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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

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.
- snapplebobapple 2y ago
  I pretty heartily disagree here. There's no such thing as a surplus of money (except in the sense that a government can print too much of it and cause inflation). There's an allocation you don't like. I don't care about the allocation as much as I care that how we got to the allocation was as coercion free as possible. That means government spending should more closely reflect the preferences of the tax payer so government coercion is as close to only coercing free loaders into not free loading as possible. This also means market power abuses from businesses and labor need to be mitigated. We should probably be much more actively breaking up large corps and making anticompetitive business practices much more per se illegal. We are much closer to this now than we have ever been in the past, with the exception of post WW2 to roughly 1970 where we were much better at enforcing antitrust, we basically just need to drift back in the direction antitrust in the 1960's and make a whole bunch of dark pattern and other anticompetitive business practices illegal and we would be great. This surplus of money idea you keep mentioning is just wrong. The rich primarily have shares in businesses and other non cash assets. They often have these because they founded businesses that make our lives better and I have no problem with them having that wealth because we are in a repeated game here and those guys showed promise in the first round, I'd rather they have the money to do angel investing, etc in future rounds to generate the next round of good business ideas to make our lives better. I have a lot of problem with these companies getting big and anticompetitive and I have outlined how to deal with that above (it's not by confiscating wealth). Also this happening globally would be a disaster. You want many small to medium size governments all trying different stuff so that when one government inevitably screws things up you have options. You don't want a monopoly in government either.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    my apologies, english is not my first language, so sometimes my choice of words is not in line with that of native speakers. i think we actually agree. what i call surplus you correctly identify as allocation. and i also agree that the manner of how that allocation was achieved matters more than the amount. but, as you say, market power abuses need to be mitigated, and these are enabled even if the power was gained without coercion. an accidental monopoly is still a monopoly and needs to be stopped if that power is abused. i disagree that doing this globally would be a disaster. but maybe we need to flesh out more what we actually mean by that. i have a sense that in the end we will find an agreement. monopoly power and market abuse is a problem everywhere. i have lived in many countries and i have seen the same patterns repeat over and over again. yes. different governments should have the freedom to try different approaches. my point is, that we need to agree globally that market power abuse and anticompetitive behavior is a problem and needs to be stopped everywhere, and so no country may create a safe haven to enable those companies to continue their behavior.

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.

snapplebobapple 2y ago
I pretty heartily disagree here. There's no such thing as a surplus of money (except in the sense that a government can print too much of it and cause inflation). There's an allocation you don't like. I don't care about the allocation as much as I care that how we got to the allocation was as coercion free as possible. That means government spending should more closely reflect the preferences of the tax payer so government coercion is as close to only coercing free loaders into not free loading as possible. This also means market power abuses from businesses and labor need to be mitigated. We should probably be much more actively breaking up large corps and making anticompetitive business practices much more per se illegal. We are much closer to this now than we have ever been in the past, with the exception of post WW2 to roughly 1970 where we were much better at enforcing antitrust, we basically just need to drift back in the direction antitrust in the 1960's and make a whole bunch of dark pattern and other anticompetitive business practices illegal and we would be great. This surplus of money idea you keep mentioning is just wrong. The rich primarily have shares in businesses and other non cash assets. They often have these because they founded businesses that make our lives better and I have no problem with them having that wealth because we are in a repeated game here and those guys showed promise in the first round, I'd rather they have the money to do angel investing, etc in future rounds to generate the next round of good business ideas to make our lives better. I have a lot of problem with these companies getting big and anticompetitive and I have outlined how to deal with that above (it's not by confiscating wealth). Also this happening globally would be a disaster. You want many small to medium size governments all trying different stuff so that when one government inevitably screws things up you have options. You don't want a monopoly in government either.
- em-bee 2y ago
  my apologies, english is not my first language, so sometimes my choice of words is not in line with that of native speakers. i think we actually agree. what i call surplus you correctly identify as allocation. and i also agree that the manner of how that allocation was achieved matters more than the amount. but, as you say, market power abuses need to be mitigated, and these are enabled even if the power was gained without coercion. an accidental monopoly is still a monopoly and needs to be stopped if that power is abused. i disagree that doing this globally would be a disaster. but maybe we need to flesh out more what we actually mean by that. i have a sense that in the end we will find an agreement. monopoly power and market abuse is a problem everywhere. i have lived in many countries and i have seen the same patterns repeat over and over again. yes. different governments should have the freedom to try different approaches. my point is, that we need to agree globally that market power abuse and anticompetitive behavior is a problem and needs to be stopped everywhere, and so no country may create a safe haven to enable those companies to continue their behavior.