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

Wouldn't we expect to be right back where we started in the long term? In the meantime, people are without jobs, banks are foreclosing on homes, the stock market is plunging.

I'm not saying rich people are what keeps us stable. I'm saying that a wealth-ectomy (surgery that removes wealthy people from a society) is going to create turmoil. Any sort of surgery would create turmoil. People living on the edge will be hurt the most.

At this point, not doing anything will also create turmoil as Medicare goes bankrupt sooner than estimated due to Trump's tax cut. That issue should be in the headlines, not Trump's latest fart.

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

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.

Regarding societal collapse, I choose to remain optimistic. — VagabondSpectre

That's cool. I don't really think of it as optimism/pessimism. It's just looking at the situation mechanically.

This is getting way off topic, but I just want to address a couple of points you seem to misunderstand about me.

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. The naive expectation of a market is that those with less wealth will trade their labor to those with more wealth, who in turn will trade that wealth away for the leisure of not having to labor, and so wealth flows from where it is concentrated to where it is not, until the poor no longer have to labor in excess of their ongoing consumption (because they have all the non-consumables goods they need), and the rich can no longer afford to rest on the labor of others (because they no longer have an excess of goods to sell off), and only those who continue to do more of value for others can continue to live a more luxurious lifestyle than others. Markets are supposed to be a great equalizer, as Adam Smith expected it. 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. Why does that happen instead of what Adam Smith expected? I say the answer is rent, including rent on money i.e. interest.

And you completely miss the point about housing rent in particular. My concern is precisely for people who have to rent out of necessity and can't afford to buy. Most people rent out of necessity because they can't afford to buy, especially if we include everyone who rents money, i.e. mortgages, with which to "buy" as collateral for that borrowing. And paying that rent prevents them from saving money or building equity to get to out of that loop; millions upon millions of people are stuck renting their entire lives unable to ever get to a point where they don't have to keep paying just to keep what they already have (a roof over their head). The world I want is one where once you've paid for housing long enough, you get to stop. Where everyone who "can't afford to buy" can afford to buy and doesn't have to rent, because buying has been made as cheap as renting. 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.

I can address the whole slew of complicated objections I'm sure you have that I've heard a zillion times before, but this thread isn't the place for that.

Taxing the wealthy makes perfect sense. We've done it before (in the US) and we had much better growth and better quality of life. Mainly the corporate sector and the wealthiest Americans should pay more. Close the loopholes and the tax havens, etc.

Also -- and this rarely gets mentioned -- tax INTANGIBLE ASSESTS. Which we don't do. We tax the interest made on them, that's all. So if you own 1 million in stocks you pay 0 dollars, 1 million dollar house you pay taxes on it. It's insane, and we know the reasons why this is the case.

Given the level of income inequality in this country (and the world), it's time to give up on these neoliberal fantasies, the fantasies of Ayn Rand, free markets, libertarianism, etc.

Tax the wealthy. It's been done before and it works. There are no alternatives, unless we can snap our fingers and change the entire economic system.

Pfhorrest, I understand you aren't eager to discuss this or think this is the wrong thread, but I would make some comments. The reason is that rents and interest is something that is important to the wealth tax argument, as it is these rents and interests, should we say return on investment, that makes assets grow. You seem to assume that this is bad, should not happen, if you object rents and interest.

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

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.

The naive expectation of a market is that those with less wealth will trade their labor to those with more wealth — 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.

Markets are supposed to be a great equalizer, as Adam Smith expected it. — 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.

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

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.

In the world of Malthus basically all societies were still very agrarian and basically there wasn't anything else to invest in than in estates and agricultural production. 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.

And paying that rent prevents them from saving money or building equity to get to out of that loop — 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.

The simple fact is that when the financial sector works well, there actually isn't a huge gap between buying a flat and paying back the loan and the interest and renting a flat. It is just as expensive or even less expensive than renting one. 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. Hence renting a huge flat or a one family home is extremely rare, as typically people opt to buy a home.

