Wealth Cap

[bintananth]

But, a progressive tax is mor theft than this wealth cap? Progressive taxes concentrates wealth and power in the government, while this spreads out wealth and power across multiple individuals.

One way to think of it - in my engineering mind - is in the terms of redlining an engine with desmodromic valve gear. Those don't really have a redline because the valves are mechanically closed instead of being closed by springs. Valve float is a non-issue.

Wealth Limit: A rev limiter. This fast, and no faster.

Progressive Tax: The Mach number of the air going in and out of the cylinders. There's an optimal range. You can exceed it but there's a price to pay and it gets ever higher the faster you go.

 

[Morphic Tide]

To be honest, the only "hard" wealth cap I'd look at would be inheritance caps. As in, the value of things passed on to or for the sake of (none of that trust fund bullshit) a single inheritor, thereby taking out intergenerational aristocratic behavior, rather than installing a glass ceiling for entrepreneurs.

Enough that it's still "independently wealthy" sums, but not the staggering mountains that lead to de-facto ennoblement from scope of economic power passed down.

Edit: The idea here is basically disallowing "I want my child to hold power over others" levels of wealth, where it exceeds the point where they can live a lavish lifestyle off nothing but passive well-solved financing of the inheritance and spending it requires fucking around with the wealth of major industrial operations.

 

[ProfessorCurio]

To be honest, the only "hard" wealth cap I'd look at would be inheritance caps. As in, the value of things passed on to or for the sake of (none of that trust fund bullshit) a single inheritor, thereby taking out intergenerational aristocratic behavior, rather than installing a glass ceiling for entrepreneurs.

Enough that it's still "independently wealthy" sums, but not the staggering mountains that lead to de-facto ennoblement from scope of economic power passed down.

It makes much more sense than the current system of inheritance taxes.

As for the posts from before this, while I do support the idea of a wealth cap to insure that no single entity or individual ever has too much power over the economy and by extension everything else I do not believe redistribution ought be the point.

Progressive taxes limit rate of growth, but if it reaches the point of acting effectively like a significant wealth cap then I suspect it is likely having some less desirable side effects for the economy.
We should be encouraging excess funds to be put into economic development where possible with the goals of increasing competition, lowering costs be virtue of both said competition and created production infrastructure, and increasing job access.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

To be honest, the only "hard" wealth cap I'd look at would be inheritance caps. As in, the value of things passed on to or for the sake of (none of that trust fund bullshit) a single inheritor, thereby taking out intergenerational aristocratic behavior, rather than installing a glass ceiling for entrepreneurs.

I'm not a fan of these. We've got them, and they've destroyed family-owned business if the deceased didn't protect against government theft properly.

 

[Morphic Tide]

I'm not a fan of these. We've got them, and they've destroyed family-owned business if the deceased didn't protect against government theft properly.

Again, that's the one sort I'd look at, it is still very implementation sensitive. Though I find it difficult to think of how you'd kneecap family owned businesses at any bar that would not immediately obliterate the notion of intergenerational finance.

Edit: Again, the target here is intergenerational power, where the process of inheriting wealth begins to act as if the families in question are inheriting noble titles. The point is making it so that meaningful control of Amazon cannot be inherited, basically.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

Define for me power. What does it mean to have power intergenerationally.

@Morphic Tide (for response)

 

[Bear Ribs]

Again, that's the one sort I'd look at, it is still very implementation sensitive. Though I find it difficult to think of how you'd kneecap family owned businesses at any bar that would not immediately obliterate the notion of intergenerational finance.

Edit: Again, the target here is intergenerational power, where the process of inheriting wealth begins to act as if the families in question are inheriting noble titles. The point is making it so that meaningful control of Amazon cannot be inherited, basically.

It kneecap'd family business and left intergenerational finance alone because it was written to do so at great length.

The laws that get passed are never the simple matters that get described in a forum post. Rather than a solid "No inheriting more than this much money" it would be a 15,000-page monstrosity with specific loopholes and carveouts built into it to protect the donor class while hosing the middle class. Most often it's simply by ensuring the law is so complex and full of traps everybody is going to have to hire a lawyer at great expense to escape it's grasp, which megacoporations can afford and family businesses can't.

 

[ProfessorCurio]

It kneecap'd family business and left intergenerational finance alone because it was written to do so at great length.

The laws that get passed are never the simple matters that get described in a forum post. Rather than a solid "No inheriting more than this much money" it would be a 15,000-page monstrosity with specific loopholes and carveouts built into it to protect the donor class while hosing the middle class. Most often it's simply by ensuring the law is so complex and full of traps everybody is going to have to hire a lawyer at great expense to escape it's grasp, which megacoporations can afford and family businesses can't.

