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Productive wealth is a good thing. It's what made our current society possible. Unproductive wealth is the real devil, the hoarding of inelastic goods like land

Productive wealth is a good thing. It's what made our current society possible. Unproductive wealth is the real devil, the hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil. I strongly prefer a society which permits the existence of Jeff Bezos over one which does not. Of course, more strongly than that, I prefer a society which taxes inelastic goods and negative externalities and returns that wealth to the public over one which does not.

RGamma 3y ago
"Funny" things will happen, when the labor factor is removed from the three factors of production by AGI. ~Jeff can finally have the planet all for himself.
- cosmojg 3y ago
  Indeed, but only insofar as he can accumulate military power. Relevantly, incompletely taxed land ownership is a means of renting such power from the state, hence my gesturing toward a land value tax and universal basic income.
smsm42 3y ago
> the hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil. What do you mean by "hoarding"? I don't think any living person owns enough land, gold or oil to represent even tiny percentage of the overall market. The whole Russia, for comparison, owns 12% of oil market. So if you personally owned all the oil in Russia (by any measure an achievement far beyond the wildest dreams even of the richest Russian oligarchs, who still have to share among many others) you'd still be just one of the players. So I don't think those mystical "hoarders" really are as scary as you seem to think they are.
- cosmojg 3y ago
  Just because hoarding is popular doesn't mean it hurts society any less. We all pay for the inefficiencies it produces, whether or not it's distributed. (Granted, distributed hoarding is better than centralized hoarding as demonstrated by the likes of De Beers et al.)
Voultapher 3y ago
Wealth, at least the way we measure it, is inextricably tied to modernity. The system you say is a "good thing" is literally speedrunning the destruction of our biosphere. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a system more effective at destroying our world. What many see as prosperity, is irreconcilable with sustainability. I find that's an uncomfortable thought.
- guhidalg 3y ago
  I agree with you, but I think what most people fail at is applying higher-order logic. Yes it is nice that private citizens have Jeff Bezos levels of wealth instead of monarchies or plutocrats, but at what cost? Most people are just unwilling to keep thinking about opportunity costs beyond the obvious.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    What cost is allowing Bezos to exist?
    - guhidalg 3y ago
      Search for “pee in bottles” in this thread.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        People have always peed in bottles when they're on a long drive, piloting an airplane long distance, on a sailboat, and so on. Some peoples' bladders have a short fuse, and carry a bottle. Do you think Lindberg brought a port-a-potty along with his Spirit of St Louis? I remember the opening sequence in a Jeff Bridges movie where he pulls over in his car and dumps his pee bottle. P.S. My dad was a B-17 navigator in WW2. I asked him what did they do when had to go. He said an empty ammo box was used. What was done with the full box? "Extra bombs over Germany!"
        yoyohello13 3y ago
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
> Productive wealth is a good thing You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process. I don't mind if Jeff Bezos the person exists, but I have no reason whatsoever to want him to have control over the scale of resources and decision-making that he does.
- tomoyoirl 3y ago
  > You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process A key advantage of leaving it to the rich is that when rich people fail, they tend to end up losing their wealth and power, hurting mostly themselves — while even a political process that isn’t being corrupted or gamed by someone powerful is badly incentivized to throw buckets and buckets of good money after bad, hurting lots of people. Elon ruining Twitter is at least his own money. The California bullet train will be an unprofitable multibillion drain on the state for decades to come …
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    This (conveniently) ignores (as do so many similar analyses) the opportunity costs of entering into a labor contract. When an enterprise fails, it is not just the stockholders and corporate officers who suffer. The employees do too. Worse, only the foolhardy investor puts more than they can afford to lose into a risky investment, meaning that while they have undoubtedly lost money from the failure, they are almost certainly still "whole" in terms of their ability to meet their basic needs. By contrast, the employees, who may have lost no capital, often face much more dire circumstances in the aftermath of a venture failing. >even a political process that isn’t being corrupted or gamed by someone powerful is badly incentivized to throw good money after bad It isn't clear to me what you mean by this.
  - Draiken 3y ago
    What? You're ignoring all the lives he ruined to play with that company. Sure, he lost money, but he has plenty to lose. He wrecked a company and thousands of lives. They pay the price, not him. It's always the workers that pay the price.
laserlight 3y ago
> I strongly prefer a society which permits the existence of Jeff Bezos over one which does not. Can you expand? What did Bezos contribute to society?
- simonh 3y ago
  He built a company employing over a million people, created novel goods and services, including services my job depends on (AWS). The wealth of a man like Bezos isn't a pile of gold he wallows in like Scrooge McDuck, it exists in his shareholder control of a vast set of companies full of employees and doing productive work. These companies would not exist without his ability to identify new markets, build efficient companies, and raise capital and deploy it effectively. Take away the ability to do that, and who is going to found the new companies? Who is going to fund and control them? Who is going to identify the new goods and services of the future, and make them happen? There is an alternative, and that's run the economy as a bureaucratic extension of government. Run companies as extensions of government departments and place economic planning under political control. It's been tried over and over.
