11 ms·

Life During Class Wartime

232 points by AndrewDucker 5mo ago

cfst 5mo ago
Regarding the IMF report, is it actually harder to hide wealth than income, or is it that there are so few global taxes on wealth that nobody's currently bothering to hide it? It seems like income, being a continuous series of transactions, would be the more difficult of the two.
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  I bet that both are fairly easy to hide, but some forms aren't. It's hard to hide when money arrives in your bank account and it's hard to hide that you own 51% of Tesla shares. You can do either one of those through a proxy however, which makes it harder to track down, not impossible (why does 51% of Tesla shareholding always agree with this guy? Why's he shilling Offshore Panama Corp LLC products so hard?)
- nerdsniper 5mo ago
  I think it varies - each are easier/harder to hide in different ways at different scales. It's the "convicting Al Capone for tax evasion" thing. They didn't need to prove where his income came from, they could just show that his wealth was clearly higher than his declared income could have possibly yielded.
- Muromec 5mo ago
  Fun fact: when there was meaningful data on Ukraine, it was number 1 in the world by wealth inequality and at the same time had the best score at income equality. Likelt has to do with not having any property or wealth taxes, but having modest incone taxes that were rigorosly collected
- floatrock 5mo ago
  Revenue transactions and taxable income are two very different topics. Your accountant can clarify the difference.
zug_zug 5mo ago
Yeah I'm glad somebody's talking about it. Wealth inequality seems like it will be THE defining issue of our lives (accelerated drastically by AI). I think there are many practical ways to solve it, and would love to see more proposals out there. Instead I tend to see nihilism or division.
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  Extreme power inequality seems to be the default state of human society. Power concentrates until it's maximally concentrated, then stays there. Power shakeups seem to usually replace one group of elites with another group of smaller or the same size. Exceptions to this rule come about for specific reasons. Before the industrial revolution, there just wasn't that much power to go around. Everyone was working their land for sustenance, and the rent-seeking nobility extracted some percent of production because that's what there was to extract. When the industrial revolution came, those who figured out how to exploit it became the new nobility and worked their employees to the bone. It was only after actual, bloody, war between the factory owners and the employees that we got labor rights, which were a truce agreement. And that agreement's been steadily declining since Reagan. It took a while because the beneficiaries of the labor rights era were able to hold onto their wealth and pass it down to their children, but now we're back in the same factory feudalism situation again, but with different technological status.
  - readthenotes1 5mo ago
    I don't know why you're down voted. Perhaps the observation that inequality is often and the noble savage utopian dream of "all pigs are equal" is not the norm is too a bitter pill to swallow
    - verall 5mo ago
      I believe it's because in many cases, the unspoken follow on to "inequality is the norm" is "and so it's useless (or actively harmful) to try to defy that norm." Not that above commentator is meaning that. But many "thought leaders" i.e. Jordan Petersen play around with similar motte-and-bailey - "hierarchies are natural" (examples with lobsters, apes, whatever) --> "existing hierarchies should be preserved" (not defended in the argument but implied). Probably some downvoters are reacting to the structural similarity, although taken in good faith i think above commenter makes a fine point about the historical pattern of periods of equality being short lived and brought about by great intentional effort while sliding back to inequality seems to occur all of the time.
huragok 5mo ago
[flagged]
- readthenotes1 5mo ago
  And then?
  - harimau777 5mo ago
    Can you elaborate?
  - FabCH 5mo ago
    Not to condone the violence OP is calling for, but we have very recent examples of what happens when somebody does this. The factual answer to your question is: „for a limited time, rejections rates by health insurance companies plummets“
    - enoch_r 5mo ago
      This doesn't appear to be true at all. Do you have a source?
      - FabCH 5mo ago
        I can’t be bothered to look one up to be honest. I’m not that invested in US internal politics. But Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of reactions with citations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Brian_Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Brian_Thompson
        enoch_r 5mo ago
        As someone who lives in the US I'd kind of prefer if people didn't flippantly mislead my countrymen to claim that assassinations are beneficial. I found zero sources on Wikipedia for what you claimed. Seriously, if you are too "bothered" to look up any source for an empirical claim, perhaps you should reconsider posting the claim in the first place. Here are several articles about denial increases in the time immediately following Thompson's death: - https://www.os-healthcare.com/news-and-blog/denial-rates-are-climbing-what-healthcare-revenue-cycle-leaders-should-be-watching-in-2025 https://www.os-healthcare.com/news-and-blog/denial-rates-are... - https://www.experian.com/blogs/healthcare/state-of-claims-2025/ https://www.experian.com/blogs/healthcare/state-of-claims-20...
Atlas667 5mo ago
Do you really understand class war? Your suggestion is having the state legislate this away as if the state isn't fully compromised by the capitalist class? This is the main lesson of the 20th century that liberals refuse to accept; that the state is controlled by capitalist class interests. Capitalist democracy is a curated racket. And even if we were to force legislation exactly as described above it can't and hasn't lasted long due to the incentives ($billions) to undo it. They will go as far as to kill people for this, and they have. Legislation does NOT fundamentally change existing power relations. They have this shit in their pockets and you're just saying that we should have them take it out of their pockets. The western allergy towards Marxism is one of the most detrimental cultural positions the working class has EVER faced.
- hootz 5mo ago
  In the west, the prevalent idea is that socialism/communism lost and that there is nothing beyond capitalism. This is it, we will forever live in a social-democracy state. I wonder who promotes this idea.
  - AlexandrB 5mo ago
    > In the west, the prevalent idea is that socialism/communism lost and that there is nothing beyond capitalism. It didn't just "lose", it killed millions of its own people in the process. Having been born in a communist state, I'd rather clean toilets in American than do anything else in the USSR. Edit: It's basically impossible to communicate the day-to-day misery and deprivation of late stage Communism without sounding like a crazy person. My parents were both university-educated professionals but we lived in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment with occasional hot running water and only newspaper for wiping after the bathroom. This was considered a rather affluent existence. To find something similar in today's America you'd have to go to the worst, most impoverished parts of town and even then...
