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People obsessed with "how will we pay for it" just don't understand. The skewed distribution of wealth creates a situation where people don't have time and ener

People obsessed with "how will we pay for it" just don't understand. The skewed distribution of wealth creates a situation where people don't have time and energy left over from their hustle to take care of themselves and to take care of each other in basic ways. People are sacrificing to the gods of capitalism. Correcting the skewed distribution of wealth would shift agency back to people to mind the business of living life up close, rather than having their life energy extracted. This is part of a degrowth mindset, and it will freak people out who flee from the shame of not winning, who cannot handle pauses or idle time, who must have control over other peopes' lives. But we can't have those people running this planet into the fire. They're gonna have to learn to be alright.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Consultant32452 7y ago
>The skewed distribution of wealth creates a situation where people don't have time and energy left over from their hustle to take care of themselves and to take care of each other in basic ways. Can you help me understand this better? Because I see this sentiment often. I'm just gonna do some quick math... Bezos + Gates + Musk + Zuckerberg = let's round up to $300 Billion. Divide that evenly among the 327 million US population. I'd get $917. Do you believe that I will take better care of myself or be a better father in the long run if I get a one-time bonus of $917?
- oblio 7y ago
  I find it a bit naive that the whole system would work like some sort of highway robbery :-) I'm pretty sure that's not what's meant when people talk of "wealth redistribution". Your argument looks like a strawman to me.
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    I'm not trying to make an argument, I'm trying to understand what the GP means in practice. I know people sometimes use questions passive aggressively, but that wasn't my intent. A more even distribution of all the wealth looks like people having a few thousand dollars of wealth. Much less if we're equalizing the whole world and not just the US. What are we imagining happens?
    - oblio 7y ago
      I'm from a former Communist state (one of those states that became Communist at Soviet-tank-barrel-point :-) ). So Communism doesn't have much appeal to me. My personal perspective is that equalizing things fully doesn't work. You want incentives to motivate people. However, it's quite amazing what motivates people - after all, for the average billionaire going from $62bn to $63bn isn't really some sort of milestone, unless they somehow surpass some other billionaire. Sometimes the things that motivate people are a lot more fine grained that it seems. So pure financial motivation is rarely the main incentive. On the other hand, such huge imbalances do eat away at democratic principles. My personal opinion is that at some point, companies should be treated as utilities/companies of vital national interest. After all, that's how rich people make most of their money, through shares, not through salaries. So, basically, once a company is taller than X, the country this company is based on gets a certain share of the company, 5%, 10%, 20%, it doesn't matter. I'd also make these shares non-voting. Even better, I'd force these companies to give out a certain percentage of these shares to employees (after all, they're "the people"). We'd have fewer billionaires, we'd have more stable middle class people, we'd have higher state revenues, we'd have less of a disconnect between totally private companies, regular people and governments. As the owner of a company, you have a choice: create a huge company and have to share the spoils or stay small and nimble and have greater control.
      - Consultant32452 7y ago
        Let's imagine the US govt takes 10% of the shares of Amazon. These are non-voting shares. Amazon doesn't pay a dividend as far as I know, so what is the point? The government doesn't have control over the company, the government doesn't get any revenue. The government can't sell the shares because then it just has to come confiscate 10% more shares from Amazon. How do I, as a regular citizen, benefit from this? Is there some mechanism I'm not seeing? Because it feels like it's just a meaningless paper transfer.
- macawfish 7y ago
  Right now, people with a lot of money basically dictate how people with not enough money use their time. How do they do this? By effectively withholding housing and food unless the people with not enough money do the work that the people with more money tell them to do... Often at the cost of taking care of their kids, of their bodies, of their mental health, of their living spaces. Money as a tool for distributing resources and collective decision making is at odds with money as a tool for domination, exploitation and extortion. Modifying the distribution of wealth isn't about chopping up the richest peoples money and handing it out to everyone else. It's about altering the flows of the dynamical system so that power is continually distributed in an equitable way, one that optimizes more peoples' ability to thrive and co-create healthy lives. It's about changing the meaning of having vs not having money, it's about reducing the intensity of the leverage people have over one another, and about freeing people to have basic autonomy and agency in their lives.
- dls2016 7y ago
  > Do you believe that I will take better care of myself or be a better father in the long run if I get a one-time bonus of $917? Your POV fails to take into account the utility and time-value of the redistributed dollars. It's the difference between some unelected doofus having tons of power because of their stationary dollars, or building a universal pre-k and/or healthcare system. I know I'd personally work less if I wasn't "blessed with the opportunity of choice" of terrible insurance plans offered by my employer where an emergency appendectomy leads to $5k in bills... or if I could work 75% time and reduce daycare hours.
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    It's still not clear to me how we are going to get the outcome you're looking for. If the wealth is redistributed to the people (the mechanism isn't important) then that amounts to a few thousand dollars per person. This isn't the kind of money that would allow wide-spread reduction in work hours. My expectation is that most people will liquify that wealth and spend it over a long weekend. Do you have a different expectation? If rather than being given directly to the people, instead the state keeps that money, are you predicting that Donald Trump will use it to build you a new school?
    - dls2016 7y ago
      Regarding reduction of work hours, I’m a subscriber to the prevalence of “bullshit jobs” theory. Remove the power from corporate overlords via redistribution and put those resources under more democratic control. As a bonus people will take ownership over their schedule. Sure, with less people working we may not have forty choices of toilet paper or same day delivery of counterfeit trinkets... but I’m more than ok with that. It will be necessary to reduce carbon emissions, anyway.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Consultant32452 7y ago

