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That new technology benefited someone besides the entrepreneur. All the consumers of that technology benefited from it. Some of that technology was directed to
by 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 agoExamples: 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 agoNice! 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 agoWhen 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?
- babesh 5y agoSuppose you tax wealth at 70% for anything over say 4 million. Now do that annually or at least periodically. What ends up happening is that unless that person’s wealth grows at greater than 70% for that period, you end up taking all their wealth above the 4 million. Your 70% tax is really a 100% tax minus 4 million. It’s just math. .30^n as n goes up approaches 0. Do it once and you take 70%. Do it twice and you take 91%. Do it 5 times and you have taken about 99.75% of their wealth. The factory system as you call it is generating most of the growth in the economy. The rest of the system is increasingly inefficient. Go look at education, healthcare, media, etc... Those are where costs have increased the most for decreasing benefits. Your approach slows down the growth of the pie and reallocates it into leeches in the system, entrenching them further. Notice how there is suddenly zero talk of decreasing healthcare costs or making education work better as a whole? Those industries hopped onto the bandwagon and are all for printing money which indirectly go to them. I am actually for some UBI. My opinion is you create an AMT on revenue and use that to fund UBI. Also, I am for a higher estate/death tax. It resets the playing field but keeps the incentive structure for people to create wealth.