    - harimau777 5mo ago
      What about all the places where that didn't happen? E.g. the Nordic countries where social democracy has been extremely successful.
masfuerte 5mo ago
I'm very surprised that Tim Bray isn't part of the richest 0.1%.
- empthought 5mo ago
  He absolutely is.
- 6AA4FD 5mo ago
  We are playing with two sets of dice, I realize mine are weighted and rolling higher than yours. Do I A- offer to switch dice B- not say anything C- offer to share D- decide not to play?
AlexandrB 5mo ago
The elephant in the room is why governments need more money: old age benefits like social security. I fear that taxing wealth will just be a tax on future investment while funnelling that wealth to the elderly. Already, folks are pushing to make the key asset owned by the old - housing - free from property taxes (if you're over 60, naturally)[1] which will only push housing prices up and drive more budget deficits that needs fresh tax revenue. I don't expect Social Security (or my country's equivalent) to exist in anything like its current form when I'm old enough to retire. This is the last hurrah and it's shocking how we're pulling out all the stops to make it happen. [1] https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advisories/2026-news-releases-and-advisories/proposed-initiative-enters-circulation-exempts-certain-homeowners-aged-60-or-older-property-taxes-initiative-constitutional-amen https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advi...
- harimau777 5mo ago
  Even if the government took the money and burnt it that would be a net good for society since it would lower inequality and thereby decrease power imbalances.
  - pitaj 5mo ago
    Wow this is nuts.
    - 6AA4FD 5mo ago
      The value of currency like other things is governed by supply, so destroying some does not damage anything real in the world, just increase the purchasing power of the other dollars in circulation.
      - chungusamongus 5mo ago
        You're describing deflation which leads to job losses. If you do nothing else, the policy you're advocating for would lead to a recession, if not a depression.
tantaman 5mo ago
Increased taxation would be defensible if it was paired with spending reform. Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody. Increasing the tax and then directly paying people, with no PMC in the middle, seems win-win-win.
- idle_zealot 5mo ago
  Ideally you'd spend the taxes on things that help people, but I would argue that even simply destroying the taxed wealth would be an improvement over what we have now, if only in that it would counter wealth/power disparity and enable democracy to work better. Allowing a subset of the population to accumulate power divorces their interests from the majority and represents the biggest threat to modern society. It would be a huge waste though. We should probably spend it on food, education, and healthcare instead.
  - jandrewrogers 5mo ago
    > destroying the taxed wealth Wealth is farms, factories, skills, etc. How would destroying all that improve anyone's life? Wealth isn't money. It exists independent of any currency you can use to give it notional value.
    - gazebo2 5mo ago
      Wealth is also money actually -- people don't contribute farms to politicians campaigns
    - tormeh 5mo ago
      The government decides who is owed what material goods. This is known as property rights. The destruction in this case would be equivalent to transferring the ownership of some factories to the government, exchanging those factories for something flammable on the open market and then setting fire to said flammable things. It's obviously wasteful, but definitely possible, and it won't directly and measurably impact anyone's quality of life. Investor confidence in your country will nosedive, though.
    - 5mo ago
jacquesm 5mo ago
[flagged]
- tptacek 5mo ago
  Can we not? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=violence%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  - ethanwillis 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - lovich 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  - jitler 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - jacquesm 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  - Teever 5mo ago
    So right off the bat I'd like to say that jacquesm's one word comment is pretty blah and in my books that along is sufficient reason to flag but I didn't this time. With that said HN is an international community, and it is important to respect the perspectives of people from around the world. Is it inappropriate for people to call for the kidnapping and arrest of Maduro from Venezuala? Doesn't appear to be from recent conversations here. Is it inappropriate for people to call for the overthrow of the Iranian government and the assassination of the Ayatollah? Doesn't appear to be from recent conversations here. Is it inappropriate for people in Canada or Greenland to discuss the prospect of American civil war and how it could potentially benefit them personally by minimizing the threat of American aggression that results in the invasion and annexation of their countries? Certainly appears to me from your response and previous conversations on here. As a non American it's conspicuous and frustrating to see how this discussion around what is and isn't acceptable speech about violence often lines up with whatever the current foreign policy of the American government happens to be. And that isn't to say that this site and others censor discussions that are critical of these policies, just that they seem to clamp down on discussions about violence when it's about domestic American violence even when it's being discussed by non-Americans like jacquesm? Why is that? Why is it okay Americans to call for the assassination of the Ayatollah but people from outside of America can't talk about the prospect of civil war and political assassinations in America? I'm a Canadian. The leader of your country has made many comments about annexing my country. It is quite likely that right-wing American interests are funding a separatist movement in my province. I consider this an overt threat to the well being of everyone in my community and my personal well being.[0][1] While America is nominally a democracy I don't hold the American people responsible for this threat. Instead I hold the American oligarchs and the skilled professionals who enable the creation of their authoritarian machinations (Including the employees of Oracle and IBM as you helpfully pointed out in a recent comment) responsible for this bullshit that now threatens me. So from that perspective why isn't it acceptable to acknowledge the necessity for the arrest of American oligarchs like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Larry Ellison? Why isn't it acceptable to call for the smuggling of weapons into America to facilitate revolutionary activities akin to what people were calling for the CIA to do in Iran? Ideally I don't want anyone to come to harm. But I have to be real about this, the more fractured America is the better off I am in the short term. Our incentives have become misaligned through no fault of my own. So something has to give. If you were in my shoes you'd feel the same way. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43485649#43487443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43485649#43487443 [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/russia-and-u-s-amplifying-alberta-separatist-narratives-to-stoke-division-distrust-report-9.7189604 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/russia-and-u-s-amplif...
