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If you just want to tax success highly enough that the end result is the same as failure why not be explicit about it?

by barry-cotter 5y ago

jnovek 5y ago
I’m sorry, did the parent edit their comment? I don’t see how you get “taxing success” out of this.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  They want to punish people and companies for getting good at their jobs to such an extent that there are no rewards for doing something well. The argument is fully analogous to economic growth being bad and by reversal poverty being good. > a great argument for incredibly stringent anti-trust that prevents companies from getting very big at all. Successfully scaling inevitably produces extremely undesirable outcomes for anyone not invested in the company > Scale and automated processes are a means of reducing risk for shareholders and rigging competition, and preventing them should be a priority for everyone
  - throwawaycuriou 5y ago
    That's not a fair reading. You're conflating success with scale, something the parent post explains has a fractal of unwanted externalities.
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
      The only way we have ever discovered of widely making more of anything is scaling processes and organisations that work. If you punish scale you punish success. This is true for manufacturing, agriculture and education and those feed into everything.
advael 5y ago
Taxing success is part of what got us here. We let these rogue optimizers get really big because of this dumb theory that everyone can somehow automagically benefit from these entities that accumulate massive power and influence. What actually happens is what always happens in such arrangements: When the entity gets powerful enough to ignore or alter the deal, they will, inevitably, whether that deal is taxes, checks and balances, or being subject to any sort of market forces, like there being competition in your market or consumers caring about (and being able to make choices about) the quality of good or service you are selling them. Risk-aversion means that such entities will try to insulate themselves from threats to their power by whatever means they have available, and we have seen time and time again that this includes subverting all the high-minded idealism of both democracy and free market economics.
smolder 5y ago
Taxing "success" doesn't make it failure even with top bracket paying 90% of it back. The hyperbole and melodrama of economic winners complaining about taxes tends to make me unsympathetic. Meanwhile for the median earner, oftentimes admirable work is effectively taxed into stagnation or failure, not by the government per se, but by the upwards money funnels controlled by rent seekers further up the hierarchy, the negative lottery of savings-draining misfortunes, useless mandatory insurance, taxes they actually pay because they don't have access to as many accounting tricks, employers that collude to pay them less than they're worth, and so on.

If you just want to tax success highly enough that the end result is the same as failure why not be explicit about it?

jnovek 5y ago

I’m sorry, did the parent edit their comment? I don’t see how you get “taxing success” out of this.

barry-cotter 5y ago
They want to punish people and companies for getting good at their jobs to such an extent that there are no rewards for doing something well. The argument is fully analogous to economic growth being bad and by reversal poverty being good. > a great argument for incredibly stringent anti-trust that prevents companies from getting very big at all. Successfully scaling inevitably produces extremely undesirable outcomes for anyone not invested in the company > Scale and automated processes are a means of reducing risk for shareholders and rigging competition, and preventing them should be a priority for everyone
- throwawaycuriou 5y ago
  That's not a fair reading. You're conflating success with scale, something the parent post explains has a fractal of unwanted externalities.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    The only way we have ever discovered of widely making more of anything is scaling processes and organisations that work. If you punish scale you punish success. This is true for manufacturing, agriculture and education and those feed into everything.

advael 5y ago

Taxing success is part of what got us here. We let these rogue optimizers get really big because of this dumb theory that everyone can somehow automagically benefit from these entities that accumulate massive power and influence. What actually happens is what always happens in such arrangements: When the entity gets powerful enough to ignore or alter the deal, they will, inevitably, whether that deal is taxes, checks and balances, or being subject to any sort of market forces, like there being competition in your market or consumers caring about (and being able to make choices about) the quality of good or service you are selling them. Risk-aversion means that such entities will try to insulate themselves from threats to their power by whatever means they have available, and we have seen time and time again that this includes subverting all the high-minded idealism of both democracy and free market economics.

smolder 5y ago

Taxing "success" doesn't make it failure even with top bracket paying 90% of it back. The hyperbole and melodrama of economic winners complaining about taxes tends to make me unsympathetic. Meanwhile for the median earner, oftentimes admirable work is effectively taxed into stagnation or failure, not by the government per se, but by the upwards money funnels controlled by rent seekers further up the hierarchy, the negative lottery of savings-draining misfortunes, useless mandatory insurance, taxes they actually pay because they don't have access to as many accounting tricks, employers that collude to pay them less than they're worth, and so on.