There should be laws against predatory and fascist forms of Capitalism. CEOs going to jail should be a regular occurrence for a few years at least.
There should be set ratios between worker pay, CEO pay and profits. It’s the only way a just society can be returned.
The problem is that wealth = power and influence in society and this has led to essentially all modern neoliberal ‘democracies’ having their governments captured and controlled by the wealthy elite. So the only way you would be able to implement something like this would be via a revolution replacing capitalism with some form of socialism that would make private wealth a thing of the past and provide a decent standard of living for all.
And if that in itself wasn’t hard enough, the other evil empires of the world would never allow this to happen anywhere. No gaining traction permitted. It would take the complete collapse or civilization world-wide, and even then we would just return to medieval fuedalism and Gun Diplomacy.
A few dozen more Luigis would also make it easier.
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Imho a hard cap on personal wealth would be sufficient.
I used to think this would be sufficient as well but as you’ve probably noticed it’s damned near impossible to get our “democratic” governments to even consider something like this since they have been so thoroughly captured by the wealthy elite. You don’t have to call it revolution or socialism if those are scary words or just don’t seem possible but somehow we have to overcome that reality and I don’t see how it can be done without dispossessing these elites of their power so we can dispossess them of their wealth.
I feel like perhaps a slightly easier first step would be to push for a cap that is higher than anybody’s wealth (say £100B) — so that the debate is initially only about the principle — and only then demand it be lowered. 1) salami slicing works, and 2) even just the fact of there being one (albeit unreachable) would imo do a lot psychologically.
And while we’re at it, another pet policy of mine is a tax that starts at 0 and approaches 100% as your income approaches infinity. Then you’d just play with the steepness of the curve. You’d still have the problem of pre-existing hoardrd wealth though.
Also the astronomical additions to the govt budget from all this would prob lead to equally astronomical embezzlement, rendering the whole limit ineffective. So another, prob more decentralized, mechanism of redistribution would need to be devised first.
We need a corporate death penalty. If corporations are people, we should be be able to charge them like people. Well-Fargo scammed over a hundred million dollars from their customers. I see no reason why they can’t be in a corporate jail, where damaged parties are paid out first, then the customers, then the employees, then the executives, and if there is anything left, let the investors have it.
Same for Equifax, they lost literally everyone’s personal data after collecting and selling it without their consent. If I did something like that, I would get multiple life sentences. The company and its assets should be liquidated, and the money generated should be used to setup a Identify Theft taskforce proactively checks for identity theft on affected individuals and pays out 100% if they are damaged by Equifax’s actions.
fascist forms of Capitalism
There is no other form, the difference is only in what state of fascism it is.
There should be set ratios between worker pay, CEO pay and profits.
Not a bad idea. Except generalize it to max ratio between highest pay and lowest pay within a company.
Just read Henry George. Land value taxes, etc. He had it all figured out 100 years ago. The fact that we still try to determine elaborate methods for building equality is absurd. The correct answers, and methodology is a variable that is already a known, and backed by piles of empirical evidence.
He adamantly argued two things:
- Land value tax above all else.
- Labor must not be considered capital.
These 2 concepts are core to the economic foundation, of building a extremely dynamic society (huge middle class, open financial systems, urbanism etc.)
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/the-curious-case-of-qingdao-chinas
Or for those very curious…
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really
The other issue is large stagnant piles of cash. Money not circulating through the system is useless.
This is basically the central thesis of world famous economist Thomas Piketty.
Inequality inevitably worsens if the rate on capital exceeds the rate on labour. That is, when society rewards simply owning capital and wealth more than working.
r > g
The earned income tax is complete bullshit. Why would people be taxes for earning money through labor? You’ve already spent your time, and earning money through labor is already one of the least efficient ways of generating wealth.Besides you’re still going to have to pay sales tax
The central bank emits money, and gets it back with taxes. Without taxes we’d just have galloping inflation and probably wealth hoarding.
Today we also have wealth hoarding, which could be at least alleviated with taxes, and taxing work more than capital gains is ofc utter bullshit. IMO.
No, the central bank does not get money from taxes. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
The central bank emits money that turns into inflation. On purpose. Because the only thing worse than galloping inflation is no inflation or deflation.
The way to not get galloping inflation is to not print crazy amounts of money.
Taxes are primarily there to fund the state (which has a much, much higher budget than what the central bank emits) and secondarily to discourage undesired behaviour.
Income tax is used because it’s super simple to collect, compared to e.g. a wealth tax or a capital gains tax which is more complex. Together with property tax and VAT (or other forms of sales tax) it’s the backbone of most tax systems because these taxes are simple to calculate, are simple to collect and are hard to evade. Also, they disproportionally affect lower and middle classes so the rich people in power like them as well.
Income tax is used because it’s super simple to collect, compared to e.g. a wealth tax or a capital gains tax which is more complex.
The real reason is that the people who are wealthy and make their money off of capital gains wanted to use the idea of income tax being easier to avoid being taxed themselves.
It’s a bit of both, surely, but it really is much more difficult to move employees, real estate and sales outside of the country than it is to move capital outside of the country.
A system crash is usually what happens. Exciting history book times.
The crash may take a thousand years or more tho
I somt think it would take a thousand years for modern society. As complexity increases so does the risk for cascading failure
It’s worse than that. Wealth inequality is inevitable in any system that allows private ownership of the means of production. Marx wrote about this in great detail.
the rich are screwing the worker over
Almost as if by design… 🤔
That is why we need robot overlords everyone is equal if we’re all slaves to our robot overlords!
