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Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

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Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#171

Post by fsckboy »

markus_zhang wrote: post #157
alexose wrote: post #142

I find it very disappointing that the most reliably lucrative career arc for a programmer nowadays is to get hired by a tech giant and stay there as long as possible. And the second most is probably to go to work for a company that could get gobbled up by a tech giant. I've made a career out of small startups, and I wouldn't trade it for a thing. On the other hand, if I'd gone to work for Amazon straight out of colle…

Was not the case for most careers out there? If you want a comfortable 9-5 job you generally join a giant and stay as long as possible.

that's not what he's saying. He's saying higher overall income, and it comes with lower risk than startups.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#172

Post by markus_zhang »

bedhead wrote: post #160
lanevorockz wrote: post #59

Trying to break the conditioning here but government should always tax in a way that it incentive WORK. The way things are Wealth is no longer being produced, so those who have it will be on top because income will never be enough to prop you up. Therefore we should want a Growth market so that more wealth is produced and risk averse people will still be rich but more people will become as rich as them. To resolve In…

I've long argued for massive estate taxes on the very rich that forces a partial reset on wealth and avoid medieval times when land ownership was just passed down generation to generation. It's the only fair and practical wealth tax I can think of. I have no problem at all with Bezos being filthy rich, however, I have a giant problem with his kids and all descendants being billionaires. A huge estate tax would also m…

There are tons of loop holes. In the end, if said legislation passes both floors the only ones got hit are the middle class people who don't have the knowledge and means to use those loopholes.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#173

Post by Frost1x »

aj7 wrote: post #154
baby wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching Super Size Me 2 you realize that the same thing happened to the chicken industry. It’s frightening. It’s like we have a democracy (so far) and under that a lot of smaller authoritarian organizations that are hard to notice or dismantle. Some of the farmers were basically slaves, in huge debts to these companies way of running things. Unbelievable.

Corporate governance is authoritarian. Period.

And its growing ever more unavoidable in daily life for anyone trying to live.

Pretty much everyone is becoming subject to these authoritarian regimes (corporate structures) as they invade and carve away at our democracy through financial influence, regulatory capture, etc.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#175

Post by nostrademons »

RNCTX wrote: post #117
_2d30 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then if you want to help people build wealth that don’t have it, you make it much harder. I really feel like people need to look into land taxes a la Henry George: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George Taxing things like capital gains differently or implementing a generic wealth tax can actually hurt those we want to help to build wealth as well as incentivize things like expatriation of wealth. Can’t expatr…

Taxes are not punishment. Taxes exist because a certain amount of wealth is required to maintain a state. I understand that the financial/business world has been trying to convince people otherwise since the mid 1970s, but they are still as wrong today as they were then. Tax “fairness” is therefore simple. He who earns the most should pay the most. You cannot expatriate dollars. The currency is issued by the state an…

Land taxes are actually better in those regards than income or capital gains taxes.

You can't hide land, and if you want the state to enforce your property rights, you can't alter your behavior in a way that lets you avoid paying the tax. That makes the land tax what economist call a "zero-deadweight" tax: it doesn't decrease economic activity or consumer wellbeing at all. There's also an economic theorem [1] that an LVT results in the optimal size of government: investment in public goods increases the value of land (and hence rent that can be charged for it), but also the tax on that land, so citizens have an incentive to vote in only those public works projects that increase rents more than their cost in taxes.

Whereas if you put a tariff on iPhones at the dock, Apple will pass that tariff along to consumers, prices will go up, and fewer people that want an iPhone will be able to afford one. The "HQ in Ireland" trick revolves around avoiding dollars at all: profits from a company's EUs operations are retained as Euros and then used to pay European employees or exchanged directly for RMBs to pay for Chinese goods.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#176

Post by kebman »

strbean wrote: post #170
kebman wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no other reason you could think of to feed a hungry person? Free individuals might give something out of benevolence. But a state institution is not a free individual. It can only represent the collective, and you cannot ensure that all individuals in such a collective would agree to such an exchange, or feel benevolent about it. As such, there is no such thing as a benevolent state. Instead, you can employ…

> It can only represent the collective, and you cannot ensure that all individuals in such a collective would agree to such an exchange, or feel benevolent about it. As such, there is no such thing as a benevolent state. A state is only benevolent if every single citizen is benevolent? That seems like a pointless assertion. In a democracy, in theory, the majority is what matters.