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

I'm confused. This doesn't make any sense.

Owning is more expensive than...?

Are you saying that simply people ought to live in a home free? Which other things are free? How do you define where and what type of home people can live for free? Who's incentive is to build houses if there isn't any price? Or I didn't get your point (which can happen).

Another question: how does people investing in an extra house (to put it on rent) would increase the price of housing??? Have you ever heard that reality developers or construction companies build house based on DEMAND? If people want to invest in real estate, then MORE houses are built. How can more supply make then the prices go up? Again there is this fallacy of the economy being stagnant.

Yet this fallacies and beliefs are real and shows the ignorance of the public discourse. When investing in real estate is de facto discouraged, there obviously isn't much investment projects going on. When the government doesn't see any private investment on the housing sector, it simply assumes there wouldn't and could not be more. Hence many times this goes into a vicious circle where there isn't much private developing going on even if there is demand for more housing, hence government housing is seen as an answer. Yet this typically doesn't correct the mismatch as building with tax income is expensive. With small supply of rental flats and huge demand for them the rents naturally go up, which then is battled by even more restrictions. Which then discourage people even more from becoming the hated landlords. This happens usually because of the public discourse. People complain that the rents are too high and the lines are long to public housing, and the norm leftist response is to say that the government will build more and put a stop to price increases by regulation.

And if you are thinking of real estate booms (like the US had before the financial crisis), the reason why prices go up is because the finance sector goes into this loaning frenzy pushing everybody more money. Which is another phenomenon.

And so it has been when the markets work. They work far better than centralized planning of the economy. — ssu

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.

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

The price is the purchase price. "To have a right to use something" and "to own something" should be the same thing. The point is for the users of things to be the owners of those things, instead of some people using things owned by others and others owning the things that everyone else uses.

Wealth only effects one's potential to buy products and services — ssu

In a truly free market, without rent and interest, yeah. The exact problem is that that's not true: that wealth can just "generate" more wealth not by being spent but just by being lent. You said earlier:

it is these rents and interests, should we say return on investment, that makes assets grow — 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.

And those with skills that are in higher demand usually get wealthier than others — ssu

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.

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

True, but the underlying mechanism of lending productive capital is unchanged. This is actually an analogy I make a lot: rent and interest are the remnants of feudalism, adapted to a modern economy. In a feudalistic, agrarian economy, serfs lived and worked on land that belonged to someone else, and had to give much of the product of their labor to that landlord for the privilege of living and working there. In a modern economy, there are more types of capital besides land, and we usually work upon one lord's capital while living on another's, but still a big chunk of the product of our labor goes to the first "lord" (the employer) and then a huge chunk of what we "get to keep" goes straight to paying another (the literal landlord, or else the bank).

Paying rent isn't the problem. — ssu

Yes, it is. And banks don't solve the problem, because interest is rent on money and has all the same problems. Borrowing money isn't any better than borrowing housing.

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

Maybe that's true in places where land is dirt cheap and three-room apartments are "normal". When you live in the middle of nowhere and supply is virtually infinite relative to demand, these problems are easily overlooked. But in places where people actually live, where there is a crunch, all these flaws show through.

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. Even now that I make more than 75% of people in the country do. I don't even live in a big city, I live in a trailer park surrounded by farms and ranches out on the edge of civilization (within walking distance of national forest), and I would settle for anywhere within commuting distance of here, but there isn't anything affordable for hundreds of miles. I have to save up hundreds of thousands of dollars of down payment just so that interest alone on the cheapest available home doesn't make owning more expensive than renting. And the vast majority of people are poorer than me, and live in places more densely populated than my hometown, so this isn't just a "me" thing, this is a huge systemic problem affecting billions of people.

Owning is more expensive than...? — ssu

Than it otherwise would be. If you own two houses, you can live in one and rent the other out for free money. That makes owning houses attractive to people who otherwise wouldn't be interested in owning more houses, people who already have a house of their own, people who generally have a lot more money than people who don't yet have a house and need one to live in. So with more rich people interested in buying additional houses as "investments" (free money machines, not actual investments), the price of those houses goes up way above what it would be if the only people buying were people who need a first home to live in.

