If the elite are indeed vacuuming up most of the wealth that is created in America, then their departure would have the long term benefit of creating opportunity for those left behind.. — VagabondSpectre
Both glass and recycling are incredibly energy intensive. Right now a lot of our glass is made with natural gas. Natural gas will be depleted about the same time as petroleum.We can go back to glass and recycle-culture if necessary, but really there are all sorts of possible technologies that we can and likely will discover. — VagabondSpectre
Regarding societal collapse, I choose to remain optimistic. — VagabondSpectre
How does it distort? Interest is the price of money, extremely important issue. That there wouldn't be a price for the use of land or built structures sounds very strange, if you otherwise do favor the price mechanism of markets to barter or central planning.I don't hate markets. I love markets. I think rent (including interest) distorts markets away from what we would naturally expect of them, and creates the problems that people wrongly blame markets themselves for. — Pfhorrest
Wealth only effects one's potential to buy products and services. And those with skills that are in higher demand usually get wealthier than others. So it is truly naive to think that those with more wealth won't trade their labor, but just sit idly by with their wealth.The naive expectation of a market is that those with less wealth will trade their labor to those with more wealth — Pfhorrest
And so it has been when the markets work. They work far better than centralized planning of the economy. In fact, the idea that a tiny cabal of righteous and ideologically pure people have this God-like wisdom to plan everybody else's economic behavior and how a complex system like an economy works is one the saddest stories in human development. And also the reason why monopolies are bad.Markets are supposed to be a great equalizer, as Adam Smith expected it. — Pfhorrest
This "realism" sounds quite a idealist version of a Malthusian argument of there being this larvae, the rentier class, just idly being there as a parasite to the people who work. And the juxtaposition to those that have 'indefinite luxury' and those with 'insufficient wealth' is along those ideological lines.Instead, in reality, those who have sufficient wealth can rest in indefinite luxury on unearned income from that wealth, and those with insufficient wealth must labor indefinitely just for the continued privilege of using someone else's property to do the work they need to survive. — Pfhorrest
Paying rent isn't the problem. This problem, which is especially real in the Third World, is really about a banking and financial sector, that doesn't work well. Put it simply: when a financial sector doesn't work, the only person you can get a loan is a mobster who is a loan shark and normal banks serve only the elite.And paying that rent prevents them from saving money or building equity to get to out of that loop — Pfhorrest
I'm confused. This doesn't make any sense.I think the very existence of rent distorts the market to make it so that owning is more expensive, because if you own an extra house you can get free money from people who need it to live in, which makes buying extra houses attractive to rich people, which inflates the price above what poor people can afford, forcing those people into renting from the rich people who bought all the housing out from under them. — Pfhorrest
That there wouldn't be a price for the use of land or built structures sounds very strange, if you otherwise do favor the price mechanism of markets to barter or central planning. — ssu
Wealth only effects one's potential to buy products and services — ssu
But that's not how actual wealth is created, that's just how wealth enables one to extract more wealth from the productive economy. If you'd actually read Wealth of Nations you'd understand that the reason why economies aren't zero-sum is because it's not simply the quantity of stuff in the economy but the distribution of it that constitutes the wealth in the economy: if I have a gazillion pencils and no paper, and you have tons of paper but no pencils, we can make the very same stuff worth more by trading some pencils for some paper so that we each now have the ability to write whereas before neither of us did. Trade is what actually creates new wealth; lending just siphons off of that.it is these rents and interests, should we say return on investment, that makes assets grow — ssu
And those with skills that are in higher demand usually get wealthier than others — ssu
In a modern economy agricultural production is a small cog in the wheel where the service sector is in an important role. So owning land isn't the only thing that rich people can do. — ssu
Paying rent isn't the problem. — ssu
Here if you rent a large two room or a normal three room apartment, you could with the same money buy a smaller flat of your own and pay similar amount some years and then have the flat for yourself. — ssu
Owning is more expensive than...? — ssu
Who's incentive is to build houses if there isn't any price? — ssu
I've stated multiple reason just why a wealth tax is stupid populism. The fact that the the tax has numerous structural problems and that many countries have tried it and abolished it (yet NOT abolished progressive taxation, value-added tax, inheritance taxes etc) tells it simply sucks.
One thing I left out, but should be added is the detrimental effect on savings. The important role of what savings have is usually left out in the populist rhetoric where perpetually "the rich just get richer and the poor poorer". A wealth tax curbs savings. — ssu
Wealth tax is simple populism that doesn't work and leaves the real problem, the lagging real wages, unresolved. The US has had real wages not going up for a long time. This is the real problem, not that some Americans own the most successfull corporations in the World. — ssu
So if you own a van Gogh painting worth 100 million USD, you'll have to pay annually half a million dollars to the US government just for fun of owning it, by Warren's example.
If you get an annual return on investment of 5% to your 100m wealth (whatever it would be), which is an OK return, the tax pushes up your capital gains taxes (somewhere like 23,8% I presume) on your income +10% I guess.
With the Bernie model owning a 100m van Gogh will cost you 1,18 million annually.
