And this is America right now:
Housing and food - yes, be angry that there’s no money for that.
But healthcare? Money is not the issue - US healthcare, yes the precious private healthcare, is already getting a ridiculous 16% of the federal budget. For context - their military gets around 4%!
The money is already in the system, it’s the system itself that must be changed and made to work for the general public instead of shareholders.
To be fair, it helps that Norway suddenly got rich by selling ecologically disasterous products to the rest of the world while avoiding them itself.
are you serious?
Yes, Norway’s oil production is state owned, so every Norwegian benefits from it rather than a select few.
That last line nails it: it doesn’t cap success, it just makes sure failure isn’t catastrophic.
But that’s one of the primary tenants of conservatism! What will conservatives do if people are allowed to continue living after they fail?
It does cap the wildest, antisocial forms of success that are insane excess.
Progressive taxation should mean you can never gain enough power, which capital is, to warp your society with power beyond your single vote, whether that power is expressed through direct bribery, lobbying, or mass media propaganda to try to trick your fellow citizens into voting and advocating against their own interests with your booming, capital powered voice that drowns out those you disagree with merely because you’ve exploited more capital into your private account than others.
I don’t see any shame, horror, or problem with putting a hard cap on how much an individual can accumulate, as other people live here too.
Despite what Elon Musk believes, this whole planet shouldn’t be his personal playground, but that’s what it means to become a trillionaire, entire governments will bow at your feet. That’s perverse. No unelected, unaccountable individual should hold so much power, unless humanity wants to live in a hell of its own making.
lobbying is direct bribery, isn’t it?
Shhh, that’s a secret, those are “campaign contributions” and nothing is expected in return! Mercy me, I have the vapors…
3 people in America each have several times as much wealth as the entire bottom half of America. It’s ok to have a ceiling nobody contributes 400B to society. For reference that is more than every teach and every doctor make in America. Does anyone believe that Elon is individually more valuable than the either profession?
US billionaires:
“Wait, you mean to say that we can keep our current quality of life, dabble in our little space projects, and that those we employ won’t suffer???”
“Lol naw fuck that.”
Exactly. The cruelty is the point. They enjoy making people suffer.
I feel like it’s a means of creating a further distance between the rich and poor when conventional means have reached their limit, though i imagine there is likely at least some sadistic pleasure they derive from it (and there are very likely some that get a lot)
Here’s a comparison that came to mind for me: when i make dinner, i like to make my wife and i a salad but I’ll go out of my way to make a very nice presentation of the various ingredients on my wife’s salad. I will have the exact same ingredients for mine, but intentionally slop them onto the plate with hasty abandon and even take measures to try to make it look even worse. I like to argue that my wife’s salad is the better of the 2, that there is a hierarchy that’s immediately distinguishable–even though it’s the exact same stuff. That her salad is actually even better than if they both had been presented the same way–that i can make that basic salad even better than previously thought possible by creating a severe inequality in its presentation to the other one. Of course, that’s a very harmless comparison but i think there’s something in it.
I mean, it’s like the rich can only be so pleased with their riches and the luxuries it affords them. Not to mention a lot of that stuff probably becomes trite/commonplace even if it’s a giant yacht or fancy food or living space or whatever. They can only be so happy, and sustaining that happiness is probably not easy when you’ve burned through the conventional happiness-granting activities. It would seem that they find more nuanced, and perhaps even perverted means of pressing the happiness button. I suppose Epstein’s Island really kinda drives home that whole disgusting “someone has to suffer in order for me to be happy” kinda dynamic.
It’s disgusting to think people derive pleasure from making others suffer like this, but it’s not the least surprising to discover. 🫠
Yeah… It’s like the mobile f2p games. The paying players need the f2p players so they can stomp on them.
Unfathomable wealth isnt enough, they also need to rule.
You mean, instead of having $ 99.9, I would only get 99? Over my cold, dead body!
I honestly don’t think the problem is that Capitalist’s don’t understand that concept; they very much do.
They also understand that the money for raising that floor would likely come from taxes on them; and so keeping the floor low means that they can keep even more profit.
It’s not a lack of understanding. It’s pure unadulterated evil.