>The skewed distribution of wealth creates a situation where people don't have time and energy left over from their hustle to take care of themselves and to take care of each other in basic ways. Can you help me understand this better? Because I see this sentiment often. I'm just gonna do some quick math... Bezos + Gates + Musk + Zuckerberg = let's round up to $300 Billion. Divide that evenly among the 327 million US population. I'd get $917. Do you believe that I will take better care of myself or be a better father in the long run if I get a one-time bonus of $917?

oblio 7y ago
I find it a bit naive that the whole system would work like some sort of highway robbery :-) I'm pretty sure that's not what's meant when people talk of "wealth redistribution". Your argument looks like a strawman to me.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  I'm not trying to make an argument, I'm trying to understand what the GP means in practice. I know people sometimes use questions passive aggressively, but that wasn't my intent. A more even distribution of all the wealth looks like people having a few thousand dollars of wealth. Much less if we're equalizing the whole world and not just the US. What are we imagining happens?
  - oblio 7y ago
    I'm from a former Communist state (one of those states that became Communist at Soviet-tank-barrel-point :-) ). So Communism doesn't have much appeal to me. My personal perspective is that equalizing things fully doesn't work. You want incentives to motivate people. However, it's quite amazing what motivates people - after all, for the average billionaire going from $62bn to $63bn isn't really some sort of milestone, unless they somehow surpass some other billionaire. Sometimes the things that motivate people are a lot more fine grained that it seems. So pure financial motivation is rarely the main incentive. On the other hand, such huge imbalances do eat away at democratic principles. My personal opinion is that at some point, companies should be treated as utilities/companies of vital national interest. After all, that's how rich people make most of their money, through shares, not through salaries. So, basically, once a company is taller than X, the country this company is based on gets a certain share of the company, 5%, 10%, 20%, it doesn't matter. I'd also make these shares non-voting. Even better, I'd force these companies to give out a certain percentage of these shares to employees (after all, they're "the people"). We'd have fewer billionaires, we'd have more stable middle class people, we'd have higher state revenues, we'd have less of a disconnect between totally private companies, regular people and governments. As the owner of a company, you have a choice: create a huge company and have to share the spoils or stay small and nimble and have greater control.
    - Consultant32452 7y ago
      Let's imagine the US govt takes 10% of the shares of Amazon. These are non-voting shares. Amazon doesn't pay a dividend as far as I know, so what is the point? The government doesn't have control over the company, the government doesn't get any revenue. The government can't sell the shares because then it just has to come confiscate 10% more shares from Amazon. How do I, as a regular citizen, benefit from this? Is there some mechanism I'm not seeing? Because it feels like it's just a meaningless paper transfer.
macawfish 7y ago
Right now, people with a lot of money basically dictate how people with not enough money use their time. How do they do this? By effectively withholding housing and food unless the people with not enough money do the work that the people with more money tell them to do... Often at the cost of taking care of their kids, of their bodies, of their mental health, of their living spaces. Money as a tool for distributing resources and collective decision making is at odds with money as a tool for domination, exploitation and extortion. Modifying the distribution of wealth isn't about chopping up the richest peoples money and handing it out to everyone else. It's about altering the flows of the dynamical system so that power is continually distributed in an equitable way, one that optimizes more peoples' ability to thrive and co-create healthy lives. It's about changing the meaning of having vs not having money, it's about reducing the intensity of the leverage people have over one another, and about freeing people to have basic autonomy and agency in their lives.
dls2016 7y ago
> Do you believe that I will take better care of myself or be a better father in the long run if I get a one-time bonus of $917? Your POV fails to take into account the utility and time-value of the redistributed dollars. It's the difference between some unelected doofus having tons of power because of their stationary dollars, or building a universal pre-k and/or healthcare system. I know I'd personally work less if I wasn't "blessed with the opportunity of choice" of terrible insurance plans offered by my employer where an emergency appendectomy leads to $5k in bills... or if I could work 75% time and reduce daycare hours.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  It's still not clear to me how we are going to get the outcome you're looking for. If the wealth is redistributed to the people (the mechanism isn't important) then that amounts to a few thousand dollars per person. This isn't the kind of money that would allow wide-spread reduction in work hours. My expectation is that most people will liquify that wealth and spend it over a long weekend. Do you have a different expectation? If rather than being given directly to the people, instead the state keeps that money, are you predicting that Donald Trump will use it to build you a new school?
  - dls2016 7y ago
    Regarding reduction of work hours, I’m a subscriber to the prevalence of “bullshit jobs” theory. Remove the power from corporate overlords via redistribution and put those resources under more democratic control. As a bonus people will take ownership over their schedule. Sure, with less people working we may not have forty choices of toilet paper or same day delivery of counterfeit trinkets... but I’m more than ok with that. It will be necessary to reduce carbon emissions, anyway.