591–600 of 694 posts
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What incentive would anyone have in making more then 400K a year if you were going to be taxed at 90%?
Why should people be incentivized to take home more than 400k/year? Why not reinvest that money in the business and have the executives take home only $150k/year?
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"Non distortive" You can't imagine a way a tax like that would change people's behavior? People would give their money to their children before they die, or spend it all on themselves, and maybe some would work less because they were previously motivated by building up assets to give to their children.
I never understand why someone working less is considered a bad thing. If a person works less that leaves a vacuum for their services which will then be filled by another market actor.
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Socialism is a bit of an over-loaded word. Most people use it to speak about market economies in western Europe with heavily funded public health, wellness, and education programs which intend to promote democratic constitutional goals such as equal opportunity for citizens. Planned economies such as the USSR clearly impinge on human liberty, tend to be undemocratic, and are usually very inefficient, and I think almo…
>Planned economies such as the USSR clearly impinge on human liberty, tend to be undemocratic, and are usually very inefficient I disagree that they impinge on human freedom, at least I don't think they do compared to capitalist economy. I see no reason why they should be undemocratic. And you'll find nobody in favour of a 5 year plan as the USSR had; there have been massive advances in economic planning methods, as…
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So you can sell PayPal one day for $200 million and have the capital to build a space ship company and the first viable fully electric car manufacturer.
Sadly Musk is an outlier. Very few entrepreneurs have had his impact on the world.
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What would you suggest as an alternative if there were only enough jobs to support 20-30% of people .. including professional jobs like doctors/radiologists/lawyers being displaced?
Slightly offtopic, althought maybe not: Is it any political party's goal to close all tax loop holes, so as to virtually eliminate the possibility of another Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, at least on their scale?
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Are you making a modest proposal that people should go from four kids to one, post facto? I think everyone deserves to be able to have vacation time, especially single parents.
I'm not proposing anything. Just suggesting that there are more factors than income that affect 'inequality'. An article that focusses on inequality due to low income should perhaps pick an example with a more typical family situation.
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How do you kill the elite if they have advanced weaponry and can monitor all communications? What happens if they have no use for servants or consumers by virtue of having automated all their production needs? This scenario may sound extreme but it's certainly not implausible.
This is why Trump is arming police force with military grade weapons--to protect the elite should the lower classes rise up.... That and he's using racism to divide and conquer us--make us hate and fight ourselves poor/middle class vs poor/middleclass -- if we're too busy infighting we'll never join forces and rise up against the elites...
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Markets are optimization processes, so, very powerful tools. Leaving the metric to optimize to the optimization process doesn't look a good idea, the same way it's not a good idea to leave the thermostat to choose the temperature. In my experience, the only people that think that the thermostat it's who should choose the temperature, it's the people that feels very comfortable with the current one and don't care abou…
I really like your analogy, but what did you mean by "anything is better"?
That's globalization for you. Apple's software is based on open source BSD. They sub-contract the building of their phones to China, and they are made mostly with Korean chips and displays. Apple can import cheap indentured workers from overseas on H1B visas. They avoid US tax by pushing their profits through Ireland. Kodak was a far more progressive company that invested in their employees. Apple is now the world's…
Kodak have missed digital revolution and stayed on analog for too long, that's why it's dead. Treating its employees better had nothing to do with that (except maybe hasten downfall a little).
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Might as well give up trying to earthquake proof buildings as well because earthquakes are just an inherent fact of life. That's doing some reductio ad absurdum on your argument but you are saying we should just give up trying to fight something that bad and give some minor help when possible, correct? We can try to do better
I'm not saying we shouldn't try. Each individual person willing to help should do so. I'm saying more broadly that we're all probably at the mercy of an inescapable cycle that may not end until humanity is willing to cooperate perfectly at the global/species level of abstraction. 'The Lessons of History' also comments that competition is also inherent to our biological nature. There's a passage about how we usually o…