teyc 5mo ago
A fairer way would be requiring all excess profits be invested in hard assets like factories, infrastructure etc. capital should be forced into competition and create excess capacity.
- metabagel 5mo ago
  This was one of the effects of the 90% rate for the highest tax bracket. It incentivized reinvesting money into the economy, rather than taking profits.
sherburt3 5mo ago
[flagged]
- Sebguer 5mo ago
  This is a great soundbite, but it's also completely vacuous. Wanting the government to take action against a clear societal issue is not wanting the government to be God.
  - sherburt3 5mo ago
    [flagged]
christkv 5mo ago
In Europe governments make up such a big part of GDP now in some cases nearly half of it that it becomes silly to talk about the evil capitalist. We should be talking about the graft and poor spending of that money.
- lovich 5mo ago
  Well the article wasn’t speaking about Europe but Canada and America. And if you read the article you will see his mention of the wealthy that are advocating for higher taxes/better wealth distribution and explicitly says that not all wealthy are The Enemy.
- TacticalCoder 5mo ago
  > In Europe governments make up such a big part of GDP now in some cases nearly half of it ... Oh more than half. In France it's 59% officially. And then there are the fake "private" companies that are actually owned by french-state apparatchiks and operating like the various state monopolies (like utility companies): so the real number is higher than 59%. France has probably more than 2/3rd of its GDP that is public spending. It's basically a planned economy. A planned economy with the only expected result of a planned economy: the public debt of France is 115% of the GDP growing. Inflation is through the roof (you think gas prices are high in the US?). And they have zero clue as to how they're going to pay their empty promises of pensions to the aging population. But what's really amazing in a country like France where 2/3rd of the GDP is public spending is this: publications constantly hammer the exact same message as in TFA: "We should tax the rich!". The french Piketty (who's btw never worked for a second in the private sector in his life: a pure product from the socialist french education system who's exceptionally good at creating state-lovers ever begging for more taxes) is mentioned in TFA. 2/3rd of the GDP being public spendings but instead of trying to get out of that planned economy the message hammered by all the media (who are either owned by the media of by the french-state apparatchiks) is: "Tax the rich". The delicious irony of the 3 first of the only 5 companies France has in the Top 100 by market cap (and none in the Top 50) being three companies selling luxury goods and bringing money into France by selling luxury products outside of France is of course not lost on people. There's LVMH, L'Oreal and Hermes exporting like mad luxury products and bringing in money from overseas into France and, instead of giving the people owning these companies medals, France explains that you should "tax the rich". Yeah. But no. I just don't buy it. I'd rather be poor in a capitalistic society than live as a slave in a planned communist economy. "Better dead than red" FWIW too.
yabones 5mo ago
For the vast majority of human civilization, all taxes were based on wealth. Your emperor, pharaoh, czar, or whoever was in charge sent a dude around to take a bit of everybody's stuff. Not how much income they made but how much stuff they actually had. It's only been the last 120-ish years that the idea that wealth and income were totally different things as far as taxation is concerned emerged. I think almost everybody would be better off if taxes were something like 1% of total assets rather than off the top of your income.
- nerdsniper 5mo ago
  I think that could generally work domestically, as in, "I don't have anything to give you, I gave/lost it all to Bob...go get it from him". But it would need to be modified with a tax on any wealth leaving the country/jurisdiction, so I can't just make $1B and then send it all to my aunt in $COUNTRY / $STATE / $CITY with low/no wealth taxes and then claim that I don't have any wealth (unless there were sensible reciprocity agreements for tax revenue reapportionment). ----- But I'm not sure if your historical claims are accurate. I believe a lot of taxes were a fraction of the expected yield of land, which is more complicated than just "taxing wealth vs. income". Yes, the taxes would go up if you owned more land, which sounds like a tax on wealth. But the imputed tax base would be based on historical yields (income) because the quality of the soil would vary (which also could be construed as a tax on wealth because higher quality soil meant land might be worth more per acre). It was also based on the weather during that growing season, if yields were down in that area then taxes would be lower that year, which sounds more like an income tax than a wealth tax. You also said "its only been about 120 years since wealth and income were different": The Christian tithe that became de jury under Charlemagne in 779 A.D. was a strict 10% tax on land yield each year (~income tax) but other empires and lords used fixed quotas (~wealth tax), and records exist that these could have brutal effects during years where weather resulted in lower yields. There was the 600-year long sales tax on salt in France, which definitely wasn't a wealth tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabelle In 1899 the UK instituted a 10% levy on annual incomes over £200, with a graduated rate for incomes between £60 and £200. Income taxes had a hiatus from 1816-1842 but has been permanent since the "Income Tax Act of 1842". The Mit'a (Inca Empire, Pre-1532) taxed individuals "time". Which I think most people would consider kind of an income tax - it's literally paid in labor. Adult men had to spend a certain number of days each year working on state projects - like building roads, farming state lands, or fighting in the army. They didn't have currency. Their economy was based on centralized planning, labor taxation (mit'a), and state redistribution of goods. The Saladin Tithe taxed revenues at 10% in 1188.
cdrnsf 5mo ago
Reversing Citizens United, publicly funding elections, installing a functional regulatory regime and equitable taxation would go a long way. Perhaps we could also engage in less ill considered military adventurism as well? Causing a domestic affordability crisis as a distraction and a salve for one's ego seems like a bad idea.
- jacquesm 5mo ago
  You'll find half the voting population is aligned with the capital against that. So I don't think that will fly until the situation becomes quite dire.
  - pstuart 5mo ago
