It’s not that hard
Wealth caps. Worldwide. Start at something reasonable, say 10 million
Anything over that goes 100% tot axes. Nobody has a “right” to more than that, nobody needs more than that. No, you don’t NEED three Lamborghini’s, you don’t need 20 houses.
Keep everything else the same, just a single rule to make a huge difference
Governments now will have enough income to fund a huge social net with free education, free healthcare, universal income so that people can spend money to keep the economy running
People now can choose to do some of the little work left.
On a side note: fuck these AI clowns for focussing on AI on exactly those tasks that make life worth living instead of focussing on the mundane shit tasks that nobody wants to do. Garbage collection still requires humans yet these shit stains claim that art andusic is now covered. Yay! Now we have shitty AI art and shitty jobs!
So I am working on the mundane task part…
Not really the part of “wealth caps”, but still, good on you!
Yep, can’t do much about that other than vote and write my useless representatives. Taking back what they stole and putting it to work for the masses, to do the grind, that’s something I can do now.
Peregrine, Snipe, and Kiwi are all available for free on the managed cloud accounts and I’m handing out beta keys for free for a while so please do try them out if you find one that’s useful!
you don’t even need that. If you have more brackets and keep going up in percentages and tax every type of income including investments in progressive way then you will get to a point where its just to hard to make more than say 10 million. We basically had this. When we had tax brackets that went up to 95% and only 40% for investment and that limited wealth quite a bit. Rates need to be the same regardless of source be it inheritance, lottery winnings, wages, or investments. Heck im fine with not paying taxes on things if you legally lock it up so it can’t be sold. still have to pay any income it creates year to year but can’t sell it or transfer it in any way. combine this with a 1% tax on all buying and selling which would be a massive reduction for most purchases but would be a vast increase for stock and bond trading. would completely clear out short term trading.
What’s wild is that, as you say, we used to have this system in the US. We even had it during the time conservatives are so nostalgic for.
Gradually, over the past 60 or so years, all the prosperity has been siphoned back toward the top, and now it’s a radical idea to propose the system that our grandfathers lived under.
The point of the cap is more to really have it clear that NOBODY has the right to hoard wealth. Everybody can be free to live the way they want to, everybody can live perfectly comfortable, and the psycho types amongst us that need to have that little bit more than the rest are perfectly fine being a little richer than the rest while spending their lives on work, if they like that… But nobody is allowed to be crazy rich anymore. If you don’t cap it, ways will be found around it, they will add a few laws, repeal a few others, and we’re back to today again.
This is just a single hard stop, no ways around it, you have a hard physical limit, and anyone even remotely suggesting we can drop this rule is known for being a hoarding pyschopath immediately.
I sorta get you but I do think a soft cap is the way to go. those pyschopaths will literally just go underground. hiding wealth, capping all family and such. I mean they do this anyway basically but with a soft cap it just makes it harder for them to decide which is worse. working more or finding a better system to get more or working more or finding a better way to circumvent the system.
There are ways around this. For example, let’s say you set the wealth cap at 10 million. You write a law that says, “anyone that reports an illegal fortune larger than this will receive half of the money confiscated from this illegal fortune to divide tax-free among yourself, friends, and family.”
Billionaires don’t know how to manage their own money. They hire accountants. So you make it so any random accountant can rat out an illegal billionaire and get paid enough to not only max out their own lifetime allowable fortune, but those of all their friends and family.
Sure, the billionaire could avoid this by just dividing up his wealth among his own friends and family. But in that case, he’s still losing control. And that’s ultimately the point of this. Thousands of low-digit millionaires are infinitely superior to one billionaire.
thats an interesting take. problem is we are already dealing with tens of billions which is closing in on hundreds to likely some of these finance guys are already pulling in hundreds of mil. Might have to start that cap at a billion and titer it down.
Good luck going underground.
How are you going to drive your third lambourghini around without alerting authorities that you’ve been stealing from everybody? How are you going to live in your mega stupid mansion without very quickly getting a knock on the door from the tax man?
because you don’t own the lambourghini or the mansions. you just use them time to time. its not has hard as you make it. I mean its happening right now. Many rich people have property owned by corps that are owned by trusts. there is this whole specific thing because the company owns thing liability wise but the trust does ownership wise. its a crazy rabbit hole if you ever want to go down it.
Uh huh, but it doesn’t work like that. Somebody has to own that lambo at some point, be it a person or company. You could have 100 people pool together half their resources and have half a billion dollar company that rents out lambos but at that point, what is the point of it all?
If in that universe, with wealth caps, somebody wants to show off with a Lamborghini, go ahead, its dumb. You’re sinking boat loads of money into showing off to other people that you’re just as rich as they are.
