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I think there's a good argument to be made that personally accumulated wealth spent on experimental projects such as this one is used better than if it were tax

I think there's a good argument to be made that personally accumulated wealth spent on experimental projects such as this one is used better than if it were taxed and added to the relatively enormous federal budget. DoD yearly spend is greater than 10x of Zuck's net worth, after all.

dublinben 11y ago
You're pushing a false dichotomy of personal wealth or Federal income tax. It would be much easier and effective to simply preempt the concentration of such wealth in the first place by ensuring more equitable salaries across the workforce. No onerous redistribution necessary.
- panic 11y ago
  How would you force employers to pay their employees equitable salaries? What if a job isn't worth that much to an employer?
  - dalke 11y ago
    Turn the question around - how do you force employees to accept horrible salaries? You make sure there is no job safety so they are scared to ask for a raise. You make sure there is no good social safety net, so they fear for losing their job. You make sure the employees cannot effectively organize to present a more effective bargaining force. And you get people to believe that a business model that can't pay its employees an equitable salary should still be allowed to continue.
    - panic 11y ago
      I completely agree. My point was that, without some extra source of money, forcing employers to pay a particular salary won't work. We need to make it possible to live without a salary.
      - dalke 11y ago
        You may agree in principle, but you are using terms like "forcing employers" which contains a built-in bias. Here's the same question with a different bias: "How do you restore power to the employees so they get equitable salaries?" Your question assumes that what we have now is natural, and that force is required to change things. If the shop owner's thumb has been pushing down on the scales for years, then the solution is not that the customer needs to apply an opposite force to balance thing out, but the shop owner needs to stop applying force. (Okay, applying a counter-force, as in Leslie Thrasher's "Tipping the Scales", would be a short-term solution, but it's also an easily corrupted one, and it makes most of the people feel like they are being ripped off.) To start the answer to my question, first remove so-called "right-to-work" laws, or at least the legal requirement that non-members can "force unions to provide without compensation grievance services that are paid for by union members." (Quoting Wikipedia Right-to-work_law#Unfairness .) There's plenty more, but it's a belabored topic that you can easily find elsewhere.
      - chillwaves 11y ago
        Check out basic income.
  - zanny 11y ago
    Then the job is not worth doing. Ditch digging and filling has zero productive utility. If there is something someone wants done, but they value it so little its not worth the time to provide another human with a living wage, it is not work worthy of being done. If it actually mattered to whoever wants it done, they would offer more for it. Remember, corporate profits are only the indirection of the translation of time into things and acts. People buy a McRib to eat, but if they had to pay the supply chain of that McRib reasonable wages they would probably rather eat something else for that price, something healthier and tastier most likely. Though in all honesty, the real problem is not forcing employers who do employ people to give them more money than they would be willing to work for. The problem is that those wages constitute the survival of that individual, even when in our current society it is asinine to think people are contributing to one another's survival more than they are contributing to superfluous wants. The fraction of our workforce involved in providing food, shelter, security, and health are probably at most one in ten. The rest are there for wants. Our social organization needs to start reflecting that more rather than making the unskilled writhe in destitution for scraps of a living.
    - cinquemb 11y ago
      >…even when in our current society it is asinine to think people are contributing to one another's survival more than they are contributing to superfluous wants. The fraction of our workforce involved in providing food, shelter, security, and health are probably at most one in ten. The rest are there for wants. Our social organization needs to start reflecting that more rather than making the unskilled writhe in destitution for scraps of a living. I wish this was stated more often, at least to expose people to converse on ways we can allocate resources in different/arguably better ways compared to say 5k years ago.
  - mindslight 11y ago
    Fix monetary policy so that people would be able to save in liquid assets rather than financing everything and living month to month. As an individual's savings rise, their autonomy increases while the marginal utility of an earned dollar decreases. They'd naturally demand a higher salary. If that job wasn't worth that much to an employer, either the cost of the resulting service would rise or the job wouldn't get done, just like now.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    >How would you force employers to pay their employees equitable salaries? * Provide more competition for labor from the public sector by employing more people in the public sector (i.e. the opposite of austerity). * Raise the minimum wage significantly. >What if a job isn't worth that much to an employer? "isn't worth it" = "can't employ that person and make a profit" Corporate profits are at all time highs and labor's share of income is at an all time low. Ergo there is a massive amount of slack at the low end. Every corporation that employs a lot of people will scream until they're blue in the face that they will fire half of their workforce if you raise the minimum wage by so much as a cent, but when it actually goes up, they don't do anything of the sort. Raising the minimum wage to $20 or $25 / hr would be one of the most direct ways to transfer money from 0.01% to the pockets of the people who do all the actual work in this country. It would not only drag salaries up it would drag the cost of property down. You just have to deprogram all of the people who erroneously believe that it will cause mass unemployment, massive inflation, or who think that it's somehow unfair to people earning $minimum wage + $x (who would all get a pay raise too).

