UL is the least proactive organization imaginable. They test nothing before being paid to do so by the manufacturers.
You are missing the context in which we’re discussing “proactive”. Companies are vigorously proactive when it comes to prioritizing their own profits (or mitigating their own risks). But they’re completely reactive when it comes to the public good. And they’re only reactive if they have a profit interest. Otherwise they’re utterly inactive, and not infrequently counteractive.
Or as someone else put it:
Overt conversion of a government agency to private ownership, an example of which might be selling part of all of the shares of an agency to outside investors, is only one possible definition “privatization”. Other definitions include perceived massive deregulation of a heavily regulated industry, or government agencies hiring private companies to private government services (or less relevantly here, a corporation removing the trading of its shares from a public exchange).
It just happens to be the case that your own use adheres to literally none of the standard definitions.
But you can speak as you like.
Yes, it’s very true that if state agencies fail in protecting people’s homes from being burnt down, they will start to consider employing alternative services.
This is not particularly surprising. People don’t like it when their homes burn down. Insurance companies don’t like it when their clients’ homes burn down.
The implication of this clause is that protecting their clients’ homes from being burned down is not “really doing good”.
Just for the record: it’s a bad thing when people’s homes burn down. This makes it a good thing – yes, really, a good thing – to prevent that.
The fault being laid at the feet of insurance companies here is that are protecting from fire the people who paid them money.
It is true that – although good – there is no angelic morality at work here. But it is within the scope of why they exist. Lower costs today will mean lower future premiums for future clients, which is also a good thing. It means future fire insurance will be marginally more affordable. And fire insurance is good. Really. It’s good when people have the chance to protect themselves from severe negative outcomes of their worldly possessions turning to cinders.
The world would be a better place if people focused more on achieving the little goods in the world around them, correcting the little wrongs within their own sphere, rather than trying walk down some miraculous path to achieve the vaunted Public Good.
The world would be a MUCH better place if good acts, resulting in small improvements in the world, were celebrated as such, instead of the acts being denigrated simply because the good actor was an institution composed of mere mortals with mixed motivations, rather than having achieved the the lofty moral purity of Jesus and all His angels descended from heaven to quench all conflagrations worldwide.
No, the implication is that a public firefighting force will direct its efforts to maximize the overall number of home saved, while the private crews will neglect the public mission and serve the most expensive properties. This is grand for the 1 family who gets protected, not so grand for the others whose homes burn while the private crews watch.
If that home gets protected at the expense of possibly protecting 100 other homes, then yes, it was a bad thing to protect that home. Maybe good for that homeowner and the insurance company… not so good for the neighborhood that burned down while the private crew was protecting one home.
We’re not talking about the perfect being the enemy of the good here. We’re talking about the inefficient local optima of putting resources toward individual properties when there’s a big picture of a fire threatening hundreds or thousands. We’re talking about how some things work better when everyone does them together. This is comparable to how vaccinations work best when everyone gets them, not when individuals get it if they feel like being protected.
What’s that saying… if the facts are on your side, pound the facts… if the law is on your side, pound the law. If neither is on your side, pound the table. Pounding the table as you’re doing demonstrates the weakness of your point.
This is all a bit confusing. Have we finally settled on a good working definition of socialism and capitalism we can all agree on?
I think definitions are a waste of time, because in this area they are almost always used as a tool to ignore an argument rather than to enlighten.
“Here’s why socialism (or capitalism) is bad…”
“That’s mot socialism! (or capitalism)”
This happens constantly, then the debate shifts to the pedantry of what socialism or capitalism really is, and the original point forgotten.
I’d prefer to talk about the root differences, which comes down to whether you believe society should be organized by a central authority, whether economic activity and structures should be planned by governments or allowed to emerge from the myriad interactions of the public, for their own reasons. Or, for less extreme cases, why a particular activity shoild or shouldn’t be socialized rather than allowing market forces to do the work.
Mad rant from a pedantic loser (me) incoming!
Socialism has an actual definition, an theory behind it. It is an ideological stance coherently developed. Not every thinker has one specific view on it, but you can both see what it is an argue about it reasonably.
Capitalism… isn’t. It’s not really an “ism” in that there never was any ideological intent behind the creation of it. Capitalism and Free Markets are not the same thing; they do happen to be two great tastes that taste great together. However, all Socialism enterprises have been Capitalist; they just hated the competition. Most "modern definitions, by which I mean “monumentally stupid things people say because they don’t understand how wordification happens”, mush Free Markets and Capitalists and a bunch of other half-baked notions together and pretend it’s some kind of ideology.
Not in my experience outside of academia. The common definition of socialism is when the means of production are owned and controlled by the state, and the value of production distributed to the people according to their needs. But then there’s ‘Democratic socialism’ which apparently means different things to just about everyone, ‘Social Democracy’ which is isn’t different from Democratic Socialism depending on who you talk to, and Communism and Fascism which both have socialist aspects.
There’s eniugh ambiguity in all of it that anyone can dodge a hard question by employing the No True Scotsman fallacy. So I’d rather just skip the terms and talk about the issues directly.
