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They make the mistake of thinking the government will do a better job than individuals. When the government is often stacked with the most useless, theiving sac

They make the mistake of thinking the government will do a better job than individuals. When the government is often stacked with the most useless, theiving sacks of lazy crap in society and should be atleast as big a concern as any rich person. they also confuse the negative effects of market power abuse caused wealth accumulation and wealth accumulation from improving the production possibilities frontier. we have laws called antitrust to stop the former we just need to use them a lot more like we used to post ww2 and pre 1970s. Damping the latter wealth accumulation is a really dumb idea and should be avoided. theirideas on ingeritance tax is honestly just naive. They will capture a bunch of the upper middle class guys and the really wealthy will avoid it, as they always do. What that type of inheritance tax will do is fossilize the ultra wealthy and everhbody else

em-bee 2y ago
They make the mistake of thinking the government will do a better job than individuals. maybe they do, maybe they don't. but by preference, it is easier to demand transparency from the government than to demand it from individuals. because transparency from individuals implies removal of privacy. so i'd rather give billions to a government and have it clearly documented how they spend the money instead of demanding the same from individuals.
- snapplebobapple 2y ago
  Your statement about government is very narrowly potentially true about only a very tiny slice of western democratic governments (and some of their vassals/former vassals) in the last 200 or so years and is nearly universally untrue about every other government in both time and space. Also you seem to be a bit confused about the flow of funds. You aren't giving anything to anyone. This article is all about taking from some people with an arbitrarily chosen amount of earned and unspent income. if you are referring to all the transactions you willingly (if begrudgingly) participated in trading your money for goods and services you wanted from these people, only the times you had to pay a higher price because of market power abuse should be of any concern to anyone and the solution to that problem already exists in law via antitrust law, we just have to enforce it better, there is no requirement or benefit to arbitrarily confiscating these people's assets in solving that specific and actual problem.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    You aren't giving anything to anyone i was referring to the citizens as a whole deciding that money should be taken from the rich and be given to the government for good use. and i am not talking about current or past governments but about the future. as obviously the idea of limiting wealth is talking about the future too. it should be clear that implementing this requires a government that can make good use of those funds. governments can change, and they need to change in order for this measure to be successful. this article needs a followup to address two points: what kind of government do we need in order to make good use of that money? what will the actual effect be of a limit? because the reality will not be that the government will continue to get lots of money, but those people who have reached their limit will stop accumulating money, which will change economics and leave money more distributed without the government getting all that much.
    - snapplebobapple 2y ago
      Yah, that's not giving. That's using force to take from people. I realize you aren't talking about history, it's why you are saying things that are so incorrect. You are failing to look at all the times in history we have run shades of your proposed experiment to understand why it has never ended the way you envision. The answer to your two questions becomes obvious in a historic context. Tax payers object less to taxes when they align with their preferences so the only government that has a chance of avoiding stagnation as the rich change their structure to avoid your new policy is one that actually gives tax payers the services they want in an efficient manner (if you want services for others it means finding a way to provide them in a way that the benefit to the tax payer from network effects is equal or greater than the cost to the tax payer). Barring an efficient and responsive to tax payer preferences government, the outcome will be stagnation, capital, and competency flight as people smuggle every asset they can out of the reach of the coercive policy then finally smuggle themselves out if they can. After a few generations this leaves you with a much weaker, more incompetent country ripe for takeover (if anybody stronger is experiencing expansionary population growth) or ripe for further stagnation and weakening until its weak enough for an external force to find taking it profitable regardless.

em-bee 2y ago

They make the mistake of thinking the government will do a better job than individuals. maybe they do, maybe they don't. but by preference, it is easier to demand transparency from the government than to demand it from individuals. because transparency from individuals implies removal of privacy. so i'd rather give billions to a government and have it clearly documented how they spend the money instead of demanding the same from individuals.

snapplebobapple 2y ago
Your statement about government is very narrowly potentially true about only a very tiny slice of western democratic governments (and some of their vassals/former vassals) in the last 200 or so years and is nearly universally untrue about every other government in both time and space. Also you seem to be a bit confused about the flow of funds. You aren't giving anything to anyone. This article is all about taking from some people with an arbitrarily chosen amount of earned and unspent income. if you are referring to all the transactions you willingly (if begrudgingly) participated in trading your money for goods and services you wanted from these people, only the times you had to pay a higher price because of market power abuse should be of any concern to anyone and the solution to that problem already exists in law via antitrust law, we just have to enforce it better, there is no requirement or benefit to arbitrarily confiscating these people's assets in solving that specific and actual problem.
- em-bee 2y ago
  You aren't giving anything to anyone i was referring to the citizens as a whole deciding that money should be taken from the rich and be given to the government for good use. and i am not talking about current or past governments but about the future. as obviously the idea of limiting wealth is talking about the future too. it should be clear that implementing this requires a government that can make good use of those funds. governments can change, and they need to change in order for this measure to be successful. this article needs a followup to address two points: what kind of government do we need in order to make good use of that money? what will the actual effect be of a limit? because the reality will not be that the government will continue to get lots of money, but those people who have reached their limit will stop accumulating money, which will change economics and leave money more distributed without the government getting all that much.
  - snapplebobapple 2y ago
    Yah, that's not giving. That's using force to take from people. I realize you aren't talking about history, it's why you are saying things that are so incorrect. You are failing to look at all the times in history we have run shades of your proposed experiment to understand why it has never ended the way you envision. The answer to your two questions becomes obvious in a historic context. Tax payers object less to taxes when they align with their preferences so the only government that has a chance of avoiding stagnation as the rich change their structure to avoid your new policy is one that actually gives tax payers the services they want in an efficient manner (if you want services for others it means finding a way to provide them in a way that the benefit to the tax payer from network effects is equal or greater than the cost to the tax payer). Barring an efficient and responsive to tax payer preferences government, the outcome will be stagnation, capital, and competency flight as people smuggle every asset they can out of the reach of the coercive policy then finally smuggle themselves out if they can. After a few generations this leaves you with a much weaker, more incompetent country ripe for takeover (if anybody stronger is experiencing expansionary population growth) or ripe for further stagnation and weakening until its weak enough for an external force to find taking it profitable regardless.