Either way, that doesn’t matter. Nobody can cross the 10M line, nobody is stupid rich, governments get huge incomes, to me it sounds like a great change
don’t get me wrong its better than now. Just because I have an alternative method does not mean I feel what we have now is better. well. than anything.
Then we need to seriously rewrite corporate charter law. For example, maybe it shouldn’t even be legal for corporations to own other corporations. Limited liability as a concept has some value, in terms of encouraging investment. So there is value in LLCs existing. But we don’t need the free-for-all we have now. We could move corporate governance to a white list model, where there are only a set series of structures you’re allowed to use to organize a company.
Among these are the regulations would be restrictions on the forms of compensation you’re allowed to provide high-value employees. Maybe the only legal form of pay for executives should be salary.
And again, you can enforce this by relying on the little people that the executives don’t even recognize as human. Does a CEO formally have $10 million to their name, but they have exclusive use of a $100 million mansion provided by their company? Fine, let the janitor rat him out, and in turn the janitor will end up owning that mansion.
it shouldn’t even be legal for corporations to own other corporations.
100% agree
And again, you can enforce this by relying on the little people that the executives don’t even recognize as human. Does a CEO formally have $10 million to their name, but they have exclusive use of a $100 million mansion provided by their company? Fine, let the janitor rat him out, and in turn the janitor will end up owning that mansion.
These are some forms of possible cheats, yes, but again ask the question: does it make sense? Why would anyone permit the CEO of the company where they are a shareholder to live in a 100 million dollar mansion if it won’t get you anything? That CEO won’t get you anything more than 10M. The only way it would work is that those at the top of that company would get luxury things from the company while the company itself doesn’t have the resources to survive because the limited resources went to the CEO.
In any case, this was just a single rule, feel free to add a few more :)
Person wealth cap at 10M
Company wealth cap at 1B
Company employee cap at 1000
I do feel like we should not allow logical entities to own other logical entities. you can have a wrap something up to allow for pooling assets with individuals but it does seem like allowing multi levels like this causes all sorts of shenanigans. so yeah you can have a trust but no owning companies and if a company buys a company it becomes a combined company or the sale is not allowed.
Agreed. The promise of AI when I was younger (80s 90s) was it would do all the jobs no one wanted and we as humans could focus on arts, entertainment, and leisure. Somehow along the way those got crossed.
I agree, man. Let the tots axe whoever makes over 10 million and keeps it!!
It’s just gonna be the same 8 companies passing money between each other. Kinda like the Nvidia/openAI circle jerk. Us peasants will live in company towns, and be paid in company dollars that we can spend to buy food and water, from the company. Don’t worry, they’ll deduct rent straight from our checks.
I’ve always been kind of a Balam simp. They at least pretend to be upfront and halfway honorable. Arquebus was always too pretentious. Honestly I’d probably end up in the Dosers anyways. Drugs seems like a reasonable reaction to galaxy spanning corporate overlords.
A cancer doesn’t plan
who cares? that’s not this year’s problem let alone this quarter. this year, profits go up
It’s illegal to look at next year
We kinda have two choices:
Some flavour of socialism where people get what they need for free
Or
Turbo-rio-de-janiro style inequality where we all live in slums
Now the 2nd one is what the ultra rich want and they have a lot of power, so it’s kinda on the rest of us to make the first happen instead
Didn’t the French have an option three?
It’s an uphill battle, but it’s better to start early than late.
Unlike before, the rich now have private armies, lobbying groups, and mass surveillance networks while we peasants own nothing. Plus, the pot is slowly boiled.
The rich have always had private armies and spy networks. The technology may have changed, but same old same old.
I disagree. My opinion is that the technology did change. It just became more efficient at doing its job (killing people, surveillance, and mass propaganda).
The internet was supposed to be a gateway of information, but now it’s the largest propaganda network. Free speech is censored by closed source algorithms and the entire internet infrastructure is controlled and owned by the 1%.
We are more isolated compared to before, class solidarity is almost nonexistent, and its easier to identify people now vs before due to being interconnected real time.
I can go more on and on but the tldr is that technology has made it easier and faster to crush dissent
The french fucked up cause they didn’t have option 1 as the follow-up to option 3.
Data centres notoriously don’t have heads, but I love the enthusiasm
If Louis so-and-so hadn’t had a head my ancestors would have blown him to bits, that’s also an option for datacenters, just look at Iran !
They do have power supply, though.
Data centers are made by companies and companies have board of directors who have heads. CEOs have heads.
The sad part of a revolution is that it means civil war. You can’t have a revolution without infighting or counter revolution. It always amounts to civil war.
The other sad part is that once the French king and queen were taken care of, it was time for the revolution OGs to get their heads chopped off. Desmoulins, Danton, D’Eglantine, Philippe Égalité… infighting and a little reign of terror just made the revolution turn on itself.