And if you later decide to sell the goddam painting and van Gogh is out of vogue (perhaps because he's a white male or something) and get only 31,99 million or it is shown to be a forgery, tough luck! You won't get your tax money back (without having a great lawyer). — ssu
An embarrassing argument, Maw.This is so goddamn dumb, no one has just a $100M Van Gogh painting as their only asset. What an exceptionally embarrassing argument, for a long list of reasons. — Maw
It is fairly ridiculous argument when my example was real, something that genuinely happened to me personally with wealth taxation in my country. I talk of own personal experience. You don't.You are just attacking an abstract of the wealth tax of your own conception. That's fairly ridiculous — Maw
That's really a big topic to discuss and worth another thread.When do markets work, in your view? Any examples? I see mixed economies, all over the world and throughout history. All involve a very strong state intervention. — Xtrix
No, literally. If you have wealth, cash, moolah, you can buy products and services. The rich can do that more than poor. What you can earn with your labor is a different thing.In a truly free market, without rent and interest, yeah. — Pfhorrest
Why?Trade is what actually creates new wealth; lending just siphons off of that. — Pfhorrest
And if your wealthier, typically you get better education, better possibilities and so on. Social mobility is very important for a society. Without it, there's huge underlying problems.All else being equal, yes. The problem is that all else is not equal, and you can get (and stay) wealthier just by starting out wealthier, despite being less productive a worker than people who started out poorer and, despite their greater productivity, remain poorer. — Pfhorrest
. Here if you rent a large two room or a normal three room apartment, you could with the same money buy a smaller flat of your own and pay similar amount some years and then have the flat for yourself. — ssu
It isn't dirt cheap. I was talking about Helsinki. The highest prices are equivalent of something like Paris. The reason why the prices are so high is because the interest rates are historically so low. Still, a cleaner can buy a small flat quite close to the city center. Of course the reason is that a cleaner get's multiple times the income of a cleaner in a poorer country. Same job, totally different income.Maybe that's true in places where land is dirt cheap and three-room apartments are "normal". — Pfhorrest
And this is a problem quite generally in every poor country.My parents have spent their entire lives paying for housing and still own no housing to show for it, despite having paid over that time more than the current cost of a house. I have spent my entire life paying the lowest rent I can possibly find (in the area where I was born and raised and where my entire life is so don't just say "why did you move somewhere expensive" or "why don't you just move back somewhere cheap"), saving and investing at ridiculous rates (currently up to over a third of my take-home income) trying to save up enough money for a down payment on anything available for purchase such that the interest alone (which is, again, rent on money) wouldn't exceed my existing rent, so that I can actually finish paying off a house before I die and not spend my entire life having to pay just for the privilege of having somewhere to sit and stave to death in peace.
I have never wanted to rent. I have always wanted to own. I have always lived in the place I want to continue living. But owning within my lifetime has always been out of reach. — Pfhorrest
Why should it be massive? Or what do you define massive?If by "working institutions" you mean massive state intervention, I agree. — Xtrix
If you have wealth, cash, moolah, you can buy products and services — ssu
I already explained this but let me try to be more clear about it. If someone has much more of something than they need and someone else has much less of it than they need (both "needs" as determined by each person's own assessment of themselves), the normal expectation would be the poor person would work for the rich person in exchange for some of whatever that is (or work for someone else for money to trade for it, same thing in principle, money is just a medium facilitating multi-party trades), until the poor person has as much as they need or the rich person doesn't have more than they need anymore. But if rent is an option, instead of that exchange of labor for property, the rich person can only offer a temporary use of the property in exchange, so after the whole transaction is over, the original property has been returned to the rich person, and the payment for its use remains with the rich person, so the rich person now has more than they started out with, and the poor person has less. You might say why doesn't the poor person go to someone else who will sell to him instead, but it's in every rich person's interest to have this kind of "I win at your expense" arrangement, so as classes, the rich, who are the ones with the power to dictate what arrangements are available, will prefer those that leave the poor paying them continuously for the temporary use of things, rather than the poor eventually getting richer and no longer having to work for the rich just to get the money they need to pay the rich.If then trade is so good and renting so bad, what is so wrong with renting something than buying? — ssu
If I travel to a foreign country where I would want to explore the surroundings with a bicycle, why would I have to buy a bicycle and then sell it a week later? I theoretically could do that, but renting a bicycle would less difficult. — ssu
And this is a problem quite generally in every poor country. — ssu
And who or what is responsible for those financial markets working or not working? It's in the interest of the wealthy for them to "not work" like that (which is working according to plan from their perspective), and the wealthy are the ones with the wealth being lent out, who can dictate the terms on which it is lent. Why would they want anyone to be able to own outright and stop paying them rent or interest? Who is going to stop them? And most to the point, wouldn't stopping them be -- gasp -- socialist interference in the "free" market"?It is a genuine cause for povetry, for a country to lag behind, for there not to exist a large wealthy middle class. The fact is that then the financial sector simply doesn't work. If an ordinary person working in an ordinary job cannot go to the bank, cannot get a loan and cannot pay that loan back and still live decently, the financial markets in the economy simply don't work! If ONLY the rich can get loans with a decent interest, then simply the market doesn't work. — ssu
Simply put, when there is no option other than to rent for people who work, then the entire society has a huge problem. — ssu
Now it's interesting that the idea of wealth tax is floated even in the US. I haven't followed it closely, but at least Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed it. If somebody knows more about this, it would be interesting to hear your comments. — ssu
Your comments, apart from saying "Increasing wages can only get so far when 1% of the US population own over 40% of the wealth, while the bottom 80% own less than 10%." have been quite in line with your ordinary condescending attitude, like "This is so goddamn dumb", "exceptionally embarrassing argument", "this little circle jerk you're having with yourself", which is normal fashion to you. Still, I've responded to your arguments if you give them.Yeah, clearly you haven't been following it closely, but it's obvious now you're only interested in hearing comments about it insofar as it's viewed negatively. — Maw
The only difference is the level where the tax starts. There's genuinely no other difference. And in the Finnish example, the wealth tax started when you basically with our currency had people who's wealth was over a million, i.e. millionaires.I answered how their proposals aren't at all similar to the example you provided in the opening post. — Maw
Benkei gave an example of an implementation of a wealth tax.It's not similar to Benkei's example. — Maw
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.