Life During Class Wartime • Hacker News Board

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#71

Post by nerdsniper » Wed, May 06, 2026, 9:25 PM UTC

yabones wrote: post #52

For the vast majority of human civilization, all taxes were based on wealth. Your emperor, pharaoh, czar, or whoever was in charge sent a dude around to take a bit of everybody's stuff. Not how much income they made but how much stuff they actually had . It's only been the last 120-ish years that the idea that wealth and income were totally different things as far as taxation is concerned emerged. I think almost ever…

I think that could generally work domestically, as in, "I don't have anything to give you, I gave/lost it all to Bob...go get it from him". But it would need to be modified with a tax on any wealth leaving the country/jurisdiction, so I can't just make $1B and then send it all to my aunt in $COUNTRY / $STATE / $CITY with low/no wealth taxes and then claim that I don't have any wealth (unless there were sensible reciprocity agreements for tax revenue reapportionment).

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But I'm not sure if your historical claims are accurate. I believe a lot of taxes were a fraction of the expected yield of land, which is more complicated than just "taxing wealth vs. income". Yes, the taxes would go up if you owned more land, which sounds like a tax on wealth. But the imputed tax base would be based on historical yields (income) because the quality of the soil would vary (which also could be construed as a tax on wealth because higher quality soil meant land might be worth more per acre). It was also based on the weather during that growing season, if yields were down in that area then taxes would be lower that year, which sounds more like an income tax than a wealth tax.

You also said "its only been about 120 years since wealth and income were different":

The Christian tithe that became de jury under Charlemagne in 779 A.D. was a strict 10% tax on land yield each year (~income tax) but other empires and lords used fixed quotas (~wealth tax), and records exist that these could have brutal effects during years where weather resulted in lower yields.

There was the 600-year long sales tax on salt in France, which definitely wasn't a wealth tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabelle

In 1899 the UK instituted a 10% levy on annual incomes over £200, with a graduated rate for incomes between £60 and £200. Income taxes had a hiatus from 1816-1842 but has been permanent since the "Income Tax Act of 1842".

The Mit'a (Inca Empire, Pre-1532) taxed individuals "time". Which I think most people would consider kind of an income tax - it's literally paid in labor. Adult men had to spend a certain number of days each year working on state projects - like building roads, farming state lands, or fighting in the army. They didn't have currency. Their economy was based on centralized planning, labor taxation (mit'a), and state redistribution of goods.

The Saladin Tithe taxed revenues at 10% in 1188.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#72

Post by nervysnail » Wed, May 06, 2026, 9:27 PM UTC

Muromec wrote: post #28

nervysnail wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

... was an ideology that gave 200 million of people universal healthcare, universal childcare, public housing and increased luteracy rates but took away democracy and national self determination, unleashed genocide and allied with literal Hitler

How did it take away national self-determination exactly? The Soviet model regarding self-determination was definitely better than what any other nation had. I probably don't have to mention that Lenin wrote a whole book on national self-determination, defending the right to self-determination on the condition that it does not harm the socialist project.

Although one may call it superficial, a mere formality no indicator of self-determination in the Republic, it is remarkable that the Soviet ruble had 15 local languages printed on the banknote.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#73

Post by BobbyJo » Wed, May 06, 2026, 9:27 PM UTC

pitaj wrote: post #57

zug_zug wrote: post #3

Yeah 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.

My hot take is that wealth inequality is the least bad problem we could have, if it is even a problem at all. What people are actually experiencing is not wealth inequality, but cost disease. Vital things (housing, healthcare, education) are more expensive - and that's mostly the fault of state action.

Two things:

1) You have to get it out of your head that it is enough when everyone has X standard of living. It isn't. It's enough when less than a critical threshold of the population is dissatisfied, and that dissatisfaction can come no matter what the median/lowest standard of living is. This is just how societies work, uniformly.

2) Money is a ledger supported by a social contract. Spending wealth in ways that erode the social contract is bad. I think we can all agree 500M dollar yachts, empty luxury apartment buildings, and buying up shorelines in populated areas are all bad looks, and therefore, erode the social contract. The wealthy really need to step in and police each other socially here, if they want to continue being wealthy.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#74

Post by tormeh » Wed, May 06, 2026, 9:28 PM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #49

idle_zealot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally you'd spend the taxes on things that help people, but I would argue that even simply destroying the taxed wealth would be an improvement over what we have now, if only in that it would counter wealth/power disparity and enable democracy to work better. Allowing a subset of the population to accumulate power divorces their interests from the majority and represents the biggest threat to modern society. It woul…

> destroying the taxed wealth Wealth is farms, factories, skills, etc. How would destroying all that improve anyone's life? Wealth isn't money. It exists independent of any currency you can use to give it notional value.

The government decides who is owed what material goods. This is known as property rights. The destruction in this case would be equivalent to transferring the ownership of some factories to the government, exchanging those factories for something flammable on the open market and then setting fire to said flammable things. It's obviously wasteful, but definitely possible, and it won't directly and measurably impact anyone's quality of life. Investor confidence in your country will nosedive, though.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#75

Post by singleshot_ » Wed, May 06, 2026, 9:28 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #20

hootz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the west, the prevalent idea is that socialism/communism lost and that there is nothing beyond capitalism. This is it, we will forever live in a social-democracy state. I wonder who promotes this idea.

