Life During Class Wartime
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Life During Class Wartime
1–10 of 263 posts
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#2Regarding the IMF report, is it actually harder to hide wealth than income, or is it that there are so few global taxes on wealth that nobody's currently bothering to hide it? It seems like income, being a continuous series of transactions, would be the more difficult of the two.
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#3Yeah I'm glad somebody's talking about it. Wealth inequality seems like it will be THE defining issue of our lives (accelerated drastically by AI).
I think there are many practical ways to solve it, and would love to see more proposals out there. Instead I tend to see nihilism or division.
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#4Yeah I'm glad somebody's talking about it. Wealth inequality seems like it will be THE defining issue of our lives (accelerated drastically by AI). I think there are many practical ways to solve it, and would love to see more proposals out there. Instead I tend to see nihilism or division.
Extreme power inequality seems to be the default state of human society. Power concentrates until it's maximally concentrated, then stays there. Power shakeups seem to usually replace one group of elites with another group of smaller or the same size.
Exceptions to this rule come about for specific reasons. Before the industrial revolution, there just wasn't that much power to go around. Everyone was working their land for sustenance, and the rent-seeking nobility extracted some percent of production because that's what there was to extract. When the industrial revolution came, those who figured out how to exploit it became the new nobility and worked their employees to the bone. It was only after actual, bloody, war between the factory owners and the employees that we got labor rights, which were a truce agreement. And that agreement's been steadily declining since Reagan. It took a while because the beneficiaries of the labor rights era were able to hold onto their wealth and pass it down to their children, but now we're back in the same factory feudalism situation again, but with different technological status.
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#5Regarding the IMF report, is it actually harder to hide wealth than income, or is it that there are so few global taxes on wealth that nobody's currently bothering to hide it? It seems like income, being a continuous series of transactions, would be the more difficult of the two.
I bet that both are fairly easy to hide, but some forms aren't. It's hard to hide when money arrives in your bank account and it's hard to hide that you own 51% of Tesla shares. You can do either one of those through a proxy however, which makes it harder to track down, not impossible (why does 51% of Tesla shareholding always agree with this guy? Why's he shilling Offshore Panama Corp LLC products so hard?)
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#6Regarding the IMF report, is it actually harder to hide wealth than income, or is it that there are so few global taxes on wealth that nobody's currently bothering to hide it? It seems like income, being a continuous series of transactions, would be the more difficult of the two.
I think it varies - each are easier/harder to hide in different ways at different scales. It's the "convicting Al Capone for tax evasion" thing. They didn't need to prove where his income came from, they could just show that his wealth was clearly higher than his declared income could have possibly yielded.
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#7[flagged]
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#8Yeah I'm glad somebody's talking about it. Wealth inequality seems like it will be THE defining issue of our lives (accelerated drastically by AI). I think there are many practical ways to solve it, and would love to see more proposals out there. Instead I tend to see nihilism or division.
[flagged]
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#9Yeah I'm glad somebody's talking about it. Wealth inequality seems like it will be THE defining issue of our lives (accelerated drastically by AI). I think there are many practical ways to solve it, and would love to see more proposals out there. Instead I tend to see nihilism or division.
Extreme power inequality seems to be the default state of human society. Power concentrates until it's maximally concentrated, then stays there. Power shakeups seem to usually replace one group of elites with another group of smaller or the same size. Exceptions to this rule come about for specific reasons. Before the industrial revolution, there just wasn't that much power to go around. Everyone was working their la…
I don't know why you're down voted. Perhaps the observation that inequality is often and the noble savage utopian dream of "all pigs are equal" is not the norm is too a bitter pill to swallow
Re: Life During Class Wartime
#10[flagged]
And then?