Be careful what you wish for.
Option 3 : WW3 and kill off all the poors
This might inconvenience some of the rich, though.
“maybe the clothes are made of paper. The food is just nutrient paste…”
Or something like that from the Expanse. Sure, your needs are met, but living life on basic assistance seems like a nightmare.
Another fiction to look at could be Star Trek. Pretty much everything materialistic is free. You study and work not to afford your materialistic needs and wants, but for the joy of doing it.
And people do build careers and business, for the joy and the achievement of it.
… just to contrast your idea of badic income meaning barely surviving.
I have a suspicion they are focusing on short-term goals, because that is what those people usually do. For example, it’s probably hard to explain who should watch all the ads and buy all the advertised products when Facebook replaces their content and interactions with bot slop. They didn’t think this through. This isn’t some kind of visionary 4D chess. But it does not matter to them. When wasting 80 billion on a VR project that was doomed to fail from the beginning does not matter, nothing does.
I purposely “watch” ads because I think it’s funny that me doing it causes company’s to think they work and therefore spend more money, I cannot think of a single thing I bought because of an ad, sure some things I have learned about because of ads but if I bought the product it is because I researched the product and it fit with my expectations, most of the time I buy competitive products because my assessment process asigns negative points for ads that annoy me.
What you’re describing is exactly how most ads work. It’s to inundate you with a brand so you want to search it up and likely purchase it. You never bought directly from an ad, but an ad sure as fuck worked on you.
I’m a former digital marketer. Many ads are meant for brand reach. They’re basically there to ear (mind?) worm you so you’re thinking about the brand. Digital ads can be cheap in niche markets when bidding isn’t forcing up prices due to competition for market share.
If buy “worked” you mean “caused me to not buy a product” then you are correct. I have no memory of ever buying a product because of an ad. In fact the ads I see are almost all for products I have no interest in. I get ads for fast food and I haven’t been to any restaurant in 10 years or so. I get ads for feminine hygiene products and I am male. I get ads in Spanish that I’m certain are for great products but I will never know because I don’t speak Spanish. I have even got an ad from a company that makes sand traps for off shore oil rigs.
To me ads feel like a person is trying to scam me it is the same feeling I get from door to door sales people and agresive sales people in general. The more I see an ad the less likely I am to hold positive feelings for the product.
I understand that I am nerodivergent and therefore my response to ads is atypical, but it is still my response.
“This year, give her english muffins.”
Whatever you say, Mr. Billboard.
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For example, it’s probably hard to explain who should watch all the ads and buy all the advertised products when Facebook replaces their content and interactions with bot slop.
Sam Altman owns a company that provides ‘human verification’
The owners of other robots.
Rich people mostly. But you can save your camp currency/scrip for a few years and buy some approved shoes or whatever at the work camp store.
The economy is already morphing to serve the needs of the upper levels of worth. Look at the trend with airlines shrinking economy sections and expanding first class and business class. Pretty much all consumer offerings are moving to the luxury tier.
Vegas is a good example. Increasingly caters to the top 1%.
This is pretty much what the empires in the world war era were asking. They found the answer and it was poor, developing countries.
Yeah, the “elite” aren’t actually smart enough to figure that out. Elite is kind of an oxymoron.
No one asked you to use that word to describe them, why are you perpetuating it?
They’re not elite, they’re just rich fuckers who attained massive riches by exploiting the workers’ need for survival.
That’s why they need to horde that much money.
Nobody gets rich or stays rich by hoarding money. That’s not what being wealthy means.
Please explain. You mean they invest and are actually very smart and earned their wealth by working hard?
Rich people don’t hoard cash. They have assets that are valuable. A billionaire doesn’t have a billion dollars on their bank account. Hell, they probably don’t even have a million in there. All that wealth is tied to investments that either increases in value or for the very least holds it.
Making money is incredibly easy if you have a lot of money to begin with. Going from zero to million is hard. Going from million to a hundred million, not so much.
It’s hoarding none the less. I assume the previous commenter didn’t mean literally cash, neither did I. So yes you’re right.
Is Elon hoarding money because he owns multiple succesfull companies?
I don’t think so. Hoarding means sitting on a pile of something that you don’t use/need.
Exactly!!
They’re more like sadistic self interested fucks than elites.
Thats not very “shareholder value” of you. /s
Anticapitalist badthink. Prepare the mechanical hound.
The robots won’t have all the jobs. And the demand for human labor will increase.