I think its more than that, they already have all the money, but wealth is relative so if they can make everyone else twice as poor then their wealth relative to everyone else just doubled.
There are definitely bad actors out there trying to convince people of misconceptions, and I’m sure they have a non-zero amount of success. I recall being told some overly simplifying misconceptions of socialism when I was young.
this is the reason social democracy rarely works in practice.
The reason social democracy doesn’t work is because it doesn’t change the power structure. It’s treating a symptom and not the root cause. By leaving the root cause untouched, the symptoms will always come back.
that’s pretty much what happens in my country. without other countries our rich can extract value from, it’s still business as usual and purchased/pressured politicians because money is still power.
Great. Now do both.
“doesn’t put a ceiling on wealth”
eeeeehh. maybe we fucking should?
increased privatisation is happening all over the Nordics. I don’t know how much in Norway compared to here in Finland, but being in my fourth decade I can definitely see it happening and intensely. I can’t get a fucking public dentist anymore. Hell, children aren’t given free dental care anymore.
If no one were living in poverty I would be more accepting of the ultra-rich’s existence.
Except that that’s hard to happen.
The very existence of an ultra-rich means that there was someone who managed to get extraordinarily high amounts of extra value from someone as compared to what they paid that ‘one’ for it and then did it over and over again, essentially leeching value out of the system, making it a -ive sum game for anyone inside it.
So when you take more than you give, you end up breaking the original meaning of money (that was “proof of work/goodwill”) and when you do that enough, the worth of work gets warped and those who do similar work, end up indirectly losing more than what they give.
We are a plutocracy, our government sold out long ago and is the most corrupt country of all time.
I know that they say it’s actually pretty good and we are a rule of law country without a corruption problem, but unfortunately, that’s because we’ve made corruption and bribery perfectly legal.
If you haven’t done this yet, check out Super PACs, long story short it’s a cash pipeline with laughably weak oversight, and everybody in government knows exactly why it legal.
In 1970s FBI did a bribery catfish of reps, mayors, and more, and almost half of them took the bait and many were convicted of bribery (ABSCAM).
Starting in 2000s, Super PACs allow unlimited funding and they don’t have to declare who gave it to them. The FBI is now investigating furries instead of congress.
It’s a madhouse.
Depends. I actually fully support putting a ceiling on wealth.
The analogy I always come back to is nuclear weapons. We don’t let private individuals own them. We don’t make you get an atomic bomb license. We don’t tax nukes heavily. We don’t make sure that only the kindest and most ethical people are allowed to own nukes. We simply say, this is too much power to be trusted to one individual. No one should have that level of power.
And yet, would anyone doubt that someone like Bezos, all on his own, can cause an amount of damage comparable to a nuclear bomb? If Bezos had it in for an entire city, could he not destroy it? Could he not buy up the major employers and shut them down? Could he not buy up all the housing and force the citizens into penury? Could he not buy up and shut down the hospitals? I have no doubt that, if he wanted to, Bezos could single handedly destroy a city. And how many lives would that take? How many would drink themselves to death or die by their own hand after Bezos came in and destroyed their entire lives? How many would die from lack of resources and medical care, etc?
Bezos could absolutely, if he wanted to, single-handedly cause a level of destruction and human misery comparable to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
And that is a power no one should have. The only way anyone should have that level of power is through democratic elections.
This is why I support wealth caps. I would personally set the maximum allowable wealth at 1000x the median household income. In the US, this would be about $80 million USD. That’s about the maximum fortune a person that actually works for wages can amass in a lifetime, if they’re a very high earner, live very frugally, and marry someone of similar status. 1000x median household income is the limit of what I consider to be an honest fortune - one made primarily through your own work, rather than sponging off the labor of others.
Excellent points. I like your analogy of economic power to nuclear power.
We’ve already seen Musk throwing his economic weight around like a nation, threatening to turn Starlink on and off over war zones based on his own needs, and not the national security of any of the nations involved.
When Sociopathic Oligarchs with Hoarding OCD, start accumulating such economic power that they can compete with nations, then they have reached their limit. It will only get worse, as more and more of them start negotiating their own deals, possibly to the detriment of the very nation of which they are a citizen.
