Comment by ryanjshaw
3 days ago
> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs
What alternative do you propose?
3 days ago
> we live under a system that is arranged for the sole benefit of the owners of capital, and have been convinced that this is an immutable state of affairs
What alternative do you propose?
I would like to propose a cap on net worth.
Realistically, if you have 300M, you and your direct family are settled for life. So, I want to propose 1B cap on net worth, if its more than that for 12 months straight, surplus goes to government, if your net worth is down after that, government obliges to return it partially to make it to 1B.
People, who are eager building things and innovating, will keep building regardless, power hungry will try to find other ways to enrich themselves, but eventually they will give up (e.g. having 10 kids, each with 1B net worth)
Instead of an arbitrary net number, why not a multiplier of the median? For example, capping at 300x the median citizen/household.
This is so arbitrary and incredibly naive. How did you come to with 300M, why not 300k or 300 billion? How would you determine the worth of rare, illiquid or intangibles? What about wealth held in trusts or companies? How does the accounting work if I borrow against my wealth? What happens when things change value dramatically in a short period of time? And the government is going to "make billionaires whole again" if they crater their wealth?
You are asking me about implementation difficulty, difficult implementation doesn't mean idea is not worth it.
One example:
* 300k vs 300M - doesn't matter if I said 100M, 200M, 550M, if you think 300M is not enough for you and your family to afford anything, not sure how other people are surviving for even less.
Here is why I think this is good:
1. Ambitious people will still be ambitious, its rare some genius kid says: I know this is 100B idea, but I won't build it, because I will only own 1B of it.
2. Limits the power, when power is really limited, people will be forced to focus on different things. For example, if you had plans to take over the world by making $10T and creating an army to kidnap president of another state you don't like, then you would know, it is not possible to make 10T, its not only about how much, its about suppressing hungry animal in you by capping your limits.
3. There is a chance "bad" ambitious people, will be converted to real philanthropist, because they know it doesn't matter to own more than 1B anyway and they can't own it.
3 replies →
They would break ownership into trusts. The caps idea has forever been dumb.
So let's say we implemented this and the government suddenly receives billions of credits from wealthy individuals. Would anything actually change? Is this what's holding us back from repairing all the roads to a fine standard? From implementing universal basic income?
It seems to me that if one tried to actually spend those credits we'd simply get inflation. Prices for roads, food etc. would just go up.
We definitely want to work on inequality, but I think numbers above 1B net worth are just weird quirks of the system. Musk is powerful because he's powerful, the number is just a reflection of that. Keeping his number below some arbitrary threshold isn't going to combat his power.
We need to tackle the problem head on: we need to stop individuals from amassing so much power. We get lost in this stupid abstraction called money. It's not what matters.
Doesn’t the US have an almost $2T deficit?
What do you think all that money you taxed from billionaires will do in the hands of the “government”, pay the bills for 12-24 months? Then what’s your plan after the government has spent it all? No amount of taxation can solve a spending problem.
Would SpaceX exist if your ideas were in charge?
it would.
Some options why it should happen:
1. Assuming Elon is curious person, he will still build it out of curiosity.
2. Assuming Elon is not curios person, just power hungry, he will probably think its not worth building it, but someone else who is curious will build it eventually. This is even better, because when power hungry person owns such thing, they might use it for bad things as well (e.g. to gain more power, eventually interfering with elections, oh wait, it did already happen)
3. Government will build, because government will have more money now, but then we should be even more careful who gets to the top. Assuming people won't have more than 1B, maybe there will be less lobbying? because its not worth as much as it was before?
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Not forcing a scarcity of necessities like housing would be a start.
Peer competition is what makes everything work. You need scarcity of necessities to force people in to the system. Recent rulings allowing the criminalisation of homelessness are pushing this further. Your existence is default-illegal unless you work to outbid your peers for housing.
Be realistic, demand the impossible.
A reference to France in May of 1968: "Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible."
See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68#Slogans_and_graffiti
"I demand a purple unicorn build the things I want to."
Now what?
Claude Code already is the purple unicorn. We're already there - the only problem is that regulatory systems are set up in a way that benefits a small minority of capitalists, rather than the majority.
The same but less rigged would be a good start. I feel like people ask your question as a gotcha because they can't wrap their head around a system more nuanced than "cancerous capitalism" or "potato famine communism"
Something like we had in advanced western europe and the US between ww2 and the late 70s seemed much more balanced while not requiring a complete system change. Most people would be fine if we sprinkled a bit of socialism on top of the gigantic pile of capitalism.
Stuff like housing, energy, transportation, shouldn't make you live paycheck to paycheck forever. Just the fact that people are slowly starting to talk about 50 years mortgage should be a wake up call.
Most people would be happy knowing there is something a tiny bit better coming, rather than knowing they will never make it out and will kept getting fucked a tiny bit more year after year. My grandparents had objectively a harder life than mine, but their life was improving every year, mine is stagnating at best, and usually I'm losing purchasing power year after year, while being relatively well paid for my country
Perceived success of 1950s and 1960s does apply to non-white people, women or countries destroyed by war.
And it still mostly doesn't so it's not really a good argument. Meanwhile the share of women in the workforce more than doubled but households' purchasing power isn't even as high as back then when it comes to the basics like cars/energy/housing, if anything it's down quite a bit.
We should unite, not fight about who's whitest, XYZ gender or a minority, you'll always find someone who has it better or worse than you, what matter is the average is going down, while back then it was going up, the rest is mostly noise.
1 reply →
It's always the same: workers need to unionize and form a political power bloc. Then, those most impacted—the majority—have an array of options, which are well explored in the annals of leftist and socialist political theory.
This is not at all to say that more conservative or reactionary theorists are wrong about how the world works. In fact, I think they're usually more right about what's really going on abstractly.
But, the working man doesn't need to know what's really going on. They need to win the war, and there's a ton of tactical advice written down—hard won lessons by those who built the modern world through the labor movement.
The place to start is with the usual suspects. Verso Books, The New Centre for Social Research, histories of the labor movement, and new political commentators like Josh Citarella.
"Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common ...."