dublinben 11y ago

You're pushing a false dichotomy of personal wealth or Federal income tax. It would be much easier and effective to simply preempt the concentration of such wealth in the first place by ensuring more equitable salaries across the workforce. No onerous redistribution necessary.

panic 11y ago
How would you force employers to pay their employees equitable salaries? What if a job isn't worth that much to an employer?
- dalke 11y ago
  Turn the question around - how do you force employees to accept horrible salaries? You make sure there is no job safety so they are scared to ask for a raise. You make sure there is no good social safety net, so they fear for losing their job. You make sure the employees cannot effectively organize to present a more effective bargaining force. And you get people to believe that a business model that can't pay its employees an equitable salary should still be allowed to continue.
  - panic 11y ago
    I completely agree. My point was that, without some extra source of money, forcing employers to pay a particular salary won't work. We need to make it possible to live without a salary.
    - dalke 11y ago
      You may agree in principle, but you are using terms like "forcing employers" which contains a built-in bias. Here's the same question with a different bias: "How do you restore power to the employees so they get equitable salaries?" Your question assumes that what we have now is natural, and that force is required to change things. If the shop owner's thumb has been pushing down on the scales for years, then the solution is not that the customer needs to apply an opposite force to balance thing out, but the shop owner needs to stop applying force. (Okay, applying a counter-force, as in Leslie Thrasher's "Tipping the Scales", would be a short-term solution, but it's also an easily corrupted one, and it makes most of the people feel like they are being ripped off.) To start the answer to my question, first remove so-called "right-to-work" laws, or at least the legal requirement that non-members can "force unions to provide without compensation grievance services that are paid for by union members." (Quoting Wikipedia Right-to-work_law#Unfairness .) There's plenty more, but it's a belabored topic that you can easily find elsewhere.
    - chillwaves 11y ago
      Check out basic income.
- zanny 11y ago
  Then the job is not worth doing. Ditch digging and filling has zero productive utility. If there is something someone wants done, but they value it so little its not worth the time to provide another human with a living wage, it is not work worthy of being done. If it actually mattered to whoever wants it done, they would offer more for it. Remember, corporate profits are only the indirection of the translation of time into things and acts. People buy a McRib to eat, but if they had to pay the supply chain of that McRib reasonable wages they would probably rather eat something else for that price, something healthier and tastier most likely. Though in all honesty, the real problem is not forcing employers who do employ people to give them more money than they would be willing to work for. The problem is that those wages constitute the survival of that individual, even when in our current society it is asinine to think people are contributing to one another's survival more than they are contributing to superfluous wants. The fraction of our workforce involved in providing food, shelter, security, and health are probably at most one in ten. The rest are there for wants. Our social organization needs to start reflecting that more rather than making the unskilled writhe in destitution for scraps of a living.
  - cinquemb 11y ago
    >…even when in our current society it is asinine to think people are contributing to one another's survival more than they are contributing to superfluous wants. The fraction of our workforce involved in providing food, shelter, security, and health are probably at most one in ten. The rest are there for wants. Our social organization needs to start reflecting that more rather than making the unskilled writhe in destitution for scraps of a living. I wish this was stated more often, at least to expose people to converse on ways we can allocate resources in different/arguably better ways compared to say 5k years ago.
- mindslight 11y ago
  Fix monetary policy so that people would be able to save in liquid assets rather than financing everything and living month to month. As an individual's savings rise, their autonomy increases while the marginal utility of an earned dollar decreases. They'd naturally demand a higher salary. If that job wasn't worth that much to an employer, either the cost of the resulting service would rise or the job wouldn't get done, just like now.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  >How would you force employers to pay their employees equitable salaries? * Provide more competition for labor from the public sector by employing more people in the public sector (i.e. the opposite of austerity). * Raise the minimum wage significantly. >What if a job isn't worth that much to an employer? "isn't worth it" = "can't employ that person and make a profit" Corporate profits are at all time highs and labor's share of income is at an all time low. Ergo there is a massive amount of slack at the low end. Every corporation that employs a lot of people will scream until they're blue in the face that they will fire half of their workforce if you raise the minimum wage by so much as a cent, but when it actually goes up, they don't do anything of the sort. Raising the minimum wage to $20 or $25 / hr would be one of the most direct ways to transfer money from 0.01% to the pockets of the people who do all the actual work in this country. It would not only drag salaries up it would drag the cost of property down. You just have to deprogram all of the people who erroneously believe that it will cause mass unemployment, massive inflation, or who think that it's somehow unfair to people earning $minimum wage + $x (who would all get a pay raise too).