I agree that Capitalism is not like other ‘isms’, but is better thought of as what emerges from free markets when central planners don’t intervene or intervene very little.
Well I did admit it was a Mad Rant from the beginning.
However, and understand that I almost always in favour of free and free-er markets, the Corporation at the heart of modern economics is necessarily a creation of the government.
(Side note: Technically corporations are old ideas, but for most economic purposes as described in this thread they followed the Capitalists and Free Markets; they did not create them. Old forms of the corporation do exist, such as Monasteries, Universities and so forth.)
The Corporation has to be actively sustained by a government in order to exist and to function economically. They are chartered according to a specific legal formula and therefore, having some amount of government protection and some very favourable legal advantages regarding liability, they can in exchange expect a certain amount of demands to be placed on them which a sole proprietor ought not expect to face. One thing I dislike about the government today is that it tends to use a proxy such as “number of employees” or interstate commerce as a proxy for this.
Now all that being stated, I broadly agree with you, Sam_Stone, on the issues here. I see a great many commenters who seem to be really, really peeved that Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk have a lot of hypothetical wealth. It seems like there is an inevitable cycle where (mostly, but not always Left-wing) pundits get pissed about some economic factor they don’t really understand, demand massive changes to try and force the universe into the mold they like better. Unfortunately, this inevitably causes other changes and reactions they don’t like, and also can’t control, so they demand that thing also be changed, and so it goes forever.
It’s particularly bizarre to me to see people upset that Amazon… pays its employees quite well.That is, Amazon pays people maybe a bit less than the same Living Wage that similar people were screaming about not long ago, but pretty comparable for most purposes. I have many criticisms of Amazon, but it’s wages aren’t really one of them and that critique is utterly inane. (Much better critiques of Amazon focus on the mistreatment of workers, or in how it miserably tried to get tax breaks off NYC.)
But the trick is that Amazon is for most purposes an extremely good corporation and the kind that we ought to encourage. It competes openly, aggressively innovates, and is still growing and hiring. It reinvests heavily into technology and people. It has made and connected entire markets together in ways that literally didn’t exist previous, and far from charging a premium it often does this at a lower cost. Amazon has 1 or 2-day delivery on an truly absurd array of goods, for basically no cost to the customer. Several of these would be remarkable accomplishments on their own; combined they suggest that Amazon is the most innovative company in the world. I wish we had a few more like it!
I’ve seen several memes going around to the effect that if you made some ridiculous amount of money every day for some ridiculous amount of time and just stuck it in your giant Scrooge-McDuck-Money-Bin, you’d still have less than Jeff Bezos. This may be true (I never did the actual math) but unfortunately it literally misses the point that it made. Jeff Bezos, whatever his real faults, built and sustained Amazon from basically nothing, despite some of the greatest analysts believing him doomed and enduring a fair amount of ridicule and failure. Amazon went from the garage to global giant in twenty years, and literally changed the marketplace as a result. Bezos created that value - Well, him and others; he wasn’t alone of course). Rather than selling out he kept building and developing and improving, and it turned out he had a way better understanding of what could and should be done than, say, Sears.
And the best part is that Jeff Bezos couldn’t consume all that wealth if he lived for a thousand years. It benefits everyone. He probably will slowly sell off his holdings and enjoying his life however he pleases, but he can’t have 200 million times more consumption than the guy with a measly thousand in the bank.
Just to be clear, this is an argument against taxing Jeff Bezos’s wealth?
I’m not sure what you mean by “hypothetical wealth”. Do Bezos and Musk fly around in “hypothetical private jets” between their “hypothetical mansion” and “hypothetical yacht”?
The modern American “definition” of Capitalism is basically “greed is good” (as coined by Mr Gekko in the 80s. That is to say, the amassing of great wealth or capital, in itself, is considered a virtue.
The issue people have is that there are a handful of people like Bezos, Musk and other billionaires who own more wealth than the rest of the country combined. Which would be fine of everyone else lived a decent enough lifestyle, but that is not the case. Tens of millions of people can’t afford day to day living expenses, health insurance, or the education that will supposedly elevate them out of poverty.
Which is not to say that people who create multi-billion dollar corporations don’t deserve to be ridiculously compensated for their ingenuity and entrepreneurialism. But when you live in a society where you are told “we can’t afford to pay for it” about stuff like healthcare, education, infrastructure, worker safety, decent maternity leave, and so on, it’s not unreasonable to ask why that society can afford to pay people like Bezos billions.
That wasn’t really my point. However:
What I think the previous two commenters are missing is the part where I point out that Bezos can’t consume all his wealth. Which means it’s still there. It really is creating jobs, and along the way generating lots more tax revenue in various other ways. In order to tax wealth, you have to liquidate it. That is emphatically not a good thing!