Then it’s only a matter of time before these Oligarchs start building private Armies, and then form alliances that can really throw their weight around. Or worse, start wars with each other over private beefs, that catch innocent citizens in their crossfire.
These things are easily predictable, if something isn’t done to blunt the power of these out-of-control fortunes. Otherwise, we will be sitting here in the not-so-distant future, wondering why we didn’t do something about these psychopaths when we had the chance.
it’s only a matter of time before these Oligarchs start building private Armies
Just to be clear, this is why governments exist. Not to stop people from building armies because it’s bad. But to avoid the waste that comes from economic competition becoming militarized.
Bezos and Musk both make more money by NOT engaging in warfare with each other. But if warfare between them would give them an edge, then the government is the structure they create with other capitalists to rejigger the incentives so that Tesla doesn’t start bombing Amazon.
Bombing is a waste of capital.
But of course there’s the corollary - if Musk and Bezos get richer not bombing each other, then they could probably get more richer if they joined forces and bombed other people.
And that’s what the US military and CIA do. They are the military arm of the capitalists, so there is no need for private militaries. The capitalists all get together and bomb people not part of their in-group as a way of making themselves richer.
If the people of the US manage to gum up the works and stop the military from maximizing profit for the capitalists, then the capitalists will form private militaries and coordinate them to maximize their profits by bombing people not in their in-group. Today that means periphery, 3rd world, and socialist countries. Tomorrow that could mean the technologists against the financialists.
The OCD that drives them to hoard vast amounts of money, also makes them control freaks. They aren’t going to wait for the government to do their job and protect anyone from anyone. They are actively weakening America, and other countries, just so the governments will be corrupt enough for the Psychopathic Oligarchs to bribe their way to anything they want, but still be too weak for the govt to fight back when they finally realize they’ve created a monster.
And eventually, after they all have trillions of dollars, with trillions more pouring in, it won’t be about making more money, it will be about taking the other guys’ money. By then, governments will be irrelevant, and we will be back to monarchies, and the expense didn’t keep the old European kings from warring with each other.
Stop psychologizing the present day oligarchs in a vacuum. It’s not about the government protecting anyone.
This is the definition of government.
The reason oligarchs don’t have an incentive to build private armies over the last several centuries is because competing with other oligarchs through warfare DESTROYS CAPITAL.
It’s not about protection. It’s about waste. It’s less wasteful to win Bezos yacht in court than it is to bomb it and sink it to the bottom of the sea.
To be more succinct, the way I always describe it is wealth is not just money, money is too abstract. Wealth is power and that degree of power should not be so concentrated in so few private individuals.
Bezos could single handedly destroy a city And Musk actually did this with Boca Chica.
Also the power to launch a nuclear strike is shockingly consolidated. The president can if they decide to, and they’d likely get positive support from military command.
Anyways, I’m in full agreement even if I’m poking at your examples and metaphors.
The president can if they decide to, and they’d likely get positive support from military command.
Last i heard military murican command on the news, the vibe was “That’s not quite true.”
There’s a whole bunch of steps for that to happen and no guarantees the chain of command would acquiesce, given the orange clown is in the white house.
Bezos could absolutely, if he wanted to, single-handedly cause a level of destruction and human misery comparable to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
I get your point but that’s insulting the victims of the most heinous act against humanity ever committed. Those people, mostly civilians, died that day.
What you describe would definitely drive people into poverty, and maybe death, but it wouldn’t instantly kill them.
Eh, no reason to discard the idea of putting a ceiling on the rich. Even if you took away all of the money people had that was over 1 billion dollars, that wouldn’t cause any of those people to suffer.
1000x the median household income. That should be the cap. It’s a nice round number; people can understand it. And it indexes automatically with inflation.
Moreover, this is about the maximum lifetime fortune achievable by someone who actually works for a living. In a US context, 1000x median household income is about $80 million USD. That’s still an incredible amount of money, though just barely achievable by actually working for wages. It’s the kind of fortune two neurosurgeons could amass if they both worked long careers, lived extremely frugally, and invested everything they made. 1000x median household income is what I consider the largest possible ‘honest’ fortune. In order to earn beyond that level, you have to earn your money not through your labor, but the labor of others. You have to start a business and start sponging off the surplus of your employees. 1000x median income is about as large a pile as you can get without relying on exploiting someone else’s labor. And that seems like a reasonable place to set a cap. Still high enough to provide people plenty of incentive to work hard, get an education, better themselves, etc. But no so high that people amass fortunes that are threats to national security.