  - rsoto2 3y ago
    Workers created all those things not Jeff Bezos. A lot of the services and technologies leveraged by AWS are created via open source projects for example PostGres.
    - poncho_romero 3y ago
      And in addition, if we grant the idea that Bezos created those things, it was not the super rich Bezos we have today who did. The parent commenter is arguing for the existence of a Jeff Bezos who is not the Jeff Bezos who exists today—rather they want a significantly poorer Bezos, because that is the Bezos who accomplished those feats
    - jimbokun 3y ago
      Managing and growing companies is a distinct skill. Open source software is wonderful and amazing. But it's not a replacement for Amazon and other companies.
rsoto2 3y ago
"permits the existence of Jeff Bezos" - your mind on capitalism. What things of importance has Bezos done? End world hunger? Or are we celebrating the death of local stores and malls? What about a society that prevents kids from starving instead of making bombs and satellites for world wars?
- missedthecue 3y ago
  Society has collectively voted that Amazon massively improves their lives. If they didn't think so, they'd still be choosing to shop at Sears and Kmart and hosting their software on HP enterprise servers in a musty office basement. That's all the clear and evident result of the market system which is very democratic. People vote with their dollars every day. The winners of these billions of daily democratic votes rise to the top and losers die out.
  - devbent 3y ago
    > If they didn't think so, they'd still be choosing to shop at Sears and Kmart Let's be clear: Amazon has been responsible for the shutting down of so many in-person businesses that entire product categories are can only be purchased on Amazon. The choice is a false one.
    - rajup 3y ago
      Come on. You make it sound as if Amazon started a campaign to directly shut these in-person businesses down. The reality however is more mundane and exactly what parent comment mentioned: people voted with their feet and dollars, the in-person businesses that did shut down could not adapt and we are all the better for it.
      - rsoto2 3y ago
        I completely agree that it was mundane and expected that's why I don't think bozos deserves to be viewed as a demigod of productivity. It was bound to happen.
      - 3y ago
dogman144 3y ago
If you’ve got elastic liquid assets, go forth and grow. If you’ve got property, as in, the asset most normal folks own end to end and drives their wealth - negative externality. Interesting take.
- cosmojg 3y ago
  My take becomes a lot more interesting when you consider that only 77 million Americans own land[1] while more than double that number, 158 million, own stocks[2] (and millions more own other elastic liquid assets). Yes, it's a wildly popular and literally ancient meme that land ownership is the path to wealth, but people aren't stupid. When the structure of the economy changes, human behavior follows. Current landowners don't even get screwed over, they just stop accumulating additional wealth from hoarding land. More likely than not, they'll sell that land for roughly whatever it was worth when the tax came into effect to enterprising developers who will buy it and attempt to turn it into something more productive for a profit. After all, land value taxes only apply to the space occupied by the land itself, not any improvements on that land like apartments or offices. Coupled with zoning reforms, we'd see apartment complexes replace single-family housing and train stations replace parking lots as suburban sprawl transformed into walkable paradise. [1] https://ubique.americangeo.org/map-of-the-week/map-of-the-week-mapping-private-vs-public-land-in-the-united-states/ https://ubique.americangeo.org/map-of-the-week/map-of-the-we... [2] https://www.fool.com/research/how-many-americans-own-stock/ https://www.fool.com/research/how-many-americans-own-stock/
pdonis 3y ago
> Unproductive wealth is the real devil, the hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil. They're not wealth if they're hoarded. Undeveloped land, or gold and oil in the ground, are no use to anybody. They're only wealth if they're used. And that requires lots of productive effort to develop the land, or to get the gold and oil out of the ground and into productive use. I agree that unproductive wealth is the real problem, but we need to be careful how we define it.
- cosmojg 3y ago
  Maybe I'm getting my terms mixed up, but wealth includes anything with value, no? So long as somebody else wants to develop that land, or mine that gold, or tap that oil, it is wealth. At least, that's my understanding.
pdonis 3y ago
> a society which taxes inelastic goods and negative externalities and returns that wealth to the public over one which does not. The problem is that this kind of society, even if we assume for the sake of argument that it would be preferable, is not really achievable politically. The only way to implement it is to have a government that has the power to coercively tax people, and all history shows that governments will not use that power to redistribute wealth to the public at large; instead they will use it to enrich themselves and their preferred special interests.
- jimbokun 3y ago