    > until the situation becomes quite dire. Ironically, it's already incredibly dire. People are stupid -- it's crazy making to watch this play out.
    - jacquesm 5mo ago
      That's true, but not so dire that they are motivated to act, besides, they are too gullible to even properly register how far they've been duped to act against their own interests. I used to have some kind of delusion about how democracy was 'good enough' because of my implicit assumption that people on average were smart enough, educated enough and in general wise enough to realize when they're being played. That seems to have been a pretty serious mistake on my part.
      - pstuart 5mo ago
        I'm right there with you. Prior to 2016 I assumed that most people would "do the right thing" when it was made clear that it was the right thing to do. But now it literally feels like a bad horror flick where there's a zombie mind-control virus that turns people into passive drones that can no longer have independent thought. And while I used the word "stupid", there's plenty of otherwise intelligent people that have fallen prey to this and there's literally nothing one can say or do to have them reconsider their stance.
demorro 5mo ago
Y'all can say violence isn't the answer all you like, but not addressing this will cause violence. Mass, misguided, idiotic violence of the like few of us can imagine. Either we make significant change whilst we still have some capacity to reason, or we consign ourselves to the fate of animals, following our impulse gradients to the places they invariably lead.
JuniperMesos 5mo ago
> As a resident of a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, the effects of pathological inequality are in my face every day: Bentleys gleaming on the road, ragged people huddled in the rain cadging cash outside the drugstores, thousands homeless. I also live in a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, and attributing these phenomena to pathological inequality badly misdiagnoses the problem. Most visibly homeless people in wealthy west coast cities are severely mentally ill in ways that prevent them from living a normal life or even living peacefully with other people without some kind of institutionalization, which local authorities are reluctant to do because there's no nice way to institutionalize people. In some places, it's possible for people with a moderate amount of dsyfunction to be able to scrape together enough resources in order to rent cheap, low-quality housing; but in wealthy west coast cities there is a massive housing shortage that is downstream of decades of underbuilding, so all types of housing are very expensive. The underbuilding was and is mostly driven by large numbers of middle-class homeowners who primarily care about the negative externalities of construction and density affecting the place where they live and own their own homes. Neither of these problems has much to do with extremely wealthy people, or wealth inequality in a general sense.
- timbray 5mo ago
  I'm highly unconvinced of the proposition that most homeless are severely mentally ill; the data I've seen doesn't support it. That's some of it, and also addiction. But a lot of them just can't make the rent. Agree on the underbuilding.
  - vondur 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - Uhhrrr 5mo ago
    This meta-analysis puts it at 67%: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2817602 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/... What data have you seen which doesn't support it?
  - xboxnolifes 5mo ago
tmsh 5mo ago
I agree with this. I think the point that's often missed about taxing the ultra-wealthy is it incentivizes them to work through people more instead of doing it all themselves. This is a good incentive. E.g., if I have no noticeable tax on my wealth as I create impact for the world through my companies I'm going to keep being the one person in charge of that (to achieve my mission of reaching mars, etc.). But if I'm going to get nicked (to the tune of billions of dollars even at 2% etc), on average I'm going to redeploy my assets via people I trust in the company etc. I might even invest more in public welfare projects. It is fair arguably that there is this forcing function because one's value accrues from those projects originally. So there is an elegant symmetry at the end too. It would be unfair to tax billionaires more if they truly worked in a vacuum and provided value to the economy through very few dependencies. But that's never the case. And right now too much excess is spent on things like these sport teams via inherited wealth etc.
w10-1 5mo ago
OK, sure, tax wealth of the rich -- if you can somehow outdo their self-interested political action. Even the most extreme viable wealth taxes proposals target ~2%. My question is really the economic efficiency of their other 98%, which is becoming about half of available resources. I suspect the evidence would show their investment gains are less from productivity and more from coordinated extractions, and that there are severe limitations that come from consolidated decision-making (after all, the premise behind the market is that the collective is smarter than the king). Not to mention that buckets of money probably are also alienating and defeat healthy self-discipline, particularly for the next generation. I would love instead to find that new money seeks and creates new opportunities, particularly those that are beyond what you can convince collectives to do. It's pretty obvious that ants threatening elephants won't go far, but (to abuse the analogy) I suspect elephants would take helpful hints. Expanding wealth inequality should make it easier for great ideas to take off, so perhaps that's a better focus.
7e 5mo ago
Inequality is rising, but is absolute wealth also rising? Median incomes inflation adjusted?
- cestith 5mo ago
  Inequality of some level is perfectly acceptable in the societies being discussed. It’s a real problem, though, when it becomes a crisis of affordability for the median earner. It’s a problem when the ultra wealthy can leverage their fortunes not just for private power but also for control of the public sector. In the US right now we’re looking at both. Citizens United and public capture in general are forming an aristocratic class in the United States.
globalnode 5mo ago
this sort of article is ragebait for me. i dont understand how as a society we can let this sort of inequality run rampant. i mean i understand the mechanisms ofc but not the apathy. a wealth tax sounds like a great solution. people can still focus on acquiring stuff, we dont have to worry about how they hide the income and the theyll barely notice the tax anyway. then we'll have enough state money to care for these supposedly "mentally ill" people living on the streets. healthier happier society. as the article states: "no need for guillotines. yet".
- globalnode 5mo ago
  sometimes i wonder why i say such things on a venture capitalist forum. i must not like karma lol
Gathering6678 5mo ago
The seemingly lack of any source for the first illustration (share of wealth) troubles me...
- nickvec 5mo ago
  It is taken from the linked “Distribution of wealth” Wikipedia article with a corresponding source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#Wealth_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#Wealth_...

