Comment by jacquesm
10 days ago
> “here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad”
And there are plenty of people that take issue with that too.
Unfortunately they're not the ones paying the price. And... stock options.
History paints a pretty clear picture of the tradeoff:
* Profits now and violence later
OR
* Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier
Unfortunately we’ve developed such a myopic, “FYGM” society that it’s explicitly the former option for the time being.
Do you have a historical example of "Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier"? I can't think of any.
If you replace "taxes" with more general "investment", it's everywhere. A good example is Amazon that has reworked itself from an online bookstore into a global supplier of everything by ruthlessly reinvesting the profits.
Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA.
If you're looking for periods of high taxes and growing prosperity, 1950s in the US is a popular example. It's not a great example though, because the US was the principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial country relatively unscathed by it.
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Post World War II USA.
If that is not an example of how taxing rich people and investing in infrastructure can accelerate progress, then I don't what could be (with of course the caveat that those investments were focused in a specific group of people and not society as a whole).
Miracle of Wörgl [0]
[0] https://unterguggenberger.org/the-free-economy-experiment-of...
Violence was a moderating factor when people on each side were equally armed, and number was a deciding factor.
Nowadays you could squash an uprising with a few operators piloting drones remotely.
Flying a drone around is easy. Identifying who is on the in group and out group and then moving them is the hard part.
I’m not sure you have really thought out what the drone part is meant to do. Militaries gave outgunned populaces for decades at this point. You don’t need drones to kill civilians.
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Every possible example of “progress” have either an individual or a state power purpose behind it
there is only one possible “egalitarian” forward looking investments that paid off for everybody
I think the only exception to this is vaccines…and you saw how all that worked during Covid
Everything else from the semiconductor to the vacuum cleaner the automobile airplanes steam engines I don’t care what it is you pick something it was developed in order to give a small group and advantage over all the other groups it is always been this case it will always be this case because fundamentally at the root nature of humanity they do not care about the externalities- good or bad
COVID has cured me (hah!) of the notion that humanity will be able to pull together when faced with a common enemy. That means global warming or the next pandemic are going to happen and we will not be able to stop it from happening because a solid percentage can't wait to jump off the ledge, and they'll push you off too.
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If you edit your comment to add punctuation, please let me know: I would like to read that final pile of words.
I did try, I promise.
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We have taxes now though, how much is enough?
Hint: The answer for the government is, it's never enough. "little bit of taxes" is never what we had.
Seriously though, I wouldn't mind "little bit of taxes" if there were guaranteed ways to stop funding something when it's a failed experiment, which is difficult in government. Because "a little bit more" is always wanted.
Every time I hear an argument like this one, it's always phrased in terms of "the government is greedy and/or incompetent, therefore taxes are bad" and never in terms of "the government is greedy and/or incompetent, therefore our systems of controlling our government are not good enough".
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