How wealthy would the wealthiest person be in your ideal society?
Where would their wealth come from?
In my ideal society (assuming money still exists) the wealthiest person would be a single digit millionaire (on the low side) and their wealth would come primarily from their income as a highly specialized worker (brain surgeon, nuclear physicist etc) rather than stocks and owning the means of production and so on. I don’t think anyone needs or deserves more than that and even if I did I still think anything beyond that would be detrimental to society as a whole.
In my ideal society there would be no money, man.
Seriously, though, in my ideal realistic society anyone could be as rich as they can, and they would be taxed properly.
General reciprocity. Take what you want or need. Chip in and participate, contribute where you can and are willing to. The language no longer has the term or the concept of “wealth”. Or “money”. Let alone “taxes”. We scarcely know what an “economic system” is, outside of it being a term we learned in ancient history studies.
It turns out that the “natural human tendency to be greedy and want all the stuff” was an artifact of a game social system based on competition and when we’re not playing that game we’re not like that. (We’re still concerned with our own individual best interests, mind you, it’s just that having all those possessions is not a very big part of that. We’re more concerned with having a good reputation with other people and having good friends, good times, creating cool shit that other people listen or watch or otherwise admire, or discovering nifty new stuff that other people are amazed by, etc)
As rich as their work efforts can make them, with the proviso they use their wealth to fund good works.
We had a thread about whether being a billionaire is inherently immortal. I didn’t agree with those who said yes. Money is a neutral tool, just like a chainsaw. How you use it matters. Build a house. Fine. Cut off an arm. Not fine.
How about no more than two orders of magnitude more wealthy than the poorest person? Not enough for some? No problem -if you want the top to be higher, raise the bottom.
Assuming an ideal moneyed society, I’d say no more than 1000x the poverty level (which in the USA would be something like $14 million a year after-tax income, currently.
I’d put a wealth cap of $1 billion. Anything beyond that, you forfeit to the government or are required to donate to charities (which cannot be affiliated with you in any sort of money-making way nor can you receive your money back from them in an indirect way).
An arbitrary limit on wealth is the wrong approach. Income should just be taxed on a progressive scale and more tax avoidance loopholes should be closed. The important point is not the regulation of maximum wealth, but the assurance of minimum standards of living for all members of society. If everyone has access to all the essentials and reasonable comforts of life I couldn’t care less how obscenely rich some people are.
About as much as they currently have, as long as they got it legit. And with fair taxes.
They earned it, they get it. After fair taxes.
Now after trump and the GOP got done destroying the IRS and warping the tax code to help the very wealthy- things are not fair.
Double the IRS budget, double their agents. Re-do the tax code with top marginal rates of 77% or so. Capital gains would be just income and taxed like income, no special lower rates, but of course it could be offset by capital losses.
So with a fair progressive tax, and plenty of IRS agents to make sure all the rich pay their fair share- they can keep whatever is left over.
Estate tax- the exclusion would be one primary residence ( up to 2 million dollars)- Plus one million to the spouse. Then $1million after that. Currently the exclusion is 11m, (22M for a married couple) which is too high. Only about 2000 estates paid any taxes. This is effectively the wealth tax some people want- just bring the estate tax exclusion back to what it used to be, and those billion estates melt like snow in the spring.
This isnt a communist state. You earn it, you keep it- after taxes of course.
I wouldn’t have a wealth cap in my ideal society. That said, it would be significantly more difficult to become a billionaire in that society because I would eliminate the tax policies that favor the accumulation of wealth. I’m in broad agreement with DrDeth’s proposals.
Problem is, that money could still do a lot of good put to some other use. Even if everyone has access to essentials and reasonable comforts of life, if you have one super-rich guy with $1 trillion, that’s a lot of wasted money.
The government could put $990 billion of it to all kinds of other things like energy, environment, education, military, infrastructure, etc. and not affect that guy’s living standards in the least (what’s a thousand mansions when you’ve got a hundred?)
I think that is what was lost as the wealthy moved away from marginal rates of 70-90%.
When your marginal rate is so high it is probably better to invest that money in something. Start a new business.
When the marginal rate is low enough (as it is now) the very wealthy tend to stash the cash away for their personal use thus removing huge amounts of cash from the economy and decreasing competition.
When I ruminate on this in the shower, my magical ideal society would have a giant pot into which all goods go and from which we each take what we need. But this ideal society would have no greed or corruption. I guess that’s where the magical part comes from.