Let me make an analogy to forestry. Bezos got some seeds and pl;anted them, then spent twenty years carefully managing the soil and water until a huge forest bloomed. Right now, he can harvest some lumber here and there, and when he brings it out of the forest he gives some to the government. The forest itself isn’t paying the tax, because Bezos has gone out of his way to carefully sweep up all the seeds he can find and re-plant them. Some people would like to use a lot more lumber and want Bezos to give it to them. It’s true he owns, in theory, an awful lot of lumber! But in order to get it, we’d have to start cutting down a lot more of the forest. Jeff Bexos does not want to do that, and it will mean a lot less forest and lumber in the future, and many other people who like having the forest may be very unhappy.
There is no way seizing Bezos’s wealth in any way involves directly cutting down the forest. If the government seizes his stock holdings, the government now owns the stock holdings, so in your analogy the trees would still be there, just the government would be a significant owner of them. If the government said “your stock holdings are worth $X and you owe us y% of that in liquid cash” he would be incentivized to sell part of his forest to come up with the cash to pay Uncle Sam.
The only question in your analogy is to what degree the next Bezos wouldn’t want to grow a giant forest now that he feared the government might tax him on part of it, and whether that downside is worth the wealth redistribution that would be possible with the assets we would gain by taxing Bezos’ wealth.
So, we nay want to take this to another thread, but in short: No, unfortunately you’re wrong. I say, “unfortunately”, because if that were so the government could basically generate infinite wealth, which would be very good! Unfortunately it does not work.
[I’m changing the name here to Beesworthy because I like the idea of the King of England having a dispute with somebody named Beesworthy.]
The government is still in the same economic law that Tree Farmer Beesworthy is: It cannot simultaneously leave the wood in place and use it elsewhere. That is the immutable reality, and it does not matter how we handwave it or hideit behind complex laws or financial transactions. I’ll respond more later or maybe onto another thread, because this may take some time. One big problem is that people keep being really, really motivated to think they’ve found a free lunch. There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
There are also numerous, specific problems with Wealth taxes, which is one reason basically nobody uses them except for property taxes, which require a all kinds of exceptions to work.
From what I’ve read there are actual practical problems with wealth taxes which is one of the reasons I’d prefer in the US that we tie capital gains to income tax and make it more progressive.
However, no. You don’t need to destroy the forest and you don’t need to create new forest. Bezos’ wealth is primarily in investments. Someone else can own those investments.
Maybe they can do what other countries have done after expropriating ompanies - sell them off piecemeal or gut their capital investment money to give to the ‘people’, thereby destroying the wealth creation in the first place. See: Venezuela’s results after nationalizing the emergy industry.
If you don’t do that, you have an ‘investment’ on paper, but you haven’t released any resources that can be repurposed elsewhere. And if you do release the resources by gutting the company you would be doing far more harm than good.
The underlying assumption is that the government is a better steward of wealth than the person who created it in the first place. All the evidence we have says that’s ridiculous.
(With another caveat that the devil is in the details as far as figuring out what rich people actually own, what it’s worth, how to tax them without loopholes etc.) All you would need to do is say “Bezos, your assets are worth 200B, give us X% of the amount you own over $Y in cash.” Then he would have to sell some investments (likely to investors below the threshold) and pay with cash.
Even if we did seize the investments directly, the only stewardship would deciding when to hold and at what point to sell what percentage or what types of investments. Or to just hold investments that will give us dividents.
Nationalizing amazon is not required in any scenario.
I knew that would be the response 
However, I can be tricky and lured you into that. Because, that’s actually… wrong! How can it be wrong when it’s so obviously right? Well, read on:
The problem is that wealth taxes MUST remove capital from the economy. From the macro-economic point of view, it doesn’t matter how you move around the transaction, it’s still occurring in the background. The government can move in and fence off part (or even all) of Farmer Beesworthy’s trees. It can, if it likes, sell them to others for cash now. But, this cash necessarily comes out of their capital stock. Or if they borrow it, it comes from someone else’s capital stock being lent to them. Even if you securitize it via some scheme you’re only changing the form of capital removal, not the net. You (as the government, not you personally) can save the Beesworthy Forest by getting trees cut down elsewhere, but you can’t really change that if you want the lumber, you gotta cut down the trees. This has implications for growth.
Now, let me clarify that nothing I wrote here is actually an argument against wealth taxes. I have many other reasons to oppose them for practical reason. Rather, I’m pointing out that most of the understandings about what , say, Jeff Bezos actually has and uses are completely confused. It’s a descriptive, not a normative, statement.
Yes, any tax removes capital from the economy and puts it into public coffers. And then any expenditure of that capital would put it back into the economy.
The two things that don’t happen:
-Taxing Jeff Bezos causes all of the economic value of amazon (and anything else he’s invested in) to stop outputting. It doesn’t cause amazon to have less ability to ship products, offer people their digital services, pay workers etc.
-Taxing Jeff Bezos magically creates new entities that that provide additional economic value for nothing.
Amazon is not directly affected at all. All that happens directly are that Bezos’s power to own everything he owns is reduced. The “everything” is not directly affected.
The only change in the “everything” would be an indirect result of a wealth tax causing people to be less willing to create economic value.