However, theres no political will, because those with money, can lobby better than those without.
Ironically America rejected the monarchy, and yet has replaced it with an oligarchy.
IMHO it is not right to try to make people that earn more than us the target to be sacked. I think it is a bad thing. It is not a matter of you have less or you have more . It is a matter of respecting people who make money legally or inherit it by the will of their own relatives or whatever. I do not think anyone should be entitled to put hands into that for any single reason whatsoever unless that money has been stolen or made in illicit ways. That is the only valid reason IMHO.
At the point where the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny fraction of members of society becomes detrimental to the functioning of our society it is necessary to redistribute before society stops functioning.
How you feel about isn’t very important.
When it is detrimental? Who decides that? I am against monopolies. Telling from offices all the others what to do or not when they are not harming anyone is also a monopoly. Governments are monopolies in many areas.
What makes you think that with fewer regulations there would be even more uneven wealth? I cannot reply to this, since it is just fiction, but fewer regulations means more services, which unfavors monopolies and drops prices for services. Making people more elligible for acces to those services as well.
Wealthy people get to choose which jurisdiction they submit themselves to. That's just how the world is.
I am saying this very naively without reflecting on the effects it would have on the economy, the inflationary forces and the overall corporate productivity. So I realize my view is mostly a romantic utopia, but nobody should be allowed to hoard billions, especially by inheritance.
There's probably a way to work around this by making it non-voting stock or something, but it's still an inherent dampener on growth, because there's no incentive to grow, and on RnD, because there's no concentration of capital. A silicon fab is worth billions; does your system imply that the only way to build one is to either arrange a consortium of 10,000 people or government funding? HN exists because of PayPal; should the PayPal money have been spent entirely on free services? How are you going to stop the black market[0]? What are the alternate routes to power in your society, and are they better than acquiring money?
You can envisage worlds where this does function, but there's a lot of work to put in regarding the specifics, and doing the work makes you realise their might be a lot of downsides.
[0] Around 80% of North Koreans' income was once acquired through the black market: https://web.archive.org/web/20110924095232/http://www.atimes...
There won't be too many proceeds because people would simply stop working at that point. I'm far from being taxed at 100% (~50% marginal all in) and my motivation to increase my pay is already very low. I optimize for fewer hours worked at the same pay now.
I think you are pretty cruel to people that produce useful things for others. You are saying that people who offer something valuable for others should be mercilessly punished.
What you are saying is that people that contribute less than these people to society should be gifted with the effort of people that are useful to the society, making the wealthy (I mean licit wealth, of course, not criminal one) a means for others to live in better conditions.
Also, you are proposing to violate the principle of people being equal under the law. If I earn xyz, they spoil me, if I earn "too much". If I earn nothing and do not contribute in any meaningful way (even to sustain myself), then I am a blessed person that can get things for free.
Not a good arrangement to create wealth for others, if you ask me. Besides being terribly unfair.
What proceeds?
I'll re-write your proposal:
"Once a person reaches something like $10M net worth they start donating huge sums of money to the charities they have created and who has their family members on board. One of them fully restored and is doing the maintenance on an authentic Gulfstream aircraft from the beginning of the century! An other one has created a school for the (still minor so he can’t claim his $10M yet) heir and a fund to send one student (chosen by the family) to Harvard on a full ride should he be accepted".
Once government "takes" all of the capital "for the presumed good of society", government will very rapidly become the enemy. Corruption will grow and grow, and society will be in the position of a corrupt, all powerful government.
It does not work folks. Read history, don't relive it like a bunch of idiotic sheep
(If you're just talking about reducing it that's fine, but we already do that massively with the tax and transfer system, and I think you guys have estate taxes too.)
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/high-income-earners-tax-ra...
Taxes are so nominal, that the haircut is almost non-existent. Beyond theory, I’m very well aware as my close friend inherited a property portfolio, and is now set for life.
Unfortunately, most are not as lucky, and therefore we should not rely on the inheritance lottery to act as our social security.
We should not be entitled to steal the effort of others. Every person can do what they deem right with their things.
It is not a matter of how much. By that reasoning I could make legal hitting people, even if it is bad, as long as I do not kill anyone. Would that make hitting people better? I do not think so. The action is still hitting.
The same way, the action is still stealing wealth for whatever reasons. Not a right choice.
Só, the choice is simple: you can pay more taxes now, or just hope that the masses won’t do a revolution and send you to the guillotine all the while you scream about your god given constitutional rights to property.
So the notion that massive intergenerational wealth is innate to humans and natural is absurd. Or if it is innate and natural, then the lack of that is innate and natural as well. Most of behavioral modernity had none of this at all, it is a relatively new phenomenon, not "innately human".
I saw it from my nephews recently. One was building a castle, like five floors high with some stuff. The younger kid comes and destroys it. His brother gets deeply annoyed and started to cry. Why? Because he spent time building it.
They are three and one years old. Do you think anyone taught them to get annoyed when the castle is destroyed? No, it is innate: what takes effort has a value for humans.
We did not have the level of wealth of today before, but every single human that puts time somewhere wants to be the ruler of that effort. That is innate I think. I saw it clearly with my nephew's reaction. Noone taught him that.
Looks like a good experiment to me.
It seems quite likely to me that as soon as we started crafting and carrying things around, we developed complex behaviors around who gets which things.
If individuals wish to operate outside of limited liability, un-shielding all their assets to the consequences of their actions, then they can keep all their revenue/earnings.
I think it's BS that limited liability orgs commit acts that damage the environment and others, pay dividends to share holders, salaries (and bonuses) to officers and employees, and then go bankrupt when they are then being held to account for their actions and leaving little to nothing to their victims because there is no ability to claw back the money they paid out.
Quid pro quo. They get limited liability for being regulated. Don't like being regulated? Then forego limited liability.
It's a timeless problem insofar that it dates back to ancient times while remaining unsolved today.
If you want equality of opportunity, you need to fight furiously for complete free speech and complete freedom of trade. The change has to come from the individual bottom up.