  There are countless programs that redistribute wealth. Welfare payments. Public education. Public health insurance programs. Retirement programs. Recently there has been a down swing in willingness to fund new programs that redistribute wealth. But that could change.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > There are countless programs that redistribute wealth. They purport to, yes, but for most of them, when you dig into the details, you find that what redistribution actually occurs is not from richer to poorer, but the opposite. And much of the money spent on the programs doesn't go to the purported recipients of redistribution at all, but to third parties. (For example, you cite public schools as redistributing wealth--but government funds for public schools only pass through the hands of the families whose children need schooling in the case of school vouchers, which are fairly rare, and in any case the money doesn't stay with those people, it ends up in the hands of the schools themselves. Given the current state of education in the US, anyone who wants to make a case that whatever redistribution of wealth occurs actually benefits the children and families has a very tough case to make.)
    - gottorf 3y ago
      > They purport to, yes, but for most of them, when you dig into the details In other words: POSIWID, or "the purpose of a system is what it does" (and not what it purports to do, because anyone can purport to do anything).
api 3y ago
This is basically Georgism: a tax on idle assets like land paired with very low or non-existent taxes on income and capital gains. Land value taxes would be on the land only and not things like buildings on it, so this would heavily incentivize maximally efficient use of land. I'm generally a fan though I would also add pollution taxes and short term capital gains (gambling) taxes.
- cosmojg 3y ago
  > This is basically Georgism: a tax on idle assets like land paired with very low or non-existent taxes on income and capital gains. Ah, so you've seen the cat! Yes, this is precisely what I was getting at. > I'm generally a fan though I would also add pollution taxes and short term capital gains (gambling) taxes. The former is known as a Pigouvian tax[2], and I yearn for such taxes with no less of my heart than I yearn for land value taxes. The latter, however, seems almost completely unnecessary. Why not allow people to gamble on noise? And if they're making a profit, it's more likely than not that they're adding signal and contributing to price discovery, along with providing short-term liquidity to all market participants! I don't mind anyone getting paid for that. [1] https://www.henrygeorge.org/catsup.htm https://www.henrygeorge.org/catsup.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax
rufus_foreman 3y ago
>> Unproductive wealth is the real devil, the hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil How would hoarding of gold, in and of itself, be bad? Say someone goes out and works and makes money, and they take the money and buy gold coins and keep them in a safe, or fill up a swimming pool so they can dive into their hoard of gold like Scrooge McDuck. They are contributing to society, and to the extent they hoard gold, asking nothing back for what they have contributed. It's like what Charlie Munger did. Made a massive fortune, spent his whole life doing it, had an amount of money that he could have used for extravagant spending, could have bought whole islands in Hawaii, could have bought politicians. But he didn't. He earned the money, earned dividends on the money, piled up all the money in a hoard. Then he died.
- vacuity 3y ago
  Hoarding gold isn't inherently bad, but many super rich people who arguably don't deserve nearly as much wealth as they have (worker exploitation, buying politicians, inheritance money, etc.), especially when juxtaposed with the terrible wealth inequality gap that they have the greatest ability to amend (through not exploiting, donating wealth or being taxed, not buying politicians to favor them, etc.). If everyone had a good baseline of living and politicians won't be bought to revert things, then no, I don't see a major issue with gold hoarders. But that's not the world we live in today.
- cosmojg 3y ago
  Charlie Munger achieved the vast majority of his wealth not by hoarding inelastic goods but by investing and reinvesting in dividend-paying stocks and bonds, virtual tokens representing liquid fractional ownership of productive enterprise. He can "hoard" those all he wants, and we all benefit from the greater levels of capital available to said productive enterprise. Now, if gold or other precious metals are necessary for the production of desirable goods, the hoarding of such assets increases the price of those goods in a zero-sum fashion. Of course, I'd never want to deny someone the pleasure of swimming in a pile of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck. I'm just saying that they shouldn't be able to profit as much off of keeping the pile locked away in their mansion. Rather, they should repay society for its losses in the form of a land value tax.
jonathankoren 3y ago
But it’s not productive wealth is it? It’s just stock. It’s Locked up value that he hordes like a dragon. That money isn’t actually being used to generate anything. Even when it is spent, it’s just financial products that generate money through financial transactions instead of actual goods and services. This has been the case since the 1980s when capital gains started being taxed below income, and the carried interest loophole was created. In fact, this is a well known economic phenomenon. Some would go as far as to say that it is an intentional outcome of the policy. In the end, the problem with Bezos and the rest of the oligarchs is the same problem with monopolies, it’s a command economy. Only instead of being dictated by some unelected government bureaucrats in a totalitarian state, it’s a a bunch unelected rich dudes with dreams of a totalitarian state. It’s an unhealthy economy.
- cosmojg 3y ago
  > But it’s not productive wealth is it? It’s just stock. It’s Locked up value that he hordes like a dragon. That money isn’t actually being used to generate anything. Oh, but it is! That value isn't locked up, it's invested in the company. That investment raises the level of capital available to the company, allowing them to hire more employees and offer more goods and services. That's all real value for real people, and yes, if it works out, capitalists get paid for making it possible. We already live in a world where one can own the means of production. The likes of Vanguard and Robinhood broker access. With a few clicks, you too can become a more productive capitalist.

