Comment by esseph
3 days ago
I'd argue we need both massive antitrust, and higher taxes on the wealthy to prevent them from amassing the power to prevent the antitrust.
3 days ago
I'd argue we need both massive antitrust, and higher taxes on the wealthy to prevent them from amassing the power to prevent the antitrust.
And change in laws regarding the legalized corruption (Citizens United, ...). And fight for real freedom of speech.
This is very complex problem that needs to be tackled from all sides simultaneously, the entrenched interests are already well setup to defend themselves.
Citizens United was a pretty pro-speech decision and is unfairly maligned, and "money is speech" predates it by quite a few years. The real problem is when huge corporations control the flow of information.
Which is a bigger problem, that corporations can pay for political ads, or that one corporation has 90% search market share? That there are political ads on Facebook or Twitter, or that those corporations control what's in the feed of hundreds of millions of people because use of their algorithm is tied to the network effect instead of having a federated system like RSS or email?
Sorry, no. Both are problem. And it is not pro-speech at all, it is pro-$$$. It is a standard practice to drown the unwanted speech in the noise of the paid-for 'speech'. Nothing about pro-speech for ordinary people there.
Furthermore, Citizen's United makes it harder to make any necessary legislative changes. Including the anti-trust. Focusing only on one issue while leaving the other heads of the hydra intact just plays into its strengths.
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Plus a systematic way of keeping the Gini coefficient of wealth small in a sustainable way. I'm a fan of establishing sovereign wealth funds whose dividends are paid out equally per capita for this purpose.
A sovereign wealth fund has the government deciding what to invest in, which is both a magnet for corruption and a good way to get below-market returns through mismanagement. It also requires an extremely oppressive build-up period where the government is collecting money in taxes to seed the fund instead of providing services to the population, which is why the countries that have one are basically all countries that net export huge amounts of oil, and China which exports everything else.
Meanwhile you don't need the government to use tax dollars to buy stocks in specific companies. If you want a UBI then use VAT. Then it comes from every company instead of having government bureaucrats choose which ones, and gets paid out immediately instead of needing a generation of build-up.
The things amassing power to prevent antitrust are corporations, not individuals. It does nothing to make Bill Gates sell shares in Microsoft to pay taxes when the corporation stays the same size. If anything it makes it worse because then more corporations are controlled by Wall St rather than founders and they're significantly more inclined to turn the screws to juice short-term profits.