Indeed, whilst it’s more difficult to raise a floor, it’s certainly a good idea to have a roof close enough to it to keep the heat where the people exist
What if we just burn the rich as firewood instead?
It would probably be environmentally friendly even
no reason to discard the idea of putting a ceiling on the rich.
There is a very good reason to discard the idea of assigning an arbitrary ‘maximum wealth’, two actually:
- it’s effectively impossible to actually enforce
- it will cost us more to try to enforce it, than we will gain in revenue
It would be tremendously expensive resource-wise, logistically, to even reliably determine if one has reached that ceiling (net worth figures for individuals that you see in the media are guesses, not the result of actual auditing), much less calculate with any degree of certainty how far over the ceiling someone is, and that ‘research/enforcement cost’ is practically certain to completely cancel out (and then some) any potential added revenue, especially because it’s also trivially easy to circumvent by creating debt, etc.
- it will cost us more to try to enforce it, than we will gain in revenue
That sounds to me like an assertion that has no basis in reality.
That would most likely be because you are ignorant of when it has already literally happened in the past, in other nations.
On multiple occasions in multiple countries, wealth taxes primarily aimed at the wealthiest demographic have been tried, and then repealed because overall tax revenue literally decreased as a result. There is a reason the vast majority of countries that have implemented such taxes have either since repealed them, or ‘loosened’ them such that they’re no longer primarily aimed at said demographic, and have become a much more ‘typical’ tax that the middle class pays.
It would cause them to move to a country without such regulation. Maybe somewhere in Africa or Southeast Asia, or South America. Though maybe there they lose a bunch of their money to corruption so overall it’s a win.
It’s exceedingly rare that they actually do this because they don’t want to live in a third-world country. The irony, ofc, is that their actions are turning the U.S. into one.
If billionaires decide to leave the country then the factories and businesses run by workers producing the billions they made will remain. You can’t pick up a building and take it with you.
If that were true, they would have already done it.
They scream about taxes and such, but they know that they are in the very best country in the world to get super wealthy. It’s relatively easy to get access to money, systemic corruption is relatively low, and legal bribery is build into the system. The government is literally based on Capitalism.
Sure, they threaten to leave if their billion dollars is threatened with a 1% increase in taxes, but they won’t, because they know that the American economic system is what gave them the billion dollars in the first place. They’re just being whiney little bitches.
These people will lie to you to make you help them get what they want, at YOUR expense. You aren’t obligated to believe them, or help them.
This what they so to literally every positive economic policy ever discussed and yet every one of those places still has rich people and overinflated companies. Maybe we should stop believing their lies?
The issue is a bit more… circular than that.
Certain things, certain ventures, need more money than that. And in a free, capitalist society you want people to be able to achieve such goals and ventures.
Problem is, once you pool that wealth into a company (the very meaning of the word, like companion, meaning “together”, or more literally “with others, in a multitude”), imbalances will occur. What if you start it out as a group of 5, each putting in a billion, then the company, without employees, becomes successful, but due to how it worked out, one person was the main brain behind the success so they get a bigger share? Suddenly the company is worth 25 billion, 15bn belonging to the genius, and the rest having 2.5bn stake. How do you regulate that?
Also what if that money is truly for operating costs, because this company is setting up a brand new town, so they’re literally paying dozens of construction crews, establishing shops and whatnot for people to use once they move in, and so on? Do you just take any excess wealth away?
Or do you let them continue operating knowing full well that someone in the company will try to use the operational funds as their personal bank account?
The idea of a wealth limit in an optimal society is good, but in our current imperfect crap, it’s never going to work, because it will put limits to what we can achieve in general.
Mind you I do agree that billionaires shouldn’t exist and should be taxed out of existence but that’s not done with a wealth ceiling.
Companies shouldn’t be creating towns, period. If we need new cities, their locations and forms should be chosen by the people. By elections. Not by some lone asshole whose only urban planning qualification is that he happens to have a large pile of money.