So basically the only way to be able to do it as it should be done or implement thusly any similarly applicable measures and to do so without causing undo harm is to use a different angle to deal with the very problems it and said other solutions are meant to solve.
That naturally raises the important matter of what can we do to get past the underhanded measures of the corrupt, get more well intentioned and stubbornly hard to corrupt individuals into power, and keep them safe from said underhanded techniques in order to hamstring the blockade of corruption for long enough to see these measures implemented and corruption kept further at bay!

 

[The Whispering Monk]

So basically the only way to be able to do it as it should be done or implement thusly any similarly applicable measures and to do so without causing undo harm is to use a different angle to deal with the very problems it and said other solutions are meant to solve.
That naturally raises the important matter of what can we do to get past the underhanded measures of the corrupt, get more well intentioned and stubbornly hard to corrupt individuals into power, and keep them safe from said underhanded techniques in order to hamstring the blockade of corruption for long enough to see these measures implemented and corruption kept further at bay!

Possible ideas...
1. Make Congress a temp position... Only in session every other year
2. Limit political donations to individuals ONLY, no corps, no unions, no PACs.
3. NO politician may lobby EVER.

 

[ProfessorCurio]

Possible ideas...
1. Make Congress a temp position... Only in session every other year
2. Limit political donations to individuals ONLY, no corps, no unions, no PACs.
3. NO politician may lobby EVER.

Item 1 limiting Congress sessions to every other year feels like a bad idea.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_session

Item 2 is as a concept a good idea and limits along such lines already exist at least here in the US, however they are clearly insufficient.
See: Contribution limits - FEC.gov.

As for number 3 restriction therein need an overhaul, so have a plan for it?
See:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying

 

[The Whispering Monk]

limiting Congress sessions to every other year feels like a bad idea.

Then how bout they only get 4 months a year in DC to get up to shenanigans. The other 8 months they are required to spend in their districts (for House Reps) and States (for Senators)?

Item 2 is as a concept a good idea and limits along such lines already exist at least here in the US, however they are clearly insufficient.

To my knowledge we don't really limit what can be done by PACs, large groupings of people like Unions and Corporations when it comes to political donations.
-I'm suggesting that we limit ALL political campaign donations to adult individuals (that are Citizens) to a max amount of...we'll say $5,000 per.
Absolutely ZERO donations by companies, unions or other groupings of people. AND NO ONE may spend their money on political campaign adds endorsing someone for office.

restriction therein need an overhaul, so have a plan for it?

Simple, if you have held public office (federal since that's the level we're discussing), then you don't get to Lobby or even be employed by a lobbying group/company for the rest of your life.

I'd also like to see a great number of restrictions on certain activities by current office holders, but that's a different topic.

 

[Largo]

To my knowledge we don't really limit what can be done by PACs, large groupings of people like Unions and Corporations when it comes to political donations.
-I'm suggesting that we limit ALL political campaign donations to adult individuals (that are Citizens) to a max amount of...we'll say $5,000 per.
Absolutely ZERO donations by companies, unions or other groupings of people. AND NO ONE may spend their money on political campaign adds endorsing someone for office.

I and 9 other people think abortion is bad. We get together to form a group arguing that abortion is bad and politicians should pass anti-abortion bills, we contribute funds to print posters, and conduct other forms of advertising.

Should that be illegal?

 

[JagerIV]

One way to think of it - in my engineering mind - is in the terms of redlining an engine with desmodromic valve gear. Those don't really have a redline because the valves are mechanically closed instead of being closed by springs. Valve float is a non-issue.

Wealth Limit: A rev limiter. This fast, and no faster.

Progressive Tax: The Mach number of the air going in and out of the cylinders. There's an optimal range. You can exceed it but there's a price to pay and it gets ever higher the faster you go.

I'm not really sure that works particularly well as an explanation, especially on the Progressive tax side, but within your anayolgy, a wealth limiter would be necessary, no?

To be honest, the only "hard" wealth cap I'd look at would be inheritance caps. As in, the value of things passed on to or for the sake of (none of that trust fund bullshit) a single inheritor, thereby taking out intergenerational aristocratic behavior, rather than installing a glass ceiling for entrepreneurs.

Enough that it's still "independently wealthy" sums, but not the staggering mountains that lead to de-facto ennoblement from scope of economic power passed down.

Edit: The idea here is basically disallowing "I want my child to hold power over others" levels of wealth, where it exceeds the point where they can live a lavish lifestyle off nothing but passive well-solved financing of the inheritance and spending it requires fucking around with the wealth of major industrial operations.