RGamma 3y ago

"Funny" things will happen, when the labor factor is removed from the three factors of production by AGI. ~Jeff can finally have the planet all for himself.

cosmojg 3y ago
Indeed, but only insofar as he can accumulate military power. Relevantly, incompletely taxed land ownership is a means of renting such power from the state, hence my gesturing toward a land value tax and universal basic income.

smsm42 3y ago

> the hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil. What do you mean by "hoarding"? I don't think any living person owns enough land, gold or oil to represent even tiny percentage of the overall market. The whole Russia, for comparison, owns 12% of oil market. So if you personally owned all the oil in Russia (by any measure an achievement far beyond the wildest dreams even of the richest Russian oligarchs, who still have to share among many others) you'd still be just one of the players. So I don't think those mystical "hoarders" really are as scary as you seem to think they are.

cosmojg 3y ago
Just because hoarding is popular doesn't mean it hurts society any less. We all pay for the inefficiencies it produces, whether or not it's distributed. (Granted, distributed hoarding is better than centralized hoarding as demonstrated by the likes of De Beers et al.)

Voultapher 3y ago

Wealth, at least the way we measure it, is inextricably tied to modernity. The system you say is a "good thing" is literally speedrunning the destruction of our biosphere. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a system more effective at destroying our world. What many see as prosperity, is irreconcilable with sustainability. I find that's an uncomfortable thought.