> In the west, the prevalent idea is that socialism/communism lost and that there is nothing beyond capitalism. It didn't just "lose", it killed millions of its own people in the process. Having been born in a communist state, I'd rather clean toilets in American than do anything else in the USSR. Edit: It's basically impossible to communicate the day-to-day misery and deprivation of late stage Communism without soun…

In the most impoverished part of my town (just kidding, in every part of my town) people live in the culverts that fill up with water when it rains. I am not sure what they do when it rains.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#76

Post by arzig » Wed, May 06, 2026, 9:29 PM UTC

yabones wrote: post #52

For the vast majority of human civilization, all taxes were based on wealth. Your emperor, pharaoh, czar, or whoever was in charge sent a dude around to take a bit of everybody's stuff. Not how much income they made but how much stuff they actually had . It's only been the last 120-ish years that the idea that wealth and income were totally different things as far as taxation is concerned emerged. I think almost ever…

For the vast majority of human history, only the ultra wealthy had any money. And then, just as now, taxing only those people would not yield sufficient resources to fund the state.

The problem is, and always will be, what happens to me is I am out of work. No one wants to force people to liquidate assets they might need to work, live, etc in order to pay an asset tax.

Then you get to the dividing line of, but what about the ultra wealthy? Well, sure, but then you write an insanely obtuse tax code to try and capture that wealth while leaving everyone else alone and the targets are highly motivated to find loopholes.

Progressives intuitively understand that it’s not worth the hassle to try and means test entitlements yet seem to miss the fact that trying to manage a confiscatory bureaucracy would have the same issues.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#77

Post by XorNot » Wed, May 06, 2026, 9:29 PM UTC

ethanwillis wrote: post #56

roxolotl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can read about the transition from the Gilded Age to The Progressive Era in US history for potential solutions. Anti-trust and political reform is a bit part. Political opinions were controlled undemocratically during that period as well through political machines. Direct election of senators, direct primaries, women’s suffrage were enacted to help with that.

And when these things aren't possible?

The US despite everything still runs a popular vote driven democracy that is clearly capable of implementing on short notice, sweeping changes to policy.

The problem remains that the US voter consistently demonstrates they don't actually care about these problems though, compared to using the state to intentionally inflict misery on subgroups they don't like.

The most radical thing the current administration proves is how unimportant taxes and cost of living actually were to its voters, given the broad support it retains despite overtly and continuously raising or making both those problems worse (read cares as: "understands" - for a group which wouldn't shut up about it, apparently significant changes aren't crippling enough to get them to change their vote in many cases).

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#78

Post by wrqvrwvq » Wed, May 06, 2026, 9:32 PM UTC

tantaman wrote: post #26

Increased taxation would be defensible if it was paired with spending reform. Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody. Increasing the tax and then directly paying people, with no PMC in the middle, seems win-win-win.

I don't think just paying people will make any difference at all. Most of the chronically poor in US at least have underlying problems such as addiction, schizophrenia or other affective disorders. Most chronically homeless people have turned down multiple state subsidized living options or have been booted from them for anti-social behavior. Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on the dollar to pay for drugs or other unnecessary things.

The other major issue with "free money" is that it is purely inflationary, unlike wages which offset most of their price pressure by providing a commensurate amount of goods/services. When you hand everyone a million dollars the price of everything just goes up, both because there's a flood of money and because there's even less incentive to produce something to buy with it.

I think there's any compassionate argument to be made for helping the indigent, but easy ideas like "taking money from job creators and value producers to pay for needles and degeneracy" are never going to work at all.

It's a bit of a trope to say that billionaires are hoarding wealth via financial shenanigans when all of their wealth is tied up in job and value creation.

The us govt wastes by some estimates 30% of its budget. Trillions annually. Have to start with the waste and fraud. Empty daycares are not a good use of hard-earned tax dollars and have a massively pernicious effect on the society. They're not taking care of kids or paying teachers. Just pure inflationary greed.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#79

Post by tormeh » Wed, May 06, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

lovich wrote: post #65

pitaj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History shows that the "fundamental change to power relations" is just a shift from moneyed interests to political/bureaucratic interests. Which is worse because while moneyed interests have power money can buy, political/bureaucratic interests have the power of state coercion. "They will go as far as to kill people for this" is rich coming from someone preaching Marxism, for which millions have been murdered.

How is the government worse than the corporation or billionaire for coercion? Libertarians always try to convince us that the corporate boot tastes so much better than the governmental one, but they both taste like leather to me and I at least have a say, however small, on the government.

Not in any communist society I've ever heard of.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#80

Post by cdrnsf » Wed, May 06, 2026, 9:34 PM UTC

Reversing Citizens United, publicly funding elections, installing a functional regulatory regime and equitable taxation would go a long way.

Perhaps we could also engage in less ill considered military adventurism as well? Causing a domestic affordability crisis as a distraction and a salve for one's ego seems like a bad idea.