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by VikingCoder 2662 days ago
I'm sorry, can you explain how we "average" the utility?

For me, it has zero value.

For another person, it saves their life, and they would pay literally anything they could.

How do we average that?

My hot take: We can't. Buy medicine in bulk, give it to people for free, progressive taxes to pay for it.

1 comments

I like your take, but how are we going to enforce progressive taxation? The wealthiest firms escape taxation, at the moment.
We ought to tax wealth instead of income, and tax individuals instead of corporations. The nature of corporate wealth is that the generation of value is disconnected from the generation of cash. It’s impossible to fairly regulate the infinite shell games that result from this. The problem we are trying to fix is inequality of wealth, so we should tax wealth directly and not via proxies like corporate profits.
I can't pretend the answer is easy, but...

Starting with personal income tax, capital gains, and estate taxes would go a long way.

I think we really need to come up with an International version of the Uniform Commercial Code. And get money out of politics.