There will always be some jobs humans can’t do. It’s not that there’s something magical about humans and the human mind. It’s just that there are certain jobs that are so complex and involve such human emotional intelligence and human interaction, that any machine that could do this instead of a person would have to be a person themselves. I might trust Commander Data to be my kid’s elementary school teacher. But that’s also because I would consider Commander Data to be a person. But there would also be little reason to mass produce Commanders Data to be elementary school teachers, as that would amount to little more than slavery. A mind is a mind, regardless of the substrate. Forcing a mind to work for you is a moral abomination, regardless of whether that mind is flesh or silicon.
As automation has increased over the generations, the demand for human labor has increased. The fields whose services have increased in price high above inflation are non-coincidentally those with the highest amount of unavoidable human labor. Think medicine, higher education, and home construction. Automation generates vast wealth. People who profit from highly automated industries then have more money to spend on things. There’s more money in the economy to support the labor-intensive industries. But automation can’t meaningfully decrease the cost of producing them. So the wealth generated in low-labor intensity industries goes towards bidding up the cost of the goods and services produced in high-labor intensive industries.
Or another way to look at it. Automation is deflationary. Whenever the production of a good or service becomes highly automated, the cost that good or service tends to go down. There’s a reason the idea of a walk-in-closet would have been considered absurd to your ancestors. When people spend less money on the automated goods, they have more money to spend on the labor-intensive goods.
Or, a third perspective. A reasonable assumption is that future automation will look like past automation. Yes, automation can be disruptive on an individual level. If you’re 55 and your entire career specialty is automated away, you’re going to be really hurting at a personal level. You just don’t have time to retrain for a new career field, and medically you may be unable to. But as a whole, people move into fields that have high need for workers. We have a higher labor force participation rate than we did 200 years ago, despite only a single-digit percentage of people needing to work in agriculture now. Wave after wave of automation has failed to result in the predicted mass employment and immiseration of the populace. And every time we’re told that “this time is different,” it turns out to be no different than the previous times. The people telling you that this round of automation will be completely different from all the others are the same people profiting from the current AI bubble.
The automation that AI is promising (but not necessarily delivering) is fundamentally different than the automation that came before.
Remember; the luddites were right but their industry was small enough that the displaced labour could be absorbed by other industries.
Not only is AI affecting almost every artistic and white-collar industry, but the cap-ex barrier to entry is way lower than for any other automation effort in the past. No need to buy expensive machines, or create whole new production lines just to test it out. Computers used to take up an entire room to do the work of a handful of people. If you can increase productivity but there is no associated increase in demand, then what you get is layoffs.
The amount of workers that this has the potential to displace far outstrips the industry/economy/society’s ability to replace with “new careers” (that we’ve yet to see materialize). And I challenge your assertion that automation has resulted in increased demand for human labour, do we significantly less unemployment on average? Over the last 70 years (in the USA for ex) unemployment has been trending up.
What we have seen is a total gutting of employee bargaining power.
Why do you assume these all need to be new careers? Why do you assume that we can’t expand existing careers? It’s happened in the past, it can happen again. Agriculture went from employing the majority of the populace to 2%. We found jobs for everyone.
There are many professions that have immense latent demand that people simply cannot afford. Really any industry that involves a lot of human labor. People want more education than they can afford. People want more healthcare than they can afford. People want more childcare, private tutoring, home cleaning, personal trainers, life coaches, financial advisors, and on and on. Think of the retinue of assistants and employees the wealthy employ. Now imagine the number of people who can afford those services drastically expanding. We don’t even need to necessarily invent new careers. There’s plenty of latent demand already. Those masses of displaced agricultural workers? Most of them found jobs in fields that already existed.
Over the last 70 years (in the USA for ex) unemployment has been trending up.
This is false. I’ll ignore the employment rate and focus on labor force participation rate, as unemployment doesn’t count people who are long-term unemployed and have given up working. Labor force participation is a better metric here.
Labor force participation has gone up and down, corresponding with changes in demographics. Despite generations of technological change and automation, we’ve always found ways to employ the excess labor. Human labor is always the ultimate bottleneck. There’s probably enough latent demand for human labor to employ many multiples of our current population.
Agriculture went from employing the majority of the populace to 2%. We found jobs for everyone.
Sure, over the course of like 200 years. Can you not see how that is fundamentally different?
There are many professions that have immense latent demand that people simply cannot afford
“Afford” is doing a lot of work in your sentence. How do you think people are going to be able to afford more? Workers aren’t going to be making more money, and the workers who enter these professions are going to be making a lot less money.
Labor force participation is a better metric here
No, it really isn’t.
Labour force participation rate is “how many working age people want a job” even if they’re unemployed.
Unemployment rate tells you “how much of the labour force can get a job” which is what we actually care about. Can you get a job if you want one. More people need jobs (as you have shown) but fewer percentage of those people are able to get jobs (as I’ve shown).\
We will be the stuff
Stuff is people! 😮
That’s why it’s called “human capital.”
It’s literally right there in the term.