And so the people who would be the buyers otherwise, the people who need a first home to live in, are priced out of that, and forced to rent a tiny studio apartment or a bedroom in someone else's house, or if they're rich like me, a plot of land on which to park an oversized vehicle vaguely resembling a reasonable one-bedroom apartment. (One still two small for two people to live in, leaving me approaching 40 years of age and 10 years of a serious relationship and still unable to get married because we can't afford a place we could live in together).

Who's incentive is to build houses if there isn't any price? — ssu

PEOPLE. BUY. HOUSES. TO. LIVE. IN.

I don't want to continue this conversation. Ideological capitalists like you simply can't conceive of any heterodox economic model, and just writing this reply has sucked up my entire day so far. I've had this conversation a million times, and the only people who ever get it are the people who already got it, so I don't want to have it again.

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 taxes have been implemented in different countries in various ways, at varying wealth levels and with differing limitations, etc. Hand waving it because some countries have abolished it (while others have retained it), is...silly to say the least. And regarding savings, I'm afraid I don't have that much concern over people who will still have multi-millions if not billions of dollars in assets after tax. The wealth tax proposed by Sanders and Warren are not "detrimental" to the savings of anyone it effects.

You are just attacking an abstract of the wealth tax of your own conception. That's fairly ridiculous concerning there are numerous ways the policy can be proposed and formed.

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

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%. Fortunately, we can do both. You can continue to attack a wealth tax as "populist", but none of the types of taxation you mentioned are able to adequately address the growing inequality due because of asymmetric asset ownership, which is why a wealth tax is the only tax that properly addresses American inequality and can curb extreme wealth accumulation. 1% of Americans own 50% of all US stocks, and the richest 10% own 84%.

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

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.

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

An embarrassing argument, Maw.

It is a simple example that people would understand the problem of wealth taxation compared to income taxation and to notice the problem when that wealth doesn't automatically create a steady annual income flow. Yeah, people don't own just a Van Gogh. But they surely can (and some do) basically own just a ranch or a farm somewhere, which would make them 'fabulously' wealthy if they sold it and assuming there would be that buyer around.

A good example of that wealth taxes aren't so simple was given by Benkei about Netherlands and the example of how there the taxation is done. And that during the financial crisis the tax officials understood how punitive it comes to be when nearly everybody doesn't make the 4% return on investment.

You are just attacking an abstract of the wealth tax of your own conception. That's fairly ridiculous — 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're the one talking about a campaign gimmick to please the left done by few candidates that likely won't get it passed legislation even if they did win the election. That not all of the Democrat candidates are for this purposal tells a lot. So who is ridiculous here?

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

That's really a big topic to discuss and worth another thread.

I don't buy the anarcho-capitalist fantasies they give, but basically many times what is called a mixed economy is actually a market economy with working institutions. Laws and regulations have to work. Yet they aren't so easily complied with. It starts with the basics like theft isn't a transaction and it isn't tolerated. Sounds easy, but actually isn't.

In a truly free market, without rent and interest, yeah. — Pfhorrest

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.

Trade is what actually creates new wealth; lending just siphons off of that. — Pfhorrest

Why?

If then trade is so good and renting so bad, what is so wrong with renting something than buying? 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.

The same if true if people genuinely have the option of a) renting a flat and b) going to the bank and get a loan that they can afford in buying a flat. If the financial markets work, then both of the options would be reality for people.

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

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.

. 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

Maybe that's true in places where land is dirt cheap and three-room apartments are "normal". — Pfhorrest

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.

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

And this is a problem quite generally in every poor country.

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.

Simply put, when there is no option other than to rent for people who work, then the entire society has a huge problem.

but basically many times what is called a mixed economy is actually a market economy with working institutions. — ssu

If by "working institutions" you mean massive state intervention, I agree. That's as "mixed" as you're going to find.

