BurningFrog wrote: post #144
turar wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No countries actually had communism, but if we're talking about socialism, then you're mostly right. My opinion is that there are many reasons for it, including: - Those countries were poor and without sufficiently established democratic institutions. - Those countries had to immediately mobilize to defend from richer capitalist countries (lead by the US) trying to undermine them in any possible way. Constant defense…

Central planning of all production means that the central planners controls everything in society.

Central planning is not a requirement for socialism.

In fact, the only significant difference between capitalism and socialism is a democratically controlled workplace, which is inherently less authoritarian than capitalistic totalitarian workplace governance.

It's also ironic how people constantly conflate "democracy" and "capitalism" on one hand, and "totalitarianism" and "communism" on the other, while completely accepting totalitarianism during a significant portion of their life -- their workplace.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#274

Post by vanderZwan »

aminok wrote: post #211
vanderZwan wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm concluding it because I have read it so know disconnected from reality your interpretation is.

This is a low value comment. A substantive comment would identify parts of my argument that you believe are disconnected from reality, and would substantiate the claim with logical arguments.

Note how you still avoid talking about whether you've ever read it or not.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#275

Post by ap22213 »

aminok wrote: post #246
aninhumer wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can define it like that, but in doing so you've just rolled an extremely complicated economic system (property) into the otherwise very simple concept of non-aggression. I think "hurting or threatening to hurt people" is a perfectly sufficient definition of aggression, and trying to stretch it to include property rights is a rhetorical trick to try and make a complicated political opinion seem obviously cor…

Laws against stealing are one of the basic laws of society. Property is not extremely complicated. If I take your laptop without your consent, that's a violation of your rights. If you have 20 laptops, that doesn't change that fact. If I have 99 other people that agree that I should be able to take your laptop, that still doesn't change that fact.

What evidence are you using to claim that laws against 'stealing' are one of the basic laws of society? I assume you mean after codified laws and surely after agriculture. And, probably post-enlightenment, right?

But, at that point, laws are no longer 'basic laws of society' but laws of the sovereign - to maintain their power and control. And, interestingly, the soverign is the only one allowed to steal. I'm suggesting that maybe those 'laws' are no longer useful or at least may need to be modified. And, I think it's a cop-out to not try to think beyond that.

But, let's go back before the king. Did people really own land then? Doubtful. Did they even have individual property rights? Probably not in the sense that we do today. Most 'property' was collective. And, people didn't own land, which was thought as sacred.

In fact, behavior within families and kin groups is not much different then it was 12,0000 years ago. And, of all families and kin groups that I know, I see young children taught to share within the group. Where that breaks down is when they encounter strangers or 'invading' groups. And, only then do they rely on the laws of the state to make transactions.

So, that's what I mean when I point out my neighbors' behavior. Their natural inclination is to share (at least with those of their kin group).

Again, I don't think capitalism or communism are the answer. I don't know what is. I just think we can imagine something better.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#276

Post by [deleted] »

aminok wrote: post #207
ap22213 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse my ignorance, but how can one then have a concept of property without implying the use of force?

Force in defense of property is self-defense. Force in pursuit of other people's property is aggression. Aggression is the problem, not force in general.

[deleted]

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#277

Post by witty_username »

humanrebar wrote: post #216
witty_username wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Furthermore, what do we with those who are just unable to produce anything of value? it's implied that they just die. Capitalism doesn't stop a person from donating to those people. Indeed, that's what happens through the government.

It's not really a donation if it's not voluntary. Whether someone should be supported by the government is an interesting question but calling taxes and welfare donations is doublespeak.

You're right.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#278

Post by Mikeb85 »

om2 wrote: post #189
Mikeb85 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing that always puzzles me about r > g is that it's comparing a first derivative to a second derivative. How can this be meaningful? It's not. It's Piketty trolling the economics field, which has become overly math-y, and try too hard to distil complex interactions into basic formulae. It's basically his way of saying that capital's share of income is growing faster than labour's share of income, or that the…

r isn't the growth rate of capital's share of income though. r represent the return on capital (which is proportional to capital's share of income), not the growth rate of the return on capital, or the growth rate of capital's (share of) income. On the other hand, g isn't the return on labor, or labor's share of income. It's (approximately) the growth rate of the return on labor. Would you rather have $100 and then g…

In Piketty's model, r is return on capital. So that means it's the return on things like equities (and btw, interest is compounding on investments, don't know why you represented otherwise), real estate (Piketty is not overly find of the role of rentiers/landlords in the economy), machinery and so on. So the money accrued by the owners of wealth and machinery that is, essentially passive income, or income generated by capital, is r.

g is the growth of the economy. We calculate it as GDP, what he's interested in is basically people's combined incomes and economic activity that goes with it.

The premise that r > g is saying that people who have wealth, their return on that wealth will always be higher than the growth of the economy. If the economy grows 1%, the return on capital (remember it's all capital in the economic sense) will be more than 1%. Now this isn't true for all years in all places, but it has been shown to be true in the long run, which is how wealth is accrued quicker by those who already have wealth, and how inequality increases. Keep in mind Piketty's book is a massive tome.

And btw, comparing a rate that's calculated as %/year to another calculated as %/year is mathematically correct.

Your example is nonsense btw, it almost seems like you've confused r with g, because interest certainly compounds with capital, whereas with income, while you'll get increases over time, it generally isn't of the same magnitude and relates to labour, of which you have a finite amount.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#279

Post by drieddust »

aminok wrote: post #272
drieddust wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we are going to change the fundamental premise of the example, and assume a scarce natural resource is being appropriated, then society could certainly charge a fee for the act of appropriating the natural resource. and from your comment elsewhere. > The homestead principle is based on the notion that if something is unclaimed, and someone adds value to it, they should be able to enjoy the full benefit of that v…

Charging a fee for appropriating natural resources can be fully justified, but whether a fee is charged comes down to practicality. Example: it's not practical to charge every individual camper a fee for every piece of obsidian they find. While scarce, the amount of obsidian they stand to find and take is so small, that the cost of enforcing the tax would far exceed the cost to society of them depriving us of the nat…

> This hypothetical machine produces information. It's a computer. It sells computations. It is powered by solar panels that are on land that I'm renting from the government.

I am glad you elaborated. So how this information is produced. In order to produce the information, you will rely on the works of centuries of collaborating between individual and groups. You will use that for free to produce value and then sell it on price of your choosing?

I am not against Capitalism. On the contrary, I hate collectivism with passion. Argument in favor of progressive taxation does not mean we are heading towards communism.You constantly use tangible and intangible resources from society without paying for them and right taxation is necessary to keep providing you those resources.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, in 20 minutes (2014) [video]

#280

Post by quadrangle »

orasis wrote: post #178
quadrangle wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of evil is not based on being out of touch with reality. "Tragically flawed" would be a better term for what you are talking about.

I like to define "evil" as a cause whose effects compound negatively toward human wellbeing. so I think their use of "evil" is fine.

The way evil is used as a word by most people, your definition stretches far too wide. The connotation of "evil" is far more appalling than merely anything negative for human well-being. By your definition far too many things are evil to the point where the word is pretty mild, which is not how most people use it.

In short: you are doing poor communication to redefine it so differently from normal use.

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