232 points by AndrewDucker 5mo ago

cfst 5mo ago

Regarding the IMF report, is it actually harder to hide wealth than income, or is it that there are so few global taxes on wealth that nobody's currently bothering to hide it? It seems like income, being a continuous series of transactions, would be the more difficult of the two.

tardedmeme 5mo ago
I bet that both are fairly easy to hide, but some forms aren't. It's hard to hide when money arrives in your bank account and it's hard to hide that you own 51% of Tesla shares. You can do either one of those through a proxy however, which makes it harder to track down, not impossible (why does 51% of Tesla shareholding always agree with this guy? Why's he shilling Offshore Panama Corp LLC products so hard?)
nerdsniper 5mo ago
I think it varies - each are easier/harder to hide in different ways at different scales. It's the "convicting Al Capone for tax evasion" thing. They didn't need to prove where his income came from, they could just show that his wealth was clearly higher than his declared income could have possibly yielded.
Muromec 5mo ago
Fun fact: when there was meaningful data on Ukraine, it was number 1 in the world by wealth inequality and at the same time had the best score at income equality. Likelt has to do with not having any property or wealth taxes, but having modest incone taxes that were rigorosly collected
floatrock 5mo ago
Revenue transactions and taxable income are two very different topics. Your accountant can clarify the difference.

zug_zug 5mo ago

Yeah I'm glad somebody's talking about it. Wealth inequality seems like it will be THE defining issue of our lives (accelerated drastically by AI). I think there are many practical ways to solve it, and would love to see more proposals out there. Instead I tend to see nihilism or division.

tardedmeme 5mo ago
Extreme power inequality seems to be the default state of human society. Power concentrates until it's maximally concentrated, then stays there. Power shakeups seem to usually replace one group of elites with another group of smaller or the same size. Exceptions to this rule come about for specific reasons. Before the industrial revolution, there just wasn't that much power to go around. Everyone was working their land for sustenance, and the rent-seeking nobility extracted some percent of production because that's what there was to extract. When the industrial revolution came, those who figured out how to exploit it became the new nobility and worked their employees to the bone. It was only after actual, bloody, war between the factory owners and the employees that we got labor rights, which were a truce agreement. And that agreement's been steadily declining since Reagan. It took a while because the beneficiaries of the labor rights era were able to hold onto their wealth and pass it down to their children, but now we're back in the same factory feudalism situation again, but with different technological status.
- readthenotes1 5mo ago
  I don't know why you're down voted. Perhaps the observation that inequality is often and the noble savage utopian dream of "all pigs are equal" is not the norm is too a bitter pill to swallow
  - verall 5mo ago
    I believe it's because in many cases, the unspoken follow on to "inequality is the norm" is "and so it's useless (or actively harmful) to try to defy that norm." Not that above commentator is meaning that. But many "thought leaders" i.e. Jordan Petersen play around with similar motte-and-bailey - "hierarchies are natural" (examples with lobsters, apes, whatever) --> "existing hierarchies should be preserved" (not defended in the argument but implied). Probably some downvoters are reacting to the structural similarity, although taken in good faith i think above commenter makes a fine point about the historical pattern of periods of equality being short lived and brought about by great intentional effort while sliding back to inequality seems to occur all of the time.

huragok 5mo ago

[flagged]

readthenotes1 5mo ago
And then?
- harimau777 5mo ago
  Can you elaborate?
- FabCH 5mo ago
  Not to condone the violence OP is calling for, but we have very recent examples of what happens when somebody does this. The factual answer to your question is: „for a limited time, rejections rates by health insurance companies plummets“
  - enoch_r 5mo ago
    This doesn't appear to be true at all. Do you have a source?
    - FabCH 5mo ago
      I can’t be bothered to look one up to be honest. I’m not that invested in US internal politics. But Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of reactions with citations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Brian_Thompson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Brian_Thompson
      - enoch_r 5mo ago
        As someone who lives in the US I'd kind of prefer if people didn't flippantly mislead my countrymen to claim that assassinations are beneficial. I found zero sources on Wikipedia for what you claimed. Seriously, if you are too "bothered" to look up any source for an empirical claim, perhaps you should reconsider posting the claim in the first place. Here are several articles about denial increases in the time immediately following Thompson's death: - https://www.os-healthcare.com/news-and-blog/denial-rates-are-climbing-what-healthcare-revenue-cycle-leaders-should-be-watching-in-2025 https://www.os-healthcare.com/news-and-blog/denial-rates-are... - https://www.experian.com/blogs/healthcare/state-of-claims-2025/ https://www.experian.com/blogs/healthcare/state-of-claims-20...

Atlas667 5mo ago

Do you really understand class war? Your suggestion is having the state legislate this away as if the state isn't fully compromised by the capitalist class? This is the main lesson of the 20th century that liberals refuse to accept; that the state is controlled by capitalist class interests. Capitalist democracy is a curated racket. And even if we were to force legislation exactly as described above it can't and hasn't lasted long due to the incentives ($billions) to undo it. They will go as far as to kill people for this, and they have. Legislation does NOT fundamentally change existing power relations. They have this shit in their pockets and you're just saying that we should have them take it out of their pockets. The western allergy towards Marxism is one of the most detrimental cultural positions the working class has EVER faced.

hootz 5mo ago
In the west, the prevalent idea is that socialism/communism lost and that there is nothing beyond capitalism. This is it, we will forever live in a social-democracy state. I wonder who promotes this idea.
- AlexandrB 5mo ago
  > In the west, the prevalent idea is that socialism/communism lost and that there is nothing beyond capitalism. It didn't just "lose", it killed millions of its own people in the process. Having been born in a communist state, I'd rather clean toilets in American than do anything else in the USSR. Edit: It's basically impossible to communicate the day-to-day misery and deprivation of late stage Communism without sounding like a crazy person. My parents were both university-educated professionals but we lived in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment with occasional hot running water and only newspaper for wiping after the bathroom. This was considered a rather affluent existence. To find something similar in today's America you'd have to go to the worst, most impoverished parts of town and even then...
  - harimau777 5mo ago
    What about all the places where that didn't happen? E.g. the Nordic countries where social democracy has been extremely successful.

masfuerte 5mo ago

I'm very surprised that Tim Bray isn't part of the richest 0.1%.

empthought 5mo ago
He absolutely is.
6AA4FD 5mo ago
We are playing with two sets of dice, I realize mine are weighted and rolling higher than yours. Do I A- offer to switch dice B- not say anything C- offer to share D- decide not to play?