Ah, yes. The majority that forced Socrates to drink poison.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#177

Post by rapsey »

AWildC182 wrote: post #144
rapsey wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see someone back up the data with regards to automation. Why is the burden of truth on the other side? Fact of the matter is Chinese factories that produce the world's gadgets employ millions. This is reality and not some mythical fully automated factories. Globalism made the very poor in China/Mexico/etc. richer, created their middle class and it made the very rich in US/EU even richer at the cost of…

While tangential, it should be noted that creating jobs in Mexico and Canada will probably always be a net good for the US even if it means some net loss of jobs in the near term. Being closely connected with populous neighbors whom you can enrich such that they can buy your stuff will vastly strengthen the US's position as well as the NA bloc. We want manufacturing in mexico because we're connected by literal rail l…

> While tangential, it should be noted that creating jobs in Mexico and Canada will probably always be a net good for the US even if it means some net loss of jobs in the near term.

Yeah the rust belt job loss is only temporary. They will come back any day now.

> We want manufacturing in mexico because we're connected by literal rail lines and can ship products back and forth far more readily and in an environmentally friendly way.

Yeah I'm sure those Mexico factories have all the environmental regulations that US/Canada does.

> This may sound controversial but it's likely the only way forward for the US to compete with China long term.

The US has given China it's growth. It has exported jobs and exported it's middle class along with it. It has also exported much of it's high tech advantage into China. All for the short term benefit of the investor class and it's billionaires. Competing with China could start by not giving away every advantage.

> Trying to ostracize our neighbors and go it alone against a country 4x our size is not a geopolitically sound move.

The only ostracizing I do is towards the billionaires who shape economic policy to their benefit and everyone else's expense.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#178

Post by Sargos »

bedhead wrote: post #160
lanevorockz wrote: post #59

Trying to break the conditioning here but government should always tax in a way that it incentive WORK. The way things are Wealth is no longer being produced, so those who have it will be on top because income will never be enough to prop you up. Therefore we should want a Growth market so that more wealth is produced and risk averse people will still be rich but more people will become as rich as them. To resolve In…

I've long argued for massive estate taxes on the very rich that forces a partial reset on wealth and avoid medieval times when land ownership was just passed down generation to generation. It's the only fair and practical wealth tax I can think of. I have no problem at all with Bezos being filthy rich, however, I have a giant problem with his kids and all descendants being billionaires. A huge estate tax would also m…

>I'm still baffled why no one has seriously floated this idea though.

It's not even a fringe idea that government policy is dictated by the wealthy class. What incentive do they have to do this?

The only way that it will happen is by regular people making it policy, and our current system doesn't give us a voice on what happens.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#179

Post by chillacy »

lanevorockz wrote: post #59

Trying to break the conditioning here but government should always tax in a way that it incentive WORK. The way things are Wealth is no longer being produced, so those who have it will be on top because income will never be enough to prop you up. Therefore we should want a Growth market so that more wealth is produced and risk averse people will still be rich but more people will become as rich as them. To resolve In…

I'm with you but substitute WORK for Value Creation. It's way to easy to "create jobs" which are essentially busy-work with 0 to negative productivity. In the coming decades, economic productivity will become more and more important as gains from elsewhere start to taper out.

Re: Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends

#180

Post by strbean »

Signez wrote: post #79
lanevorockz wrote: post #59

Trying to break the conditioning here but government should always tax in a way that it incentive WORK. The way things are Wealth is no longer being produced, so those who have it will be on top because income will never be enough to prop you up. Therefore we should want a Growth market so that more wealth is produced and risk averse people will still be rich but more people will become as rich as them. To resolve In…

> To resolve inequality we can't just have the mindset of punish the rich for creating wealth. I would argue that millions (if not billions) are injected into corr^Wlobbying to make sure that we never fully have this mindset, indeed. Meanwhile, the rich are way less taxed (proportionally) than the middle class, and in my opinion, that's a problem that stifle Western economies.

Let's not gloss over the hilarious assumption that wealth is fairly apportioned based on who "creates" it.
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