521–530 of 660 posts
Adding this to my reading list. I've thought for years that we should place at hard cap on wealth somewhere around $10 or $15 million. Because that's the point at which you have enough wealth to live a comfortably middle class lifestyle for the rest of your life, still pass down a substantial chunk to your children, and never have to earn another cent. I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a worker o…
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"Everyone driving slower than me is a slowpoke, everyone driving faster is a maniac" This was on full display back in 2017-2018 when tax code was changed to limit the amount of State and Local taxes (SALT) that could be deducted from your Federal tax liability. The original SALT deduction, before the change, clearly benefited the wealthy, with large mortgages and living in high-tax (read: expensive) areas. Cue articl…
> considers themselves 'middle class' They don't consider themselves middle class, statistically they are middle class based on (income, wealth, purchasing power, etc.). They aren't out of touch - nobody asked them - they just live where there's a higher cost of living. But it pays off, or they would move someplace less expensive, and housing would cost the same nationwide.
I'm wondering if people understand that almost all the pleasures/comforts in modern life were created by people who wouldn't exist in this system.
People with positive inability to create wealth self-appoint to control the people that have demonstrable ability to create wealth. Doing so is the only way for the former to end up in control of wealth, again because they are incapable of generating it themselves.
It's a bit amusing that no one about the commie paradox - the group of people that profess the greatest ability to central plan and redistribute wealth is entirely devoid of individuals with a track record of creating wealth. A reasonable person would expect a strong correlation there.
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Explain how to reconcile these two things: “ if some minerals are discovered on your heretofore low value land” And “ creating millions of dollars worth of goods or services” Where was the act of creation that led to the increase of the value? How did the land to acquire become yours? Most likely you didn’t discover the land, or do anything to find the materials (hiring people to do labor) so there’s no reason to thi…
It incentivizes people to find minerals that are valuable to the public. You can construct a hypothetical where someone gets lucky, and you can construct one where someone has reason to suspect the minerals are there and invests in the land.
You don't even need to construct the scenario where someone with enough capital just buys up as much as possible, knowing they will get lucky with some subset of their property. That's both a modern problem and the plot of Blazing Saddles (yes, I'm choosing that example to focus on how widespread of an issue this has been for centuries).
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You’re confusing markets with capitalism Capitalism requires a philosophical split between labor, productivity, and capital ownership A market is simply a price clearing mechanism in the context of known exchange rates of commodities, you don’t even need money for it, and says nothing about the ownership composition of the actors making trading decisions
If you have a labor market then you have capitalism, since it lets you hire labor to work for you and that is enough to make you a billionaire. So markets and capitalism are tightly coupled things, you can have some very limited markets without capitalism but in general if you have a pretty free market you have capitalism.
I’m not sure what this proves though
Again the concept of a market is independent of capitalism, they are not mutually excluding
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> When we allow wealth to accumulate we are also allowing power to accumulate. Like the power of JD Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, which was much greater than any rich man today.... oh wait.. those went defunct too. Honestly, the fact that their heirs, despite having untold wealth were unable to keep the business going actually shows that individuals sometimes do have merits on their own, independent of the amount…
It would be more accurate to look at the foundations they left behind.
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> I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a worker owned economy While I'm sympathetic to this ideal, I don't think it works. All you'd do is add all the inefficiencies of politics into business-level decision making. Democratic processes should be reserved for governing shared resources, like water and air, where independent decision making has pathologies, and independent hierarchical systems are goo…
> All you'd do is add all the inefficiencies of politics into business-level decision making. While I'm sympathetic to that line of thought, I feel like it ignores the reality that most business-level decision making is already inefficient and political. Where is the competition and fairness when a sustainable business is bought out, prices increased and development halted to wring out every bit of value, and then so…
Far less than it would be under the proposed system. There's effectively a dictator after all.
> Where is the competition and fairness when a sustainable business is bought out, prices increased and development halted to wring out every bit of value, and then sold off for parts to competitors when no profit is left?
I never said it didn't have pathologies of its own, which is why I said that we have to ensure there's competition and fairness. Arguably, anti-competitive laws have not been properly enforced for quite some time.
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The meme that the market system is democratic is strange to me. It's not a dictatorship, but it's odd to claim that something is democratic when I (as a moderately well off American) have as many votes as ten less well-off people in my own country. More, if you adjust for the number of votes each person need to use to not die. The difference grows further when you consider that there are people with well over 1,000x…
The definition of democracy is NOT limited to one person one vote. For instance, corporate board seats are democratic, but you only get to vote with as many shares as you own.
That said I think you've helped a bit with my confusion here. The point where it moves from democracy to something else is obviously not clear -- so probably the people who consider the market system to be democratic just draw that line differently from me.
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It seems likely that the only way to become a billionaire is through worker exploitation, collusion, cheating the system through tax evation and asset laundering, etc. I think politico-economic interference is the crux of the problem. For example, someone with $10 million are trying to maintain their lifestyle, they want to know what stocks, bonds, and certificates, and real estate to invest in. Someone with $100 mil…
> It seems likely that the only way to become a billionaire is through worker exploitation, collusion, cheating the system through tax evation and asset laundering, etc. What workers did J.K. Rowling exploit to become a billionaire? Did Stephen King only cheat half as much to arrive at his half-billion net worth? They produced something that people wanted to buy that previously did not exist, and everyone in the chai…