AlexandrB 5mo ago

The elephant in the room is why governments need more money: old age benefits like social security. I fear that taxing wealth will just be a tax on future investment while funnelling that wealth to the elderly. Already, folks are pushing to make the key asset owned by the old - housing - free from property taxes (if you're over 60, naturally)[1] which will only push housing prices up and drive more budget deficits that needs fresh tax revenue. I don't expect Social Security (or my country's equivalent) to exist in anything like its current form when I'm old enough to retire. This is the last hurrah and it's shocking how we're pulling out all the stops to make it happen. [1] https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advisories/2026-news-releases-and-advisories/proposed-initiative-enters-circulation-exempts-certain-homeowners-aged-60-or-older-property-taxes-initiative-constitutional-amen https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advi...

harimau777 5mo ago
Even if the government took the money and burnt it that would be a net good for society since it would lower inequality and thereby decrease power imbalances.
- pitaj 5mo ago
  Wow this is nuts.
  - 6AA4FD 5mo ago
    The value of currency like other things is governed by supply, so destroying some does not damage anything real in the world, just increase the purchasing power of the other dollars in circulation.
    - chungusamongus 5mo ago
      You're describing deflation which leads to job losses. If you do nothing else, the policy you're advocating for would lead to a recession, if not a depression.

tantaman 5mo ago

Increased taxation would be defensible if it was paired with spending reform. Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody. Increasing the tax and then directly paying people, with no PMC in the middle, seems win-win-win.

idle_zealot 5mo ago
Ideally you'd spend the taxes on things that help people, but I would argue that even simply destroying the taxed wealth would be an improvement over what we have now, if only in that it would counter wealth/power disparity and enable democracy to work better. Allowing a subset of the population to accumulate power divorces their interests from the majority and represents the biggest threat to modern society. It would be a huge waste though. We should probably spend it on food, education, and healthcare instead.
- jandrewrogers 5mo ago
  > destroying the taxed wealth Wealth is farms, factories, skills, etc. How would destroying all that improve anyone's life? Wealth isn't money. It exists independent of any currency you can use to give it notional value.
  - gazebo2 5mo ago
    Wealth is also money actually -- people don't contribute farms to politicians campaigns
  - tormeh 5mo ago
    The government decides who is owed what material goods. This is known as property rights. The destruction in this case would be equivalent to transferring the ownership of some factories to the government, exchanging those factories for something flammable on the open market and then setting fire to said flammable things. It's obviously wasteful, but definitely possible, and it won't directly and measurably impact anyone's quality of life. Investor confidence in your country will nosedive, though.
  - 5mo ago

jacquesm 5mo ago

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tptacek 5mo ago
Can we not? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=violence%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- ethanwillis 5mo ago
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- lovich 5mo ago
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- jitler 5mo ago
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- jacquesm 5mo ago
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- Teever 5mo ago
  So right off the bat I'd like to say that jacquesm's one word comment is pretty blah and in my books that along is sufficient reason to flag but I didn't this time. With that said HN is an international community, and it is important to respect the perspectives of people from around the world. Is it inappropriate for people to call for the kidnapping and arrest of Maduro from Venezuala? Doesn't appear to be from recent conversations here. Is it inappropriate for people to call for the overthrow of the Iranian government and the assassination of the Ayatollah? Doesn't appear to be from recent conversations here. Is it inappropriate for people in Canada or Greenland to discuss the prospect of American civil war and how it could potentially benefit them personally by minimizing the threat of American aggression that results in the invasion and annexation of their countries? Certainly appears to me from your response and previous conversations on here. As a non American it's conspicuous and frustrating to see how this discussion around what is and isn't acceptable speech about violence often lines up with whatever the current foreign policy of the American government happens to be. And that isn't to say that this site and others censor discussions that are critical of these policies, just that they seem to clamp down on discussions about violence when it's about domestic American violence even when it's being discussed by non-Americans like jacquesm? Why is that? Why is it okay Americans to call for the assassination of the Ayatollah but people from outside of America can't talk about the prospect of civil war and political assassinations in America? I'm a Canadian. The leader of your country has made many comments about annexing my country. It is quite likely that right-wing American interests are funding a separatist movement in my province. I consider this an overt threat to the well being of everyone in my community and my personal well being.[0][1] While America is nominally a democracy I don't hold the American people responsible for this threat. Instead I hold the American oligarchs and the skilled professionals who enable the creation of their authoritarian machinations (Including the employees of Oracle and IBM as you helpfully pointed out in a recent comment) responsible for this bullshit that now threatens me. So from that perspective why isn't it acceptable to acknowledge the necessity for the arrest of American oligarchs like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Larry Ellison? Why isn't it acceptable to call for the smuggling of weapons into America to facilitate revolutionary activities akin to what people were calling for the CIA to do in Iran? Ideally I don't want anyone to come to harm. But I have to be real about this, the more fractured America is the better off I am in the short term. Our incentives have become misaligned through no fault of my own. So something has to give. If you were in my shoes you'd feel the same way. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43485649#43487443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43485649#43487443 [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/russia-and-u-s-amplifying-alberta-separatist-narratives-to-stoke-division-distrust-report-9.7189604 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/russia-and-u-s-amplif...

