If I can reach the highest possible level of wealth by working at 20% of my ability, why would I work any harder?
Pride? Boredom?
If I could make as much money as possible by working at 20% capacity, then I would find other things I enjoy to fill the other 80%. Sounds fine to me. Maybe working as hard as we possibly can until we are almost 70 isn’t the ideal way to live life?
Yes, that is a good idea also.
Thanks, and it makes more sense and its the American way.
Which is why you tax it.
First 6.20% (with matching employer) on all earned income- no limit, same with medicare. Then a marginal tax rate of 75% or so- which would mean about 60% at the highest end.
So some rich dudes earns 100 million- after taxes he gets to keep about $30Million, That is a nice chunk of change and you can live high on the hog for that.
But then the government gets the rest- social security trust fund is massively recharged, and plenty left over for social services… or tanks or whatever.
Good points.
Yeah, we can imagine a wonderful magical world, but IRL we can just tax the bastards- which is totally fair and legal.
Beat me to it.
No, this is the pitfall of unlimited greed which individuals and the businesses they control are always driven by. No amount of money is ever enough. But governments, which represent the public interest, are responsible for ensuring a healthy balance between capitalist incentives and reasonable wealth distribution, and should never be driven by greed.
To reiterate my previous statement, “The important point is not the regulation of maximum wealth, but the assurance of minimum standards of living for all members of society.” Those minimum standards of living should be commensurate with the overall wealth of the nation, and should be assured by measures like appropriate levels of taxation on the wealthy, minimum wage standards, protection of union rights, standards for employment security (protections against unjustified firings, etc), promoting competition and preventing monopolies, and other government-enforced standards that prevent the super-rich from exploiting everyone else.
Yeah, that’s the scary bit for me. The wealth disparity we’re experiencing right now flows from this exact attitude - a group of people deciding what other people “deserve.” That never works out.
You’d have to ask Elon, who’s currently got FIVE full-time jobs. If he’s busy, you can ask Warren Buffett while he’s still working at age 94.
It’s a sort of ironic socialist fallacy. Rich people’s biggest argument against a Universal Basic Income is that people that are just given the bare necessities will stop working - ignoring the fact that they’re swimming in money and leave their mansions for work at 6 a.m.
Yeah, something like this. Regardless of how wealth is measured, a certain multiple of the least wealthy person being the cap works well, it automatically adjusts, works with any form of wealth measurement, and means that all of society can be uplifted to higher and higher minimums and maximums over time.
My initial thought was simply: 1000 times more wealthy than the least wealthy person. That would keep it simple and there’d be a pretty large gap between rich and poor, but not insanely large. In order for anyone to have a billion dollars, the least wealthy person in society would have to have a million.
The reason I want a wealth cap and not just progressive taxes is because in my ideal (well, as ideal as a monetary economy can be) world, I would want the behaviours that lead to vast accumulations of wealth to be strongly discouraged, more than mere taxation would do.
This might shock you, but “the American way” isn’t universally considered something good to emulate.
Yeah, I think it’s also probably worth adjusting the multiplier so that it provides an incentive for people who are at the top, and desire to go higher, to expressly work on uplifting the bottom
For me, a million dollars would mean I never have to work again and my kids would have a trust fund so they would never need to work. Nor their kids. My ex-wife sure would be angry but she chose to accept the divorce settlement.
A billion dollars is beyond comprehension. I live in the third world, if I had Elon Musk’s net worth I could probably just buy my home country and set my deputy president up as benevolent dictator - I’m not going to do that job.
There would be no such concept as ‘wealth’ in my ideal society, which would be based on anarcho-syndicalism. Everyone would be provided with food, health care, shelter, and meaningful work. Normal governing units would be very small – a thousand people at maximum. In my ideal society, the human population would be an ecologically sustainable number (pre-industrial levels), and would be integrated into the rest of the planetary web of life, not destroying it.
Ha ha ha.
Agreed.
I think defining “wealth” is probably one of the most salient things for this thread. Everyone seems to be approaching it as if it means that a billionaire has some sort of Scrooge McDuck or Richie Rich vault of gold coins that he can swim around in.
In fact, a great many are “paper wealthy” in the sense that their actual income isn’t necessarily in the billions, but the perceived value of their ownership stakes in businesses is.
To use a more close to home example, a lot of people in my part of town had their net worth go up by quite a bit recently because the housing market has more than doubled the value of our homes over the past 5 years or so. And over a longer period of 15 years or so, it’s nearly tripled. It’s not like we can spend that though; it’s tied up in our homes.
How does this ideal society treat someone who really does create the best mousetrap, and the value of his company skyrockets, even if his income doesn’t follow the same curve? None of that is actual liquid assets- it’s just corporate stock that increased in value very fast.
Gov. Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth plan originally suggested capping wealth at $600 million (in today’s dollars) and later revised it down to around $80 million.
I very much disagree. I want those behaviors, the endless drive to accumulate wealth, to be strongly encouraged, but far less effective.
I want business owners, investors, CEOs and the like to vigorously pursue increased profits via expansion, efficiency, processes, etc. while operating within a social structure that ensures large chunks of those “advances” are distributed to society at large. Whether it’s via higher wages, broad social programs, UBI, let the business people work their business as hard as possible, in order to fund these programs.
They get their piece, that’s for sure, but it won’t be as big as it is today, because they will be funding social programs along the way.
“The behaviours” I meant isn’t merely the drive to accumulate wealth. It’s things like - treating people as things, privileging output over well-being, believing growth is inherently superior to steady-state, and ignoring externalities that aren’t immediately codified as monetary value. Things like that.
You’re right which is why I don’t believe in private ownership of the means of production or the extraction of surplus labor value as profit for the owning class.
Neither is the South African way, but this is an American board.
Just taxed highly and fairly.
You don’t see me trumpeting “the South African way” as an ideal, here. You never will, either, absent some complete change in how this country does things so radical as to be SciFi.
All that means is that most posters are American and the board is legally American, it doesn’t mean American Exceptionalism is the Law of the Land for ideas.
Especially for ideas on how to structure a better society. For most aspects of society, and that very much includes how to deal with wealth inequality, “Learn what America does - then do the opposite” is a very good heuristic.