231–240 of 359 posts
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"Western civilization" is not a useful concept so is falling out of use
It's called the "west" in opposition to the eastern block during the cold war. And yes it's a useful concept because it exists and is well defined.
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To be practical, I would allow some transfer of wealth actually but put a marginal tax rate of 100% over say 5 to 10 million, gradually increasing from say 0% at 250k. That seems like a fair compromise. Sure, guaranteeing basic living conditions would be nice, but as we can clearly see right now, there isn't much support for it. This tax would provide plenty of money to get to that goal, however.
Really bad idea. That would encourage people to consume wealth over 5 to 10 million during their lifetimes, i.e. destroy real wealth, instead of investing it in productive enterprises, i.e. building real wealth. You want a situation where wealthy people build a lot more wealth than they consume. The last thing you want is for them to consume their wealth, making themselves better off but the society overall much, muc…
Or, maybe... if there were less of an advantage to accumulating wealth, we wouldn't destroy ourselves and the environment quite so madly while doing so. Great fortunes would not be generated, because what would the point be?
ISTM that a rich person who doesn't want her estate to be confiscated upon her death could just divide it among many heirs? If the progressive tax is not levied on the heir rather than the estate, then maybe it should be. Intentional division would destroy dynastic family wealth without wasting it on the frivolous spending of the state.
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While the physical and temporal scope of a particular empire, and the civilization it ruled over, have sometimes been co-extensive, that does not mean that the definitions are arbitrary or interchangeable. My understanding is that 'civilization' refers to a social organization in which populations, economic and political activity are concentrated in cities, and is independent of which political entity is running the…
Take turkey.... Did the Byzantine/Roman civilization end when the ottomans took over? Social organization changed, but not wholesale. social organization in which populations, Economic and political activity continued, concentrated in cities. Greek remained a major language, as did many Greek laws. Incidentally, why was Rome/Byzantine civilization Greek speaking in anatolia? Because it had been Hellenised long before…
I assume the author of the second chart that you mention is doing the same thing.
Frequency of use is not the most important issue, but Google estimates 75,400 hits for "Byzantine civilization" (plus 15,400 for "Byzantine civilisation"), and 4.3 million for "Byzantine empire".
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>...it would make a difference. It sure would. If I wanted to design a system to throw society into abject chaos, basically permanently, I can’t think of a better way than a rule of “make it impossible to build something for your children”. That idea is anti-family, it’s anti-civil-society, and it’s anti-civilization.
"My family won't receive huge amounts of my net worth. That doesn't mean they'll get nothing. My children have already received some money from me and Susie and will receive more. I still believe in the philosophy ... that a very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing." - Warren Buffett I think progressive wealth transfer taxes are a perfectly good middle ground.
Wealth transfer is income, so progressive income tax without exempting wealth transfer from income tax would seem the most direct solution.
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To be practical, I would allow some transfer of wealth actually but put a marginal tax rate of 100% over say 5 to 10 million, gradually increasing from say 0% at 250k. That seems like a fair compromise. Sure, guaranteeing basic living conditions would be nice, but as we can clearly see right now, there isn't much support for it. This tax would provide plenty of money to get to that goal, however.
Really bad idea. That would encourage people to consume wealth over 5 to 10 million during their lifetimes, i.e. destroy real wealth, instead of investing it in productive enterprises, i.e. building real wealth. You want a situation where wealthy people build a lot more wealth than they consume. The last thing you want is for them to consume their wealth, making themselves better off but the society overall much, muc…
No, it would encourage people to conceal wealth transfers as consumptive spending. (Just like existing dedicated wealth transfer taxes—gift and estate taxes—do, but more strongly, and we've seen what people dedicated to transferring wealth, like Fred Trump, already do.)
Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term? Serious question. It just seems that a lot of entries on this list are actually part of the same civilization. In the same way that I would consider the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, and the American Empire to be really all a part of the same Western Civilization. But maybe my thinking is totall…
>>> Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term? They even got that wrong. The Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire are the same political entity. Arguably the Ottoman Empire was as well, since the Ottomans basically left the Byzantine bureaucracy intact. The Sultan even used the title Caesar and declared himself protector o…
The is no objective answer to such questions - it gets down to who gets to write history and what they are trying to achieve. Charlemagne, The Holy Roman Empire and Renaissance Italy derived legitimacy by considering themselves the true successor of Rome. So did the Catholic church to some extent. Therefore western historiography have traditionally sidelined the Eastern Roman Empire. Even the name "Byzantine Empire" is part of this framing.
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Really bad idea. That would encourage people to consume wealth over 5 to 10 million during their lifetimes, i.e. destroy real wealth, instead of investing it in productive enterprises, i.e. building real wealth. You want a situation where wealthy people build a lot more wealth than they consume. The last thing you want is for them to consume their wealth, making themselves better off but the society overall much, muc…
> That would encourage people to consume wealth over 5 to 10 million during their lifetimes, No, it would encourage people to conceal wealth transfers as consumptive spending. (Just like existing dedicated wealth transfer taxes—gift and estate taxes—do, but more strongly, and we've seen what people dedicated to transferring wealth, like Fred Trump, already do.)
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Inequality fueled the French revolution. Getting rid of aristocracy led to modern democracies. Most European countries have steep inheritance taxes to prevent going back to oligarchy.
"Most European countries have steep inheritance taxes to prevent going back to oligarchy." Which has the problem of course, that the really rich have ways of not beeing affected by those laws too much. Which is not too hard, when the tax-laws are ridiciously complicated with many exceptions for good connected lawyers and many countries on this planet who welcome any people and money as long as they get a small share.
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> Interesting point. One thing that speaks for the relative harmlessness of hereditary wealth is, what happens when it gets passed on to an insane/idiotic/psychopathic heir. In these cases, it normally gets rapidly redistributed, as the heir wastes their fortune. We are past that now. Now we have advisors, funds, elite accountants, and all kinds of dead easy ways to invest and keep huge wealth long term, for even the…
Wrong. Keeping wealth long term is difficult. 1. Advisors and accountants do not own the wealth - you set the goals. If you want to spend it or mismanage it, they are not going to stop you. 2. The wealthier you are, the more difficult it is to maintain the real value of your wealth, in general. 3. If you have 3 children, they have 3 children and so on, and you split your wealth equally among your children, even a bil…
E.g. maintaining the "real value" is not as much of problem for people having tens of billions (as we increasingly see today). Even if the value drops, they're still multi-billionaires. And diversification strategies today span the globe.
And the "3 children inheritance diffusion" problem is easy to solve: rich people have less kids today than historically.
There's also that:
https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...
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Are you seriously claiming that you can understand seal script inscriptions? Are you Indiana Jones?
Yes for me. Of course I don't know every single character by heart but with a little bit practice and the help of a dictionary you can read a lot. You can even download some seal script fonts and make all the Chinese websites shown in seal script.
With some training, people can read seal script inscriptions because the structure is already fairly close to regular script which is what people use today.
The radicals are written in slightly different styles from today. It actually makes sense. Seal script is a very artistic form of calligraphy, so people use it for their seals hence the name.
An example of the "drum" character: http://www.guoxuedashi.com/zixing/yanbian/11208mb/ The horizontal arrow is the time line, starting from oracle bone script. The 4th one of the first row is seal script and the last regular script.
The idea depicted here is hitting a decorated drum on a rack with a drum stick holding in the hand.