Towns were just an example of scale - a more realistic example would be, albeit futuristic, is whatever space-faring vessels we’ll build, and I don’t mean Musk and his rocket toys he keeps blowing up, I mean actual interplanetary and deep space ships, which will cost about the same to build as a small town.
Do you want the right to building those to be retained by the government only? Or would you prefer if the right people with the appropriate resources could do it too?
The billionaires ARE the right… they’re the ones with all the money to be pushing those right-wing narratives and the ones that profit most from the success of those narratives. Mussolini himself admitted that Corporatism was a more fitting name for his ideology than Fascism, because it is a merging of the state and corporate power. If the corporations and billionaires didn’t privately capture all those billions of dollars, what, do you think that wealth would just evaporate? No! It’s us doing all the work and making all the sacrifices, we should have control over the profit we generate and a say in what we are willing to sacrifice for it!!
Whatever spacefaring vessels are going to be built should be built at the behest of the people, for the interests of the people. Not by and for whatever person is able to lie, cheat, and steal the most wealth out of our hands. What is the point of building a rocket if all it’s going to do for us is generate another few billion dollars for one guy, who already has more money than god, at everyone else’s expense?? It’s our cake, we are the ones who spilled our blood sweat and tears over it, and we’re gonna just give it away to a guy that’s pinky-promising to drop some crumbs behind him? Fuck that!
Repeat after me: THE INTERESTS OF BILLIONAIRES ARE INCOMPATIBLE WITH THOSE OF THE PEOPLE.
It is kinda done with a wealth ceiling if you tax the higher wealth more, but yeah let them make infinite money somehow if they are at the top end paying 99% of it back into society.
15bn belonging to the genius
Oof.
Anyway…
The regulation part is absurdly easy: they get a tax bill, they sell their shares, they pay the tax bill.
Operating costs don’t have anything to do with personal wealth. The company pays the operating costs. If the company’s revenue is greater than its costs, it pays dividends or reinvests and in theory, the stock prices goes up. See above.
The problem isn’t the logistics: point gun, take money. That’s pretty straightforward. The problem is ramifications. If billionaires can no longer grow their wealth, what would happen? Well, for one their control over these companies would wane. If Musk can’t own more than a billion, then he’d have to sell a bunch of stock, which means he would have less control over the board, and thus less control over decision-making. But is that such a bad thing? Are the skills and personality that cause a company to go from zero -> public the same ones you want once the company has grown to a large size? Idk, maybe ask Zuckerberg about Oculus Rift and the Metaverse.
I don’t think anyone actually knows what would happen. But we do have a lot of data on what happens if you significantly increase the marginal tax rates for upper income brackets, and it sure seems to benefit society as a whole, but depends on what outcomes you’re targeting. And that doesn’t actually target the ~900 billionaires in the United States because most of them earn money through capital gains rather than regular income.
Man, so interesting. Why do we have to pay those workers to build something that society needs? Is it because the workers need to eat? Why are the workers starving? Is it because the food they need is locked away in a hoard of wealth that only gets distributed by people who own the hoard? Why won’t they just feed people? Oh they only feed people if it means they’ll make a profit?
Hmm. How does a system this cruel stick around? What’s that? 90% of the wealth of the world is owned by a vanishingly small number of people who will only deign to feed people if it makes them a profit?
Man. Real “imperfection” you got there. I’m sure we can fix it with some reforms though once we learn more about economics…
Suddenly the company is worth 25 billion, 15bn belonging to the genius, and the rest having 2.5bn stake.
This doesn’t just happen. How did the value go up so much? Are their sales not taxed? Will the liquidation of this value not be taxed?
The core of literally any anti-billionaire economic policy needs to be the taxing of loans made on potential valuations. With that, the numbers you gave are effectively irrelevant because there’s no more infinite money glitch. They have to liquidate assets to spend money, and must pay taxes on that.
If a company gets so big that it “needs” billions of dollars to build its own town then that company’s profits and decisions should be split among its stakeholders (i.e. all of its employees).
If someone starts a company then they should be rewarded with profits if it succeeds. Contrary to capitalist arguments. The big brains behind companies don’t do it to make 15 billion dollars. They do it instead to get obscenely rich, and despite our completely warped views with companies like Tesla and Amazon, “obscenely rich” starts in the hundreds of millions of dollars maybe a billion dollars if someone was an idiot.
