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Some ancient societies deigned it honorable and mandatory for the most wealthy to be sacrificed to the gods and their property to be thereafter redistributed by
by dleslie 10y ago
Some ancient societies deigned it honorable and mandatory for the most wealthy to be sacrificed to the gods and their property to be thereafter redistributed by the state.
Some forgoed the sacrifice and allowed them to host large community events where their wealth was shared broadly.
Others made it fashionable and socially expected for the wealthy to be absurdly risky with their investments and so ensure their wealth would be redistributed regularly through the risk and reward of the market.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago> Others made it fashionable and socially expected for the wealthy to be absurdly risky with their investments and so ensure their wealth would be redistributed regularly through the risk and reward of the market. This one seems to be the one we're missing today. In particular because of two trends: a) a tax code that encourages large piles of cash to be accumulated offshore inside corporations and b) the modern trend of large companies to be publicly-traded rather than privately owned. So then you get a billionaire who owns a large percentage of their own publicly traded company which itself has a hundred billion dollars in cash inside of it. He can't direct the company to use the money for risky investments because that's not what the other shareholders want, but neither can he extract his share of it to do that with because it would incur a huge tax cost. If we fixed this we might have a dozen instances of Elon Musk instead of just one.
- clock_tower 10y agoI still like the potlatch system, or some similar turn towards "Big Man" economics, but that's a brilliant insight, that risky, sketchy dot-com investments serve as a way of redistributing wealth! I need to remember that transhumanist axiom, that "the purpose of a system is what it does" -- and not what it claims to do.