Please go easy on the downvotes—the point here is to try to understand a perspective that many of you probably won’t share.
People who think billionaires should exist generally don’t believe in the common good as much as they believe in Big Strong Man IS Cool and Sexy. Or they don’t know how labor works
There’s absolutely something to this, in that religions that enforce hierarchies are going to be more attractive to people who desire hierarchies (befitting from them or not). There’s no form in which you can be a billionaire without believing in hierarchy because it’s about as peak of human power as you can get
Billionaires in themselves aren’t the problem. The circumstances creating them are. And not taxing them appropriately even more so.
Aren’t the circumstances that give rise to them simply the fact that societies allow individuals to become so wealthy in the first place?
Yes, and that’s exactly what I’m getting at: One does not become a billionaire without exploiting a system that allows such exploitation to begin with. Nobody gets to where they are without any form of help; I’m fairly well off, and I am very aware of where I got help along the way. Becoming a billionaire is simply the result of taking any help offered to you without paying back your fair share, and that’s where the faults lie: The society that hands out government subsidies with no stipulation past a “trust me bro”.
Laws and policies need to be enacted that stifled an individuals economic growth past a certain point, effectively preventing people from becoming billionaires in the first place.
And who do you think has the greatest interest—and the resources—to set up the system you’re talking about in such a way that it essentially serves only the interests of billionaires?
I’d say the U.S. demonstrates quite impressively how this works.
To me, the saddest aspect of this nation’s decline is that the people who are paying the price have resigned themselves to their fate, since their ideology seems to make it appear inevitable to them.
No
Billionaires aren’t the problem. They aren’t good, but even eliminating them would not move the needle.
The only real fix for a significant portion of the current affordability problems is a sizeable Land Value tax. Henry George was mostly right, he wrote that shit out for us more than century ago, and we’re still ignoring him while we fuck everything up because we keep treating land as this giant pyramid scheme of investment.
But why wouldn’t it solve the problem if top tax rates were imposed that would make it impossible for such parasitic investment firms to emerge in the first place?
Go run the math. If you were to tax away say everything people own that’s greater than $50 million dollars, and give it to everyone else, the total amount each person gets is something… but not as much as you would think. On the order of tens of thousands of dollars in the US for example. That would happen one time.
The most significant problem with housing costs isn’t that corporations can invest, it’s that ANYONE can invest. Investments require that an asset appreciate faster than inflation, and if that happens by definition it will always become increasingly more expensive than people can afford. Homes cannot be an investment for anyone, or they will always become too expensive.
You seem to be trapped in the status quo, as if it were a law of nature. There are no self-regulating markets, as economists claim. What you’re presenting here as inevitable isn’t real. It’s simply an expression of an ideology that you mistake for reality.
There are people who live in houses, and there are also people who build them. There is simply no “real estate god” who is anything other than a human being.
You might think that’s naive, but if you think that way, aren’t you also saying that climate change is an unavoidable catastrophe? That puts you no longer in the camp of rationality, but in the realm of theology—namely, the inevitable Last Judgment, the end of the world, and all that nonsense.
What I’m getting at is this: The biggest lie that economics has ever come up with is that it’s science—it isn’t. Based on the theories it pursues, it’s at best a social science that has already been largely disproved.
My proposal is to destroy the market completely with a land value tax. How does that have anything to do with being stuck in the status quo? It’s incredibly radical by the standards of the average person right now.
If something is an investment, by necessity it must increase in price faster than inflation. If you tax the ability for that to happen completely away, it’s no longer an investment vehicle. That’s not economics, it’s not science, it’s basic math.
This strikes me as similar to the ideas of Lizzy Magie, arguably one of the most absurdly exploited individuals with noble goals that history has to offer. She invented Monopoly to illustrate the absurdity of land ownership—today, Monopoly is the game that teaches children cutthroat capitalism.
Magie received a ridiculous low sum for her Monopoly patent, while others became millionaires off her idea (the Parker brothers, whose empire still exists today, benefited the most).
Edit: Please don’t get me wrong—I completely agree with you. I just don’t think it’s effective to focus solely on the one area where the world’s wealthy accumulate their wealth. This is simply a realistic view, since no billion-dollar company operates in just one sector (for example, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is involved in real estate deals worth billions, even though it is, at its core, a tech company). So what I’m trying to say is: Regulations targeting only the real estate market cannot possibly solve the problem.
It’s because that game (or more specifically The Landlord Game which she made) was meant to teach on Henry George’s work (the guy that came up with the idea of Land Value taxes and explained why they were needed)
I don’t care whether or not billionaires do or don’t exist. As long as the people that they hire get paid a living wage so that at some point, they can retire. I don’t care how much a billionaire has.
Yes, I completely agree with you. I just fear that reality shows that billionaires—who, after all, aren’t some kind of fantasy—simply don’t do that. Quite the opposite: With their power, which is equivalent to the capital of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, they do everything in their power to make life for ordinary people worse and worse. We’re seeing this happen right now.
I simply cannot understand why people fail to recognize the reason for their increasingly dire situations.
I do understand that the reason is that the billionaires have so much capital that they control the media and can thus spread misinformation massively. That is precisely why fascism is so strong again—it is so attractive to billionaires because, with its ideology, it is designed to protect the “elites.” However, it’s not foreigners or any of the bogeymen this idiotic “doctrine” has to offer: the problem is those who spread this inhuman ideology—namely, the billionaires.
At “Billionaire” (or even hundreds of millions of dollars) levels of wealth the government should implement a different tax scale based on net worth. Simpler and harder to manipulate. An annual minimum tax bill of 1% of your net worth that cannot be reduced, offset, deferred or otherwise mitigated per billion annually to do buisness in the country, per country.
Just stop them rorting loopholes. I think people would probably hate billionaires a whole lot less if they just paid a FAIR amount of tax.
Edit: actually the math works pretty much all the way down. Everyone should have a minimum income tax bill every year of 1% of their net worth with the only exemption being your primary residence.
A healthy tax code would not allow billionaires to exist
Sweden has more billionaires per capita than USA.
Billionaires existing does not mean you can’t have a reasonable social welfare state. You’re wasting your time thinking taxing away billionaires will solve anything.