On top of that there are thousands of examples throughout history that show that people don’t invent things solely to make money and the original big brains behind company innovations were not necessarily profit motivated.
I’m of the opinion that that doesn’t go far enough
We need to put hard limits on personal wealth (and the wealth of companies too). After 10 million networth in wealth, all your income should go to taxes 100% until you’re below that limit… something similar should exist for companies
Same goes for power and fame. I don’t want or need a president, or a CEO that directs billions of dollars
Keep everything small, keep everyone small. Mega projects can still be done by multiple companies together, for example
End the rich!
After 10 million networth in wealth, all your income should go to taxes 100% until you’re below that limit…
This would be trivially easy to circumvent if it was put into place, just so you know.
You can’t just tax wealth, you need to tax net controllable assets and cap that.
Norwegian here: the floor is getting more and faulty and it is dependent on the imperial mode of living generally and oil and arms exports specifically
Didint you guys just find one of the biggest rare earth minerals deposit in the world?
Yes, we did. But with the current political climate I’m less and less sure that we’ll be able to handle it as well as we did with the oil.
If you want an example of an industry where we didn’t do a great job of spreading the wealth, you can look at our other major export: Salmon.
Salmon seems like a very different resource than oil or rare earth metals. My understanding is that with the oil, it was a resource that largely came out of nowhere. One day Norway had little oil. Suddenly you find this vast field of immense unclaimed resources. It’s a huge resource that no one has a claim to. Thus, it’s reasonably easy to divide it in an equitable way. But salmon? People have been harvesting that resource since the dawn of time. There must be centuries of various rules, laws, ancient royal decrees, relating to who can harvest how much salmon. And there’s going to be people that if you tell them how much salmon they can catch, they’ll point out that their family has been harvesting salmon for generations, and it’s not fair to…And on an on.
Oil seems like a much easier resource to divide equitably, simply because there’s not such a cultural and legal history behind the management of the resource.
The issue with this is that there’s plenty of rare earth minerals (they’re not rare) all around the world, it’s the refining process that is expensive and extremely polluting.
Doesn’t matter if Norway found decades worth of supply, when nobody but China is willing to build the processing plants. And China has more than enough rare earth mineral supplies themselves.
Hard to say. Current political view seem to be that EU wants to get rid of dependancy on china and great way to get free is to start mining our own.
There is pretty large deposits in Sweden, Finland and Norway so one effiecient, central refining plant could be churning virtually limitless amounts of materials, if only there would be enough funding to get the ball rolling. (Before anybody says i know Norway is not part of european union, but it is part of european economic area and part of EFTA) France already has a refining plant so the tech knowledge is already found inside the EU.
The issue is that nobody has found a way to refine it in a way that isn’t extremely polluting without the cost being extremely excessive and making it entirely pointless.
We could mine as much as we want, but the only country OK with refining this stuff is China. Unless we solve the issue of refining this in a relatively clean way at a somewhat competitive price, no refining will ever be set up in Europe.
Only sith deal in absolutes.
Caremag/Caresters plant in France is scheduled to open in 2026 and Solvay that is already running in France is trying to hit 30% of EU’s demand by 2030.
If we would start building the mines right now it would take close to 10 years to have the mines running. By that time the refining process in France should be pretty well tested and if there would be more minerals produced than they can process, building new facility with the know how they have accumulated and any progress in tech, is not that big of an leap anymore.
By the way this would be pretty close how Norway originally got their economy running with hydropower and later with oil. They waited until there was enough know how to make effective plants. Then they made deals with outside companies where the state would own part of the facilities, but the companies would make enough money to make a profit. After the deals would expire the state would get the now profitable facilities for them self, but the original companies had made enough money for the deal to be good for them.
And Trump asked recently, why don’t we have immigrants from Norway?
It’s mind blowing, the lack of self awareness.
It also contributes to the climate catastrophe by providing copious amounts of oil. It also enjoys the fruits of the exploitation in the Global South, hence it can redistribute said fruits of imperialism to its people, which is indeed better than the US oligarchs hoarding it all, but not by a lot.