If by "working institutions" you mean massive state intervention, I agree. — Xtrix

Why should it be massive? Or what do you define massive?

Would you say in Switzerland the state intervention is massive? Some would say so. I wouldn't. I think the country is an example that libertarianism and social democracy coexisting and that in reality things don't go along ideologically pure lines idealists cherish.

If you have wealth, cash, moolah, you can buy products and services — ssu

You said "only" before. I'm denying that "only". Here you don't say "only", so that's a completely different statement I'm not objecting to. Wealth effects other things besides that, not only that.

If then trade is so good and renting so bad, what is so wrong with renting something than buying? — 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 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

Why would it have to be less difficult? Rentals are already more complex arrangements than sales, and sales can be made more complex to simulate rentals if that's what people actually want. The same business that rents you a bicycle (gives you a bicycle to use for so long as you continue making periodic payments for the continued use of it, and you have to keep paying those payments until you return it) could instead just as easily sell and buy used bicycles on installment (so they give you a bicycle and so long as you continue to make periodic payments until it's paid off you can keep using it, or if you don't want to keep using it you can bring it back and they'll rebuy it, for a lower price of course, much of which will simply go to cancelling out your remaining debt for the purchase). The difference is that if you do want to keep the bicycle indefinitely, you can just finish paying it off, and not end up owing for its use indefinitely. And if you don't like the difference between that business's sale and repurchase prices, you're free to sacrifice the convenience they offer to find a better buyer elsewhere, so market forces (great thing eh?) will force the difference between sale and repurchase price to be worth the convenience.

And this is a problem quite generally in every poor country. — ssu

I'm not in a poor country. I'm in the richest state in the richest country in the world (by GDP). It's the people in the piss-poor states who can easily buy huge tracts of land that nobody else wants, who generally think it's everyone else's fault for "choosing" to have been born in the places where most people are born because those are the places most people live.

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

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"?

To be clear, I am proposing "stopping them", but by removing the state protection of the arrangements that allow them to do this (invalidating contracts of rent and interest eventually, but working up to that by increasingly taxing rent and interest income including a negative tax on rent and interest expenses), rather than by adding state enforcement of prohibitions against it (such as by legally mandating interest rates be kept below a certain percent). My way seems more libertarian, more free-market.

(Also, mandating interest rates be limited doesn't necessarily help, if the price of the properties being lent out can just skyrocket so even a small interest rate on a ridiculously overpriced property is still prohibitively expensive).

(On a parallel note, a part of me wonders if the state government of California likes policies that lead to skyrocketing property values, not only because the rich who own that property therefore profit, but because the people directly voted in a constitutional amendment limiting property tax rates, so the only way the government can get more tax is if the properties are worth more).

Simply put, when there is no option other than to rent for people who work, then the entire society has a huge problem. — ssu

At least we can agree on that.

Why should it be massive? Or what do you define massive?

Would you say in Switzerland the state intervention is massive? — ssu

Yes.

In my opinion, libertarian ideas of "free markets" is pure fantasy. They've never existed.

In your opening post you asked:

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

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.

I answered how their proposals aren't at all similar to the example you provided in the opening post. It's not similar to Benkei's example. It's has nothing to do with just owning an expensive ranch, or farm, or a Van Gogh painting. Your only counterargument was just an asinine slippery slope, and when I pointed the fallacy out, all you could do was once again complain that such a tax is just "populism", refer to wealth taxes from other countries that are completely dissimilar to Warren and Sanders' proposals, and that increasing wages and strengthening unions would suffice (as if the USA can't do both). All while ignoring the broader issue of profound wealth inequality in the USA and how it's engendered.

So since you've decided to come full circle I think I'll just see myself out of this little circle jerk you're having with yourself.

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

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.

I answered how their proposals aren't at all similar to the example you provided in the opening post. — 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.

It's not similar to Benkei's example. — Maw

Benkei gave an example of an implementation of a wealth tax.