teyc 5mo ago

A fairer way would be requiring all excess profits be invested in hard assets like factories, infrastructure etc. capital should be forced into competition and create excess capacity.

metabagel 5mo ago
This was one of the effects of the 90% rate for the highest tax bracket. It incentivized reinvesting money into the economy, rather than taking profits.

sherburt3 5mo ago

[flagged]

Sebguer 5mo ago
This is a great soundbite, but it's also completely vacuous. Wanting the government to take action against a clear societal issue is not wanting the government to be God.
- sherburt3 5mo ago
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christkv 5mo ago

In Europe governments make up such a big part of GDP now in some cases nearly half of it that it becomes silly to talk about the evil capitalist. We should be talking about the graft and poor spending of that money.

lovich 5mo ago
Well the article wasn’t speaking about Europe but Canada and America. And if you read the article you will see his mention of the wealthy that are advocating for higher taxes/better wealth distribution and explicitly says that not all wealthy are The Enemy.
TacticalCoder 5mo ago
> In Europe governments make up such a big part of GDP now in some cases nearly half of it ... Oh more than half. In France it's 59% officially. And then there are the fake "private" companies that are actually owned by french-state apparatchiks and operating like the various state monopolies (like utility companies): so the real number is higher than 59%. France has probably more than 2/3rd of its GDP that is public spending. It's basically a planned economy. A planned economy with the only expected result of a planned economy: the public debt of France is 115% of the GDP growing. Inflation is through the roof (you think gas prices are high in the US?). And they have zero clue as to how they're going to pay their empty promises of pensions to the aging population. But what's really amazing in a country like France where 2/3rd of the GDP is public spending is this: publications constantly hammer the exact same message as in TFA: "We should tax the rich!". The french Piketty (who's btw never worked for a second in the private sector in his life: a pure product from the socialist french education system who's exceptionally good at creating state-lovers ever begging for more taxes) is mentioned in TFA. 2/3rd of the GDP being public spendings but instead of trying to get out of that planned economy the message hammered by all the media (who are either owned by the media of by the french-state apparatchiks) is: "Tax the rich". The delicious irony of the 3 first of the only 5 companies France has in the Top 100 by market cap (and none in the Top 50) being three companies selling luxury goods and bringing money into France by selling luxury products outside of France is of course not lost on people. There's LVMH, L'Oreal and Hermes exporting like mad luxury products and bringing in money from overseas into France and, instead of giving the people owning these companies medals, France explains that you should "tax the rich". Yeah. But no. I just don't buy it. I'd rather be poor in a capitalistic society than live as a slave in a planned communist economy. "Better dead than red" FWIW too.

yabones 5mo ago

For the vast majority of human civilization, all taxes were based on wealth. Your emperor, pharaoh, czar, or whoever was in charge sent a dude around to take a bit of everybody's stuff. Not how much income they made but how much stuff they actually had. It's only been the last 120-ish years that the idea that wealth and income were totally different things as far as taxation is concerned emerged. I think almost everybody would be better off if taxes were something like 1% of total assets rather than off the top of your income.

nerdsniper 5mo ago
I think that could generally work domestically, as in, "I don't have anything to give you, I gave/lost it all to Bob...go get it from him". But it would need to be modified with a tax on any wealth leaving the country/jurisdiction, so I can't just make $1B and then send it all to my aunt in $COUNTRY / $STATE / $CITY with low/no wealth taxes and then claim that I don't have any wealth (unless there were sensible reciprocity agreements for tax revenue reapportionment). ----- But I'm not sure if your historical claims are accurate. I believe a lot of taxes were a fraction of the expected yield of land, which is more complicated than just "taxing wealth vs. income". Yes, the taxes would go up if you owned more land, which sounds like a tax on wealth. But the imputed tax base would be based on historical yields (income) because the quality of the soil would vary (which also could be construed as a tax on wealth because higher quality soil meant land might be worth more per acre). It was also based on the weather during that growing season, if yields were down in that area then taxes would be lower that year, which sounds more like an income tax than a wealth tax. You also said "its only been about 120 years since wealth and income were different": The Christian tithe that became de jury under Charlemagne in 779 A.D. was a strict 10% tax on land yield each year (~income tax) but other empires and lords used fixed quotas (~wealth tax), and records exist that these could have brutal effects during years where weather resulted in lower yields. There was the 600-year long sales tax on salt in France, which definitely wasn't a wealth tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabelle In 1899 the UK instituted a 10% levy on annual incomes over £200, with a graduated rate for incomes between £60 and £200. Income taxes had a hiatus from 1816-1842 but has been permanent since the "Income Tax Act of 1842". The Mit'a (Inca Empire, Pre-1532) taxed individuals "time". Which I think most people would consider kind of an income tax - it's literally paid in labor. Adult men had to spend a certain number of days each year working on state projects - like building roads, farming state lands, or fighting in the army. They didn't have currency. Their economy was based on centralized planning, labor taxation (mit'a), and state redistribution of goods. The Saladin Tithe taxed revenues at 10% in 1188.

cdrnsf 5mo ago

Reversing Citizens United, publicly funding elections, installing a functional regulatory regime and equitable taxation would go a long way. Perhaps we could also engage in less ill considered military adventurism as well? Causing a domestic affordability crisis as a distraction and a salve for one's ego seems like a bad idea.

