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The creation and adoption of new technology has created a lot of new wealth. This has increased inequality just as it has done in the past. This creates power d

by babesh 6y ago

The creation and adoption of new technology has created a lot of new wealth. This has increased inequality just as it has done in the past. This creates power disparity and envy. The creation and adoption of new technology has decreased the wealth of people obsoleted by new technology. Additionally, our system has grown many oligopolies including healthcare, education, utilities, etc... that increasingly leech off the system. Poverty not only makes it harder to become wealthy but can also be debilitating. Some poverty has been alleviated by the social system but poverty's effect is lives long. It is possible to retrain people who have been obsoleted by technology but in many cases people will end up with a lower pay than before. I don't trust either side (this writer or Paul Graham) to come up with good solutions because both are partisan. The wealth redistributors focus on redistribution but actually cause wealth to be destroyed since they disincentize the creation of wealth for all. The other side does not spend enough energy on eliminating misery and dysfunction.

feoren 6y ago
New technology could create new wealth for everyone, but instead it mostly creates wealth for the people who already own everything. If you own a bunch of factories, and someone combines a bunch of open-source technologies and concepts developed in public universities with a couple good new proprietary ideas to create a robot that replaces all your workforce, congrats! Someone else just made you a billionaire and now you get to cast off all those formerly heroic hard-working Americans into an uncaring libertarian hellscape where they become stupid lazy moochers whose death in the streets is a cheer-line for Republican conventions. There has never been any evidence that taxes disincentivize wealth creation. That's a nonsense myth that doesn't hold up to historical evidence nor to a few seconds of personal introspection. You really think a wealth tax or a 70% tax on income over $10 million would make people like Jeff Bezos go "okay screw it I'm not going to do an Amazon anymore -- the world doesn't deserve my genius!" and just John Galt out of existence? That's nonsense.
- babesh 6y ago
  That new technology benefited someone besides the entrepreneur. All the consumers of that technology benefited from it. Some of that technology was directed to providing services for the wealthy but a lot benefited people widely. That is blindingly obvious: smart phones, covid vaccines, cheap screens, etc... A wealth tax of 100% has been tried before. That definitely disincentivized wealth creation. We have run that experiment before. In fact, various experiments have been and are being run around the world. Go look at Europe to see how it is doing. Less wealth creation and less technological innovation but a higher floor. Also, a wealth tax as others have mentioned is a very narrow minded approach. It reeks of envy and is not a considered approach. It makes far more sense to look widely both at ultimate problems and solutions.
  - babesh 6y ago
    Examples: increasing capital gains taxes, AMT for corporations above a certain revenue, increasing minimum wage, free college, free healthcare, increasing inheritance taxes, breaking oligopolies by creating competitive markets, universal basic income.
    - EvilEy3 6y ago
      Nice! And we can even pay for it by using universal income, we just need to do an initial round of UBI and then it will bootstrap itself! Why nobody thought of that before?
  - feoren 6y ago
    When technologies like my example come about, we get to choose how widely people benefit from it. Automation replacing factory workers certainly could and should benefit people besides the factory owners, but my entire thesis is that the American economy is currently set up to almost entirely benefit the factory owners and shareholders, while being unbelievably heartless to the people being replaced. Sure, prices might fall for everyone, but monopolies and principal-agent problems make that harder. Note that the factory owners likely did nothing to reap that enormous benefit; they simply waited for technology to advance. Universal basic income is about recognizing that exponentially increasing automation is an amazing, unprecedented benefit to society and trying to make sure that benefit is widely shared instead of being hoarded by existing capital owners. And can you please not replace my comment about taxing the rich more with some hyper-extreme 100% wealth tax? Nobody is suggesting that, so you're arguing with a straw-man. 100% is clearly insane. What are you even referring to, the French Revolution?

by babesh 6y ago

feoren 6y ago

New technology could create new wealth for everyone, but instead it mostly creates wealth for the people who already own everything. If you own a bunch of factories, and someone combines a bunch of open-source technologies and concepts developed in public universities with a couple good new proprietary ideas to create a robot that replaces all your workforce, congrats! Someone else just made you a billionaire and now you get to cast off all those formerly heroic hard-working Americans into an uncaring libertarian hellscape where they become stupid lazy moochers whose death in the streets is a cheer-line for Republican conventions. There has never been any evidence that taxes disincentivize wealth creation. That's a nonsense myth that doesn't hold up to historical evidence nor to a few seconds of personal introspection. You really think a wealth tax or a 70% tax on income over $10 million would make people like Jeff Bezos go "okay screw it I'm not going to do an Amazon anymore -- the world doesn't deserve my genius!" and just John Galt out of existence? That's nonsense.

babesh 6y ago
That new technology benefited someone besides the entrepreneur. All the consumers of that technology benefited from it. Some of that technology was directed to providing services for the wealthy but a lot benefited people widely. That is blindingly obvious: smart phones, covid vaccines, cheap screens, etc... A wealth tax of 100% has been tried before. That definitely disincentivized wealth creation. We have run that experiment before. In fact, various experiments have been and are being run around the world. Go look at Europe to see how it is doing. Less wealth creation and less technological innovation but a higher floor. Also, a wealth tax as others have mentioned is a very narrow minded approach. It reeks of envy and is not a considered approach. It makes far more sense to look widely both at ultimate problems and solutions.
- babesh 6y ago
  Examples: increasing capital gains taxes, AMT for corporations above a certain revenue, increasing minimum wage, free college, free healthcare, increasing inheritance taxes, breaking oligopolies by creating competitive markets, universal basic income.
  - EvilEy3 6y ago
    Nice! And we can even pay for it by using universal income, we just need to do an initial round of UBI and then it will bootstrap itself! Why nobody thought of that before?
- feoren 6y ago
  When technologies like my example come about, we get to choose how widely people benefit from it. Automation replacing factory workers certainly could and should benefit people besides the factory owners, but my entire thesis is that the American economy is currently set up to almost entirely benefit the factory owners and shareholders, while being unbelievably heartless to the people being replaced. Sure, prices might fall for everyone, but monopolies and principal-agent problems make that harder. Note that the factory owners likely did nothing to reap that enormous benefit; they simply waited for technology to advance. Universal basic income is about recognizing that exponentially increasing automation is an amazing, unprecedented benefit to society and trying to make sure that benefit is widely shared instead of being hoarded by existing capital owners. And can you please not replace my comment about taxing the rich more with some hyper-extreme 100% wealth tax? Nobody is suggesting that, so you're arguing with a straw-man. 100% is clearly insane. What are you even referring to, the French Revolution?