Eh, limiting intergenerational wealth is not only not really particularly doable, for the various reasons described, but I'm do ont think it is even really desirable.

This policy, if anything, is a protection of the aristocracy policy. The point is more or less to redistribute the wealth from the 0.01% to the merely 0.1%, maybe as low as the top 1%. Which is still a 10x to 100x increase in the scale of the truly powerful.

This is a wealth cap for right wing ends, and thus the tactic is being used to different ends than the standard leftist wealth cap, making it different in very important ways. Such as trying to absolutely minimize the amount of money that flows into the government, which is counterproductive to division of power.

 

[Abhorsen]

As we see, another person pushing at capitalism, wanting just a little bit more communism, because surely this time it'll work?

Every time a capitalist compromises, it leads to a worse country, more problems, and the communist saying "We just need a little bit more, this time it'll work! I double promise!" The problem isn't that people have money. The problem is that the political institutions have the power to interfere too much, which makes them targets: there's no point in bribing the powerless.

Instead, fundamentally limit the amount of regulatory change that can be done per year, total (I'd like to just get rid of them entirely, but this'll do), and make it so that every regulation has a sunset provision that if kept, counts towards the yearly total. Maybe make it a constitutional amendment. Now a) politicians and the deep state can interfere less, and better: instead of just competing for goodies (read: bullshit government handouts), people with power will be forced to campaign against other people's goodies.

 

[Morphic Tide]

Which is still a 10x to 100x increase in the scale of the truly powerful.

No, it's a very massive loss of scale to the truly powerful because it diffuses that power among far more hands, thus greatly impeding geopolitics-warping concentrations. There being a far larger absolute number of independently wealthy people means nothing if none of them have the personal wealth to shape the landscape of governments and megacorporations.

The Polish Empire, if I recall correctly, comes to mind as a comparison. It was nominally a "hereditary aristocracy", but the way the titles worked meant that like a third of the population had noble titles with legislative influence, making it effectively a parliamentary democracy with limited franchise because there was simply too much of the population to actually be top-down.

The problem isn't that people have money. The problem is that the political institutions have the power to interfere too much, which makes them targets: there's no point in bribing the powerless.

The problem is that the current system makes it quite straightforward to have single persons or cohesive private groups become political institutions. That's why so many talk about taxing the ultra-wealthy into the ground, there's not really much you can do to trust-bust Amazon to compromise Bezos.

Libertarianism and "pure" capitalism can't really answer the natural monopoly, and the way online services function makes them ridiculously prone to them. There was always going to be a Google AdSense, because the value of advertisement services are directly proportionate to how many people are going to see it.

 

[Abhorsen]

The problem is that the current system makes it quite straightforward to have single persons or cohesive private groups become political institutions. That's why so many talk about taxing the ultra-wealthy into the ground, there's not really much you can do to trust-bust Amazon to compromise Bezos.

Libertarianism and "pure" capitalism can't really answer the natural monopoly, and the way online services function makes them ridiculously prone to them. There was always going to be a Google AdSense, because the value of advertisement services are directly proportionate to how many people are going to see it.

No, there's so much talk about taxing the ultra wealthy into the ground because we always don't like them. This dislike isn't new, it isn't special, and it isn't suddenly now justified.

Second, we aren't talking about economic monopolies here, the proposal was to stop people seizing political power. A wealth tax, cap, etc, all that leads to is people leaving the country and investing elsewhere. That's about it. Then the US doesn't get that investment, and is poorer for it.

On top of this, comparing wealth to income is dumb. Yes, Elon does have about 1% of GDP in wealth. That doesn't mean he controls 1% of the economy though, or 1% of the GDP. The US has about 126 Trillion in wealth. Elon has about 200 Billion. That puts him another order of magnitude down, at about .2% of wealth. That's not something I care about.

And on top of that, the majority of his wealth is invested. This is money that actively makes the US richer as it is used. I want more of this wealth in the US, not less.


See, the core problem with this is you are trying to stop an attack vector (lobbying, etc) on an institution (government). The problem is that there are way too many more attack vectors on this institution, with plenty of them internal ones. Social attacks are much more devastating, as we have seen with wokeness, for example. Internal power struggles for stupid points that cause harm to people the institution affects are another vector. There are in reality constant attack vectors. The solution is to make government not an important part of every day life, so that there is nothing of value to fight over.


I really don't care too much about AdSense being perceived as a monopoly, as long as it can't whine to the government to crush it's competition, which is always the real worry about regulating a monopoly: half the time you end up establishing what you intended to kill.