jacquesm 5mo ago
You'll find half the voting population is aligned with the capital against that. So I don't think that will fly until the situation becomes quite dire.
- pstuart 5mo ago
  > until the situation becomes quite dire. Ironically, it's already incredibly dire. People are stupid -- it's crazy making to watch this play out.
  - jacquesm 5mo ago
    That's true, but not so dire that they are motivated to act, besides, they are too gullible to even properly register how far they've been duped to act against their own interests. I used to have some kind of delusion about how democracy was 'good enough' because of my implicit assumption that people on average were smart enough, educated enough and in general wise enough to realize when they're being played. That seems to have been a pretty serious mistake on my part.
    - pstuart 5mo ago
      I'm right there with you. Prior to 2016 I assumed that most people would "do the right thing" when it was made clear that it was the right thing to do. But now it literally feels like a bad horror flick where there's a zombie mind-control virus that turns people into passive drones that can no longer have independent thought. And while I used the word "stupid", there's plenty of otherwise intelligent people that have fallen prey to this and there's literally nothing one can say or do to have them reconsider their stance.

demorro 5mo ago

Y'all can say violence isn't the answer all you like, but not addressing this will cause violence. Mass, misguided, idiotic violence of the like few of us can imagine. Either we make significant change whilst we still have some capacity to reason, or we consign ourselves to the fate of animals, following our impulse gradients to the places they invariably lead.

JuniperMesos 5mo ago

> As a resident of a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, the effects of pathological inequality are in my face every day: Bentleys gleaming on the road, ragged people huddled in the rain cadging cash outside the drugstores, thousands homeless. I also live in a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, and attributing these phenomena to pathological inequality badly misdiagnoses the problem. Most visibly homeless people in wealthy west coast cities are severely mentally ill in ways that prevent them from living a normal life or even living peacefully with other people without some kind of institutionalization, which local authorities are reluctant to do because there's no nice way to institutionalize people. In some places, it's possible for people with a moderate amount of dsyfunction to be able to scrape together enough resources in order to rent cheap, low-quality housing; but in wealthy west coast cities there is a massive housing shortage that is downstream of decades of underbuilding, so all types of housing are very expensive. The underbuilding was and is mostly driven by large numbers of middle-class homeowners who primarily care about the negative externalities of construction and density affecting the place where they live and own their own homes. Neither of these problems has much to do with extremely wealthy people, or wealth inequality in a general sense.

timbray 5mo ago
I'm highly unconvinced of the proposition that most homeless are severely mentally ill; the data I've seen doesn't support it. That's some of it, and also addiction. But a lot of them just can't make the rent. Agree on the underbuilding.
- vondur 5mo ago
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- Uhhrrr 5mo ago
  This meta-analysis puts it at 67%: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2817602 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/... What data have you seen which doesn't support it?
- xboxnolifes 5mo ago

tmsh 5mo ago

I agree with this. I think the point that's often missed about taxing the ultra-wealthy is it incentivizes them to work through people more instead of doing it all themselves. This is a good incentive. E.g., if I have no noticeable tax on my wealth as I create impact for the world through my companies I'm going to keep being the one person in charge of that (to achieve my mission of reaching mars, etc.). But if I'm going to get nicked (to the tune of billions of dollars even at 2% etc), on average I'm going to redeploy my assets via people I trust in the company etc. I might even invest more in public welfare projects. It is fair arguably that there is this forcing function because one's value accrues from those projects originally. So there is an elegant symmetry at the end too. It would be unfair to tax billionaires more if they truly worked in a vacuum and provided value to the economy through very few dependencies. But that's never the case. And right now too much excess is spent on things like these sport teams via inherited wealth etc.

w10-1 5mo ago

OK, sure, tax wealth of the rich -- if you can somehow outdo their self-interested political action. Even the most extreme viable wealth taxes proposals target ~2%. My question is really the economic efficiency of their other 98%, which is becoming about half of available resources. I suspect the evidence would show their investment gains are less from productivity and more from coordinated extractions, and that there are severe limitations that come from consolidated decision-making (after all, the premise behind the market is that the collective is smarter than the king). Not to mention that buckets of money probably are also alienating and defeat healthy self-discipline, particularly for the next generation. I would love instead to find that new money seeks and creates new opportunities, particularly those that are beyond what you can convince collectives to do. It's pretty obvious that ants threatening elephants won't go far, but (to abuse the analogy) I suspect elephants would take helpful hints. Expanding wealth inequality should make it easier for great ideas to take off, so perhaps that's a better focus.

7e 5mo ago

Inequality is rising, but is absolute wealth also rising? Median incomes inflation adjusted?

cestith 5mo ago
Inequality of some level is perfectly acceptable in the societies being discussed. It’s a real problem, though, when it becomes a crisis of affordability for the median earner. It’s a problem when the ultra wealthy can leverage their fortunes not just for private power but also for control of the public sector. In the US right now we’re looking at both. Citizens United and public capture in general are forming an aristocratic class in the United States.

globalnode 5mo ago

this sort of article is ragebait for me. i dont understand how as a society we can let this sort of inequality run rampant. i mean i understand the mechanisms ofc but not the apathy. a wealth tax sounds like a great solution. people can still focus on acquiring stuff, we dont have to worry about how they hide the income and the theyll barely notice the tax anyway. then we'll have enough state money to care for these supposedly "mentally ill" people living on the streets. healthier happier society. as the article states: "no need for guillotines. yet".

globalnode 5mo ago
sometimes i wonder why i say such things on a venture capitalist forum. i must not like karma lol

Gathering6678 5mo ago

The seemingly lack of any source for the first illustration (share of wealth) troubles me...

nickvec 5mo ago
It is taken from the linked “Distribution of wealth” Wikipedia article with a corresponding source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#Wealth_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#Wealth_...