guhidalg 3y ago
I agree with you, but I think what most people fail at is applying higher-order logic. Yes it is nice that private citizens have Jeff Bezos levels of wealth instead of monarchies or plutocrats, but at what cost? Most people are just unwilling to keep thinking about opportunity costs beyond the obvious.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  What cost is allowing Bezos to exist?
  - guhidalg 3y ago
    Search for “pee in bottles” in this thread.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      People have always peed in bottles when they're on a long drive, piloting an airplane long distance, on a sailboat, and so on. Some peoples' bladders have a short fuse, and carry a bottle. Do you think Lindberg brought a port-a-potty along with his Spirit of St Louis? I remember the opening sequence in a Jeff Bridges movie where he pulls over in his car and dumps his pee bottle. P.S. My dad was a B-17 navigator in WW2. I asked him what did they do when had to go. He said an empty ammo box was used. What was done with the full box? "Extra bombs over Germany!"
      - yoyohello13 3y ago

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

> Productive wealth is a good thing You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process. I don't mind if Jeff Bezos the person exists, but I have no reason whatsoever to want him to have control over the scale of resources and decision-making that he does.

tomoyoirl 3y ago
> You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process A key advantage of leaving it to the rich is that when rich people fail, they tend to end up losing their wealth and power, hurting mostly themselves — while even a political process that isn’t being corrupted or gamed by someone powerful is badly incentivized to throw buckets and buckets of good money after bad, hurting lots of people. Elon ruining Twitter is at least his own money. The California bullet train will be an unprofitable multibillion drain on the state for decades to come …
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  This (conveniently) ignores (as do so many similar analyses) the opportunity costs of entering into a labor contract. When an enterprise fails, it is not just the stockholders and corporate officers who suffer. The employees do too. Worse, only the foolhardy investor puts more than they can afford to lose into a risky investment, meaning that while they have undoubtedly lost money from the failure, they are almost certainly still "whole" in terms of their ability to meet their basic needs. By contrast, the employees, who may have lost no capital, often face much more dire circumstances in the aftermath of a venture failing. >even a political process that isn’t being corrupted or gamed by someone powerful is badly incentivized to throw good money after bad It isn't clear to me what you mean by this.
- Draiken 3y ago
  What? You're ignoring all the lives he ruined to play with that company. Sure, he lost money, but he has plenty to lose. He wrecked a company and thousands of lives. They pay the price, not him. It's always the workers that pay the price.

laserlight 3y ago

> I strongly prefer a society which permits the existence of Jeff Bezos over one which does not. Can you expand? What did Bezos contribute to society?

simonh 3y ago
He built a company employing over a million people, created novel goods and services, including services my job depends on (AWS). The wealth of a man like Bezos isn't a pile of gold he wallows in like Scrooge McDuck, it exists in his shareholder control of a vast set of companies full of employees and doing productive work. These companies would not exist without his ability to identify new markets, build efficient companies, and raise capital and deploy it effectively. Take away the ability to do that, and who is going to found the new companies? Who is going to fund and control them? Who is going to identify the new goods and services of the future, and make them happen? There is an alternative, and that's run the economy as a bureaucratic extension of government. Run companies as extensions of government departments and place economic planning under political control. It's been tried over and over.
- rsoto2 3y ago
  Workers created all those things not Jeff Bezos. A lot of the services and technologies leveraged by AWS are created via open source projects for example PostGres.
  - poncho_romero 3y ago
    And in addition, if we grant the idea that Bezos created those things, it was not the super rich Bezos we have today who did. The parent commenter is arguing for the existence of a Jeff Bezos who is not the Jeff Bezos who exists today—rather they want a significantly poorer Bezos, because that is the Bezos who accomplished those feats
  - jimbokun 3y ago
    Managing and growing companies is a distinct skill. Open source software is wonderful and amazing. But it's not a replacement for Amazon and other companies.

rsoto2 3y ago

"permits the existence of Jeff Bezos" - your mind on capitalism. What things of importance has Bezos done? End world hunger? Or are we celebrating the death of local stores and malls? What about a society that prevents kids from starving instead of making bombs and satellites for world wars?

