3 ms·

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 dem

by em-bee 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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
      i fully agree with you here. that's what i intended to address in the last paragraph. if this isn't done right then it will not have the desired effect. i am not even trying to begin speculating how to achieve the desired effects. i don't understand near enough about economy to have any idea how to actually do this. all i am talking about is that whenever there is a significant surplus of money, then it is not private individuals who should be in the position to decide how to spend that money. the latter is the situation we have now. there are individuals and companies that have acquired an enormous surplus of money, and they get to decide how to spend it. that needs to change, one way or another. there is also another dimension i'd like to add: this needs to happen globally. the idea that someone moves their wealth from one country to another needs to disappear because the laws about this should be the same everywhere. as long as there are countries where unlimited accumulation of money is still possible, then limiting extreme wealth anywhere else is not really going to be successful either. in other words we are not going to be able to really address this problem until we have a global agreement that this is a goal we want to achieve.

by em-bee 3y ago

snapplebobapple 3y 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 3y 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
    i fully agree with you here. that's what i intended to address in the last paragraph. if this isn't done right then it will not have the desired effect. i am not even trying to begin speculating how to achieve the desired effects. i don't understand near enough about economy to have any idea how to actually do this. all i am talking about is that whenever there is a significant surplus of money, then it is not private individuals who should be in the position to decide how to spend that money. the latter is the situation we have now. there are individuals and companies that have acquired an enormous surplus of money, and they get to decide how to spend it. that needs to change, one way or another. there is also another dimension i'd like to add: this needs to happen globally. the idea that someone moves their wealth from one country to another needs to disappear because the laws about this should be the same everywhere. as long as there are countries where unlimited accumulation of money is still possible, then limiting extreme wealth anywhere else is not really going to be successful either. in other words we are not going to be able to really address this problem until we have a global agreement that this is a goal we want to achieve.