 

[Morphic Tide]

I really don't care too much about AdSense being perceived as a monopoly, as long as it can't whine to the government to crush it's competition, which is always the real worry about regulating a monopoly

...It doesn't need the government, though. It crushes competition by existing. A natural monopoly is the result of areas of the economy where competition is literally not applicable as Libertarians and an-caps think of it, because the utility is directly related to the scale of the product more than being sensitive to innovation.

Amazon is unapproachable by any competition not because it's protected by the government, but because it's absurdly massive and thus readily offers nearly every product in existence. By being big, it natively becomes a superior product, with sod-all need for innovation.

Google doesn't need to do anything with the government to secure AdSense's position in the duopoly, it just needs to be on decent terms with Facebook's side and leave competitors out of its search engine. And AdSense simply grew from the requirements of monetizing that search engine.

Do you really not understand the concept of network effects and natural monopolies? Or do you not care about companies that can kill virtually any imaginable competitor simply by refusing to acknowledge them? There are, in fact, cases of degenerate monopolistic behavior that have absolutely zero need for any government involvement.

That's why most of the utilities got semi-nationalized. Because providing electricity and water natively creates near-insurmountable advantages in scale, even before getting into the abusive bullshit of crushing startups by accepting local losses payed for with outside profits.

Monopolistic behavior exists entirely independently of government, even if that's it's biggest push today. Kinda why the regulation that got captured exists in the first place, we've been over this before in the Gilded Age.

 

[bintananth]

I'm not really sure that works particularly well as an explanation, especially on the Progressive tax side, but within your anayolgy, a wealth limiter would be necessary, no?

Unnecessary. With progressive taxes those at the upper end of the income scale reach an "it's just not worth it" point when it comes to bringing home more.

The Laffer Curve, as ridiculous as it gets portrayed, has some truth behind it. It's a thought exercise which points out that at some level of taxation - it's different for everyone - people stop working once all the basics are met.

Person A might call it quits at 25% because rather be out fishing instead of at work. Person B might keep going all the way up to 99% because they'd like to add another Ferrari to their garage.

 

[Abhorsen]

...It doesn't need the government, though. It crushes competition by existing. A natural monopoly is the result of areas of the economy where competition is literally not applicable as Libertarians and an-caps think of it, because the utility is directly related to the scale of the product more than being sensitive to innovation.

Amazon is unapproachable by any competition not because it's protected by the government, but because it's absurdly massive and thus readily offers nearly every product in existence. By being big, it natively becomes a superior product, with sod-all need for innovation.

Google doesn't need to do anything with the government to secure AdSense's position in the duopoly, it just needs to be on decent terms with Facebook's side and leave competitors out of its search engine. And AdSense simply grew from the requirements of monetizing that search engine.

Do you really not understand the concept of network effects and natural monopolies? Or do you not care about companies that can kill virtually any imaginable competitor simply by refusing to acknowledge them? There are, in fact, cases of degenerate monopolistic behavior that have absolutely zero need for any government involvement.

That's why most of the utilities got semi-nationalized. Because providing electricity and water natively creates near-insurmountable advantages in scale, even before getting into the abusive bullshit of crushing startups by accepting local losses payed for with outside profits.

Monopolistic behavior exists entirely independently of government, even if that's it's biggest push today. Kinda why the regulation that got captured exists in the first place, we've been over this before in the Gilded Age.

... This thread isn't about natural monopolies is my major point. Yes, they do exist. No, google AdSense isn't one (for one major reason: facebook having such a big market share). Amazon is a better example of what you are trying to describe, but... people still compete with it. Namely Walmart is probably it's biggest competitor in the selling stuff category. Yes, the stuff is purchases in wildly different ways, but it's still the same stuff being bought. But if you are looking for similar competition, just look at any specialty market place: each one of these is a competitor with Amazon in their own little niche. Not the greatest competition, but it's still there.

Crucially, you don't seem to get what a natural monopoly comes from. The key feature of a natural monopoly is the high cost of adding new people to it, not a network effect (though that is a part of it). Most internet companies don't have this feature. It's relatively easy to set up an account on any website and start buying from them. In contrast, laying additional pipe for competition of water pipe isn't worth it, as it's a huge expense for a single added person.

Basically, because it is profitable to compete with Amazon online if you get more niche, we don't have a natural monopoly. Sure, you could call it bad, but not a natural monopoly, as it doesn't meet the definition.

 

[bintananth]

As @Abhorsen said, natural monopolies do exist. He gave the example of a water company. They generally fall under the category of public utilities and public services where having more than one provider is a cost-prohibitive mess.

Another example might be retail stuff in a town that can't support more than one store carrying it. Sure, you can go to a neighbouring town or have what you want delivered directly to you from out of town ... but you're probably not going to do that for everyday things on a regular basis unless the local store is run by a greedy profiteer who price gouges.