Are super-rich people just better at making money?

Post by jmeister » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 10:45 AM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #166

jmeister wrote: post #67

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This focus on super-rich individuals is totally misguided. What's important is the economic system. Rich individuals are simply a nauseating side-effect of capitalism. Nobody really likes it, but there simply isn't anything better. The burden of proof is on the complainers. Even Marxist-sympathetic Peter Singer gets it. >Look, I think it would be better if you had an economic system in which we didn’t have billionair…

I don't get the productivity argument. What productivity is enabled by billionaires or even individuals? Noam Chomsky has covered this, but most corporations benefit extensively from decades of government funded research and development. The socialist driven productivity is there, it's just that we slap capitalism on it at the end and think it was that that got us here.

Post by ChuckNorris89 » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 10:47 AM UTC

543g43g43 wrote: post #167

bmitc wrote: post #3

To solve all this, it's pretty simple, and the U.S. actually used to do it: heavily tax the super rich. Heavy taxation and then appropriate use of those funds for education, R&D funding, infrastructure, etc. is actual trickle-down economics. And mega corporations should be heavily taxed instead of holding the country economically hostage. They jumpstart their companies off of government funding and R&D and then act a…

Ah, the mythical "super-rich" who could fund all of our solutions, if only we could prise their money out of their clutching hands! It's funny how they always exist, even in countries like the UK and France which in reality have taxed them out of existence, and payscales are absurdly compressed compared to the US. Careful what you wish for, you are someone else's "super rich".

Post by raverbashing » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 10:49 AM UTC

Yizahi wrote: post #162

raverbashing wrote: post #141

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Yeah, that's a very easy way... Of making all your modestly rich people close shop and leave > forbidding any financial interactions with "offshore" countries And what do you think "offshore" means? This is TikTok levels of financial naivety

Offshore is common term. Its collectively all those small countries which have minuscule corporate tax, zero financial rules and refusal to cooperate with big countries about financial tax evasion. Basically everyone from Ireland, Switzerland (sorry guys, just business) to Bahamas and Panama (and ban flags of convenience while we are at it). Definitely all countries refusing to disclose financial records for internat…

Post by foldr » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 10:50 AM UTC

rsj_hn wrote: post #88

foldr wrote: post #35

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You’d expect education costs to be rising, though, as people are expected to have a higher level of education before entering the workforce than they were previously, and because career changes and reskilling are far more common than previously. It’s a bit like healthcare. You can be spending far more than you were when there was a younger population and fewer sophisticated and expensive treatments, and yet still not…

There is no evidence that people have a higher overall level of education before entering the workforce over time. Rather, people know a different set of skills and accumulate a different body of knowledge. It is only if we define "education" as the degree of knowledge in the body of subjects we teach today that one can say people in the past had less of it. But that's only because we have discarded the many bodies o…

Post by orzig » Thu, Dec 22, 2022, 10:50 AM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #91

gjulianm wrote: post #43

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Some counterpoint thoughts: > - consensual trades are win win (you want a sandwich, I want $5 let’s trade! And we both win) Not all trades are exactly "consensual". The sandwich seller can probably live without selling a sandwich, I can't live without food, so the seller has far more power to set the price. Existing power imbalances make trades less fair, specially with essential goods (and that includes jobs, which…

In the real world, there is more than one sandwich seller and they compete with each other. When was the last time you non-consensually bought a sandwich? Even homeless people on the street will sometimes refuse free food, so the idea that sandwich-sellers can set any arbitrary price they want or people will starve is just not something that happens in practice. Indeed, sandwiches are abundant and affordable.