missedthecue 3y ago
Society has collectively voted that Amazon massively improves their lives. If they didn't think so, they'd still be choosing to shop at Sears and Kmart and hosting their software on HP enterprise servers in a musty office basement. That's all the clear and evident result of the market system which is very democratic. People vote with their dollars every day. The winners of these billions of daily democratic votes rise to the top and losers die out.
- devbent 3y ago
  > If they didn't think so, they'd still be choosing to shop at Sears and Kmart Let's be clear: Amazon has been responsible for the shutting down of so many in-person businesses that entire product categories are can only be purchased on Amazon. The choice is a false one.
  - rajup 3y ago
    Come on. You make it sound as if Amazon started a campaign to directly shut these in-person businesses down. The reality however is more mundane and exactly what parent comment mentioned: people voted with their feet and dollars, the in-person businesses that did shut down could not adapt and we are all the better for it.
    - rsoto2 3y ago
      I completely agree that it was mundane and expected that's why I don't think bozos deserves to be viewed as a demigod of productivity. It was bound to happen.
    - 3y ago

dogman144 3y ago

If you’ve got elastic liquid assets, go forth and grow. If you’ve got property, as in, the asset most normal folks own end to end and drives their wealth - negative externality. Interesting take.

cosmojg 3y ago
My take becomes a lot more interesting when you consider that only 77 million Americans own land[1] while more than double that number, 158 million, own stocks[2] (and millions more own other elastic liquid assets). Yes, it's a wildly popular and literally ancient meme that land ownership is the path to wealth, but people aren't stupid. When the structure of the economy changes, human behavior follows. Current landowners don't even get screwed over, they just stop accumulating additional wealth from hoarding land. More likely than not, they'll sell that land for roughly whatever it was worth when the tax came into effect to enterprising developers who will buy it and attempt to turn it into something more productive for a profit. After all, land value taxes only apply to the space occupied by the land itself, not any improvements on that land like apartments or offices. Coupled with zoning reforms, we'd see apartment complexes replace single-family housing and train stations replace parking lots as suburban sprawl transformed into walkable paradise. [1] https://ubique.americangeo.org/map-of-the-week/map-of-the-week-mapping-private-vs-public-land-in-the-united-states/ https://ubique.americangeo.org/map-of-the-week/map-of-the-we... [2] https://www.fool.com/research/how-many-americans-own-stock/ https://www.fool.com/research/how-many-americans-own-stock/

pdonis 3y ago

> Unproductive wealth is the real devil, the hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil. They're not wealth if they're hoarded. Undeveloped land, or gold and oil in the ground, are no use to anybody. They're only wealth if they're used. And that requires lots of productive effort to develop the land, or to get the gold and oil out of the ground and into productive use. I agree that unproductive wealth is the real problem, but we need to be careful how we define it.

cosmojg 3y ago
Maybe I'm getting my terms mixed up, but wealth includes anything with value, no? So long as somebody else wants to develop that land, or mine that gold, or tap that oil, it is wealth. At least, that's my understanding.

pdonis 3y ago

> a society which taxes inelastic goods and negative externalities and returns that wealth to the public over one which does not. The problem is that this kind of society, even if we assume for the sake of argument that it would be preferable, is not really achievable politically. The only way to implement it is to have a government that has the power to coercively tax people, and all history shows that governments will not use that power to redistribute wealth to the public at large; instead they will use it to enrich themselves and their preferred special interests.

jimbokun 3y ago
There are countless programs that redistribute wealth. Welfare payments. Public education. Public health insurance programs. Retirement programs. Recently there has been a down swing in willingness to fund new programs that redistribute wealth. But that could change.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > There are countless programs that redistribute wealth. They purport to, yes, but for most of them, when you dig into the details, you find that what redistribution actually occurs is not from richer to poorer, but the opposite. And much of the money spent on the programs doesn't go to the purported recipients of redistribution at all, but to third parties. (For example, you cite public schools as redistributing wealth--but government funds for public schools only pass through the hands of the families whose children need schooling in the case of school vouchers, which are fairly rare, and in any case the money doesn't stay with those people, it ends up in the hands of the schools themselves. Given the current state of education in the US, anyone who wants to make a case that whatever redistribution of wealth occurs actually benefits the children and families has a very tough case to make.)
  - gottorf 3y ago
    > They purport to, yes, but for most of them, when you dig into the details In other words: POSIWID, or "the purpose of a system is what it does" (and not what it purports to do, because anyone can purport to do anything).

