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.
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.