Please go easy on the downvotes—the point here is to try to understand a perspective that many of you probably won’t share.
Rephrase of what I think you’re trying to ask: Should a society allow any person to accumulate wealth and power in the amount that today’s billionaires have?
There’s a huge amount of socioeconomic theory and history behind this apparently very simple question. In general, I think there’s a lot more benefit to all of us when advances do not flow entirely into the hands of a few people. Taxation has been the major form of wealth redistribution in the western world for a while now - since the Gilded Age robber-barons decided that helping society by building libraries, museums, and universities was preferable to having the government take 95% of money they made over a certain high amount.
The current system has been so perverted by that accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few that it’s become self-reinforcing, and is backed up by educational “reform” and propaganda from end to end. The result is that while the world may be continuing to get better overall, it’s either stalled, or is actively getting worse for many of us normal folks.
Without writing a novel, I think it would be a good idea to tie tax brackets to the poverty and average income levels, and then tax anything over like 100x the baseline amount at 99.98% or so. Also close all the tax loopholes like borrowing against assets being untaxed even if it’s the only source of income. Try to re-balance the system for all of us, and add as much buffer as possible to keep it from being re-fucked by those dragons hoarding all the gold.
Well, I wasn’t so much getting at what you’re saying—which I completely agree with btw—but rather, I’m trying to understand what prevents people from realizing that the reason for their poor living conditions is the accumulation of capital in far too few hands.
The reason for my question: the global resurgence of fascism, which, in my opinion, is the direct consequence of the influence of billionaires, because they use this mindless ideology with all their might to pit people against one another and thus distract them from where the real problem lies.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there are so many democracies where people view immigration as the most pressing problem. Absurdly, this is also the case in my home country, Germany, even though the German labor market needs far more foreign workers in a wide variety of sectors.
This is classic fascist ideology, which we unfortunately know all too well in this country. What’s frightening, however, is that the billionaires wield their influence so effectively that even the German masses no longer remember their inhuman faces and now still parrot whatever the algorithm—or rather, the will of the billionaires—presents to them.
It’s a tragedy, and my question in this post simply seeks to understand how this can be—how people fail to grasp that it is the powerful, and by no means the powerless, who should be despised.
There has been a concerted effort by fascists since at least 1965 to reduce education, buy up the entire media apparatus so it can be used for propaganda, break down government regulations so that they can aquire more power and wealth, create foundations and think-tanks that pump out quasi-scientific crap supporting fascism, dilute and distort scientific progress if it does not agree with them.
Studying history makes the efforts and trends clear. This isn’t people supporting fascism in a vacuum, it’s the result of society-wide manipulation of the entire world population, or at least, any part of it that votes. In that environment, I think it’s pretty remarkable that they’ve only managed to fuck up 35-40% of people at most. They’ve had to cheat political systems to make that minority act like a democratic majority.
Count me in this bracket. A progressive income tax should prevent billionaires in the first place, and for less controllable things like an IPO a wealth tax will do the rest.
People who think billionaires should exist generally don’t believe in the common good as much as they believe in Big Strong Man IS Cool and Sexy. Or they don’t know how labor works
Billionaires in themselves aren’t the problem. The circumstances creating them are. And not taxing them appropriately even more so.
No
If competent people were in charge, you’d benefit greatly from their taxes.
The problem, however, is that the world’s largest corporations pay virtually no taxes, which gives rise to the very serious problem the world is facing today.
At “Billionaire” (or even hundreds of millions of dollars) levels of wealth the government should implement a different tax scale based on net worth. Simpler and harder to manipulate. An annual minimum tax bill of 1% of your net worth that cannot be reduced, offset, deferred or otherwise mitigated per billion annually to do buisness in the country, per country.
Just stop them rorting loopholes. I think people would probably hate billionaires a whole lot less if they just paid a FAIR amount of tax.
Edit: actually the math works pretty much all the way down. Everyone should have a minimum income tax bill every year of 1% of their net worth with the only exemption being your primary residence.
A healthy tax code would not allow billionaires to exist
Billionaires aren’t the problem. They aren’t good, but even eliminating them would not move the needle.
The only real fix for a significant portion of the current affordability problems is a sizeable Land Value tax. Henry George was mostly right, he wrote that shit out for us more than century ago, and we’re still ignoring him while we fuck everything up because we keep treating land as this giant pyramid scheme of investment.
But why wouldn’t it solve the problem if top tax rates were imposed that would make it impossible for such parasitic investment firms to emerge in the first place?
Go run the math. If you were to tax away say everything people own that’s greater than $50 million dollars, and give it to everyone else, the total amount each person gets is something… but not as much as you would think. On the order of tens of thousands of dollars in the US for example. That would happen one time.
The most significant problem with housing costs isn’t that corporations can invest, it’s that ANYONE can invest. Investments require that an asset appreciate faster than inflation, and if that happens by definition it will always become increasingly more expensive than people can afford. Homes cannot be an investment for anyone, or they will always become too expensive.
You seem to be trapped in the status quo, as if it were a law of nature. There are no self-regulating markets, as economists claim. What you’re presenting here as inevitable isn’t real. It’s simply an expression of an ideology that you mistake for reality.
There are people who live in houses, and there are also people who build them. There is simply no “real estate god” who is anything other than a human being.
You might think that’s naive, but if you think that way, aren’t you also saying that climate change is an unavoidable catastrophe? That puts you no longer in the camp of rationality, but in the realm of theology—namely, the inevitable Last Judgment, the end of the world, and all that nonsense.
What I’m getting at is this: The biggest lie that economics has ever come up with is that it’s science—it isn’t. Based on the theories it pursues, it’s at best a social science that has already been largely disproved.
My proposal is to destroy the market completely with a land value tax. How does that have anything to do with being stuck in the status quo? It’s incredibly radical by the standards of the average person right now.
If something is an investment, by necessity it must increase in price faster than inflation. If you tax the ability for that to happen completely away, it’s no longer an investment vehicle. That’s not economics, it’s not science, it’s basic math.
This strikes me as similar to the ideas of Lizzy Magie, arguably one of the most absurdly exploited individuals with noble goals that history has to offer. She invented Monopoly to illustrate the absurdity of land ownership—today, Monopoly is the game that teaches children cutthroat capitalism.
Magie received a ridiculous low sum for her Monopoly patent, while others became millionaires off her idea (the Parker brothers, whose empire still exists today, benefited the most).
Edit: Please don’t get me wrong—I completely agree with you. I just don’t think it’s effective to focus solely on the one area where the world’s wealthy accumulate their wealth. This is simply a realistic view, since no billion-dollar company operates in just one sector (for example, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is involved in real estate deals worth billions, even though it is, at its core, a tech company). So what I’m trying to say is: Regulations targeting only the real estate market cannot possibly solve the problem.
It’s because that game (or more specifically The Landlord Game which she made) was meant to teach on Henry George’s work (the guy that came up with the idea of Land Value taxes and explained why they were needed)
Apparently about 300 billion per year is what would be needed for ending extreme poverty.
I’d say we should.