api 3y ago

This is basically Georgism: a tax on idle assets like land paired with very low or non-existent taxes on income and capital gains. Land value taxes would be on the land only and not things like buildings on it, so this would heavily incentivize maximally efficient use of land. I'm generally a fan though I would also add pollution taxes and short term capital gains (gambling) taxes.

cosmojg 3y ago
> This is basically Georgism: a tax on idle assets like land paired with very low or non-existent taxes on income and capital gains. Ah, so you've seen the cat! Yes, this is precisely what I was getting at. > I'm generally a fan though I would also add pollution taxes and short term capital gains (gambling) taxes. The former is known as a Pigouvian tax[2], and I yearn for such taxes with no less of my heart than I yearn for land value taxes. The latter, however, seems almost completely unnecessary. Why not allow people to gamble on noise? And if they're making a profit, it's more likely than not that they're adding signal and contributing to price discovery, along with providing short-term liquidity to all market participants! I don't mind anyone getting paid for that. [1] https://www.henrygeorge.org/catsup.htm https://www.henrygeorge.org/catsup.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax

rufus_foreman 3y ago

>> Unproductive wealth is the real devil, the hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil How would hoarding of gold, in and of itself, be bad? Say someone goes out and works and makes money, and they take the money and buy gold coins and keep them in a safe, or fill up a swimming pool so they can dive into their hoard of gold like Scrooge McDuck. They are contributing to society, and to the extent they hoard gold, asking nothing back for what they have contributed. It's like what Charlie Munger did. Made a massive fortune, spent his whole life doing it, had an amount of money that he could have used for extravagant spending, could have bought whole islands in Hawaii, could have bought politicians. But he didn't. He earned the money, earned dividends on the money, piled up all the money in a hoard. Then he died.

vacuity 3y ago
Hoarding gold isn't inherently bad, but many super rich people who arguably don't deserve nearly as much wealth as they have (worker exploitation, buying politicians, inheritance money, etc.), especially when juxtaposed with the terrible wealth inequality gap that they have the greatest ability to amend (through not exploiting, donating wealth or being taxed, not buying politicians to favor them, etc.). If everyone had a good baseline of living and politicians won't be bought to revert things, then no, I don't see a major issue with gold hoarders. But that's not the world we live in today.
cosmojg 3y ago
Charlie Munger achieved the vast majority of his wealth not by hoarding inelastic goods but by investing and reinvesting in dividend-paying stocks and bonds, virtual tokens representing liquid fractional ownership of productive enterprise. He can "hoard" those all he wants, and we all benefit from the greater levels of capital available to said productive enterprise. Now, if gold or other precious metals are necessary for the production of desirable goods, the hoarding of such assets increases the price of those goods in a zero-sum fashion. Of course, I'd never want to deny someone the pleasure of swimming in a pile of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck. I'm just saying that they shouldn't be able to profit as much off of keeping the pile locked away in their mansion. Rather, they should repay society for its losses in the form of a land value tax.

jonathankoren 3y ago

But it’s not productive wealth is it? It’s just stock. It’s Locked up value that he hordes like a dragon. That money isn’t actually being used to generate anything. Even when it is spent, it’s just financial products that generate money through financial transactions instead of actual goods and services. This has been the case since the 1980s when capital gains started being taxed below income, and the carried interest loophole was created. In fact, this is a well known economic phenomenon. Some would go as far as to say that it is an intentional outcome of the policy. In the end, the problem with Bezos and the rest of the oligarchs is the same problem with monopolies, it’s a command economy. Only instead of being dictated by some unelected government bureaucrats in a totalitarian state, it’s a a bunch unelected rich dudes with dreams of a totalitarian state. It’s an unhealthy economy.

cosmojg 3y ago
> But it’s not productive wealth is it? It’s just stock. It’s Locked up value that he hordes like a dragon. That money isn’t actually being used to generate anything. Oh, but it is! That value isn't locked up, it's invested in the company. That investment raises the level of capital available to the company, allowing them to hire more employees and offer more goods and services. That's all real value for real people, and yes, if it works out, capitalists get paid for making it possible. We already live in a world where one can own the means of production. The likes of Vanguard and Robinhood broker access. With a few clicks, you too can become a more productive capitalist.