[Frondo]

Property rights beyond "what you can defend is yours" are a purely human invention; there's nothing innate to the world that says that the property rights regime that exists now is the right one.

There are other ways you could approach it that would distribute ownership and political power in a more egalitarian way, and as ownership (and political power) become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, more and more people will realize that "we protect others' property rights to secure our own" is not meaningful. There's nothing of our own to secure, and never will be in a significant way.

This sort of refiguring of property rights can happen incrementally and peacefully (through tweaking taxes, etc), or suddenly (revolution). We've seen both lots of times in history.

Where we go next is the question; but ending the discussion the way you wanted to isn't all that practical or interesting.

[AnimalMuppet]

Look, if you want an inheritance tax, I don't object, even if it's 50%. (I might at 90%, though. And if you're going to rely on an inheritance tax, you also probably have to tax trusts...)

I just object to the "they have to much, so we should take it from them" rhetoric, on the principle that, once they're done taking what the rich have, then they're going to decide that those who have the most at that time are now the rich, and the process will continue. And it won't stop until they decide that I'm the rich, and they should take what I have. In the process, they'll destroy the economy of the country. I really would prefer that that particular genie stays in the bottle...

[TheOtherHobbes]

The UK's landowners have already destroyed the economy of the country. The country has food banks, literal starvation, and barely functional health, education, and transport systems. Industry has been almost completely sold off, and services are following in due course.

Overt this period the landowners have accumulated more personal wealth than at any time since the Enclosures.

Your point is naive first-order thinking about a third-order problem. "If we let people take billionaire stuff they may take my stuff" is nonsense.

What actually happens in redistributive economies is high taxation leads to high stability combined with high opportunity - not the false rhetoric of opportunity hiding a reality of very poor social mobility, which is what the US has, but genuine social mobility and business opportunity.

Huge inequalities are actually more like to result in revolution and war than stable economies where wealth is more evenly distributed.

Beyond a certain point massive inequalities are inherently politically unstable and almost guaranteed to result in a seismic social dislocation.

This isn't even a moral point - it's simply empirical.

[hardlianotion]

I don't recognise your characterisation of the country. I agree with your broader point.

[repolfx]

Labour rhetoric. The UK isn't "barely functional", that's a ludicrous communist fantasy that can be traced back right to Marx, who tried to convince his readers of the dire near apocalyptic state of England by committing various kinds of fraud - like making up quotes and attributing them to the PM, or relying on obsolete government reports into factory conditions. Those conditions had long since been fixed by the government's factory acts, but Marx couldn't mention that without undermining his central thesis that democratic capitalism was in a death spiral and couldn't improve the workers conditions, so he pretended he was citing contemporary documents.

Nor have "landowners already destroyed the economy of the country". The UK economy is the fastest growing in Europe right now (of the rich nations), unemployment is at record lows despite a long term massive influx of immigrants: its economy is literally the opposite of destroyed. You're lying about the reality of the UK, whilst criticising others for being naive.

Shooting down your trad-Marx rhetoric with economic facts is easy so I'd like to focus primarily on this oft-cited belief:

Beyond a certain point massive inequalities are inherently politically unstable and almost guaranteed to result in a seismic social dislocation. This isn't even a moral point - it's simply empirical.

But it is a moral point. The people who perform "seismic social dislocation" in response to (perceived or actual) economic inequality have a long history of performing that dislocation by shooting peaceful people, stealing all their stuff, building forced labour camps, liquidating all their political opposition and then turning their countries into hellholes. The communists who did all these things absolutely deserve moral condemnation and their acts cannot simply be whitewashed away as some sort of mechanical inevitability, no more than someone could excuse the Nazis as some sort of mechanical inevitability given the inequalities imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versaille.

Compare the fate of every country where your views have gained critical mass vs America. The latter is one of the world's most successful countries, if not the most. The others are all slowly recovery from absolute poverty, and recovering only because they finally turned their back on your Corbynite views.

[peisistratos]

> Those conditions had long since been fixed by the government's factory acts, but Marx couldn't mention that without undermining his central thesis that democratic capitalism was in a death spiral and couldn't improve the workers conditions, so he pretended he was citing contemporary documents

I've heard most of the anti-Marx stories - some invented, some just rumor, a few true. Never heard this one before. Not sure what one of these jibes you are referring to.

Marx traced the history of capitalism in England. Actually in his studies he showed how working conditions had gotten better in some respects. He was writing a history, so of course he referred to "obsolete...long since reports".

You are correct that he predicted capitalism was in a death spiral. Just as he had observed feudalism in a death spiral, and knew about the Roman slave latifundia economy's death spiral before that.

Corporate America going to the taxpayer to bail out "too big to fail" deregulated banks is precisely the kind of thing Marx predicted. Marx said eventually that would lead to the end of capitalism.

Who knows, the amount of carbon poured into the atmosphere increases every year, perhaps capitalism and humanity will both end at the same time before Marx's visions could be realized.

[toomanyrichies]

> ...once they're done taking what the rich have, then they're going to decide that those who have the most at that time are now the rich, and the process will continue. And it won't stop until they decide that I'm the rich...

Isn’t this just the slippery slope fallacy?

[sosborn]

That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. http://www.fallacyfiles.org/slipslop.html

[toomanyrichies]

Doesn’t mean it’s right either. Taken from the link you cited:

> One reason why I am skeptical has to do with the difficulty of the causal reasoning needed to establish that a slope really is slippery; most slippery slope arguments make little or no attempt to do this hard work. Moreover, it is difficult even in retrospect to tell whether a slippery slope mechanism has actually been at work.

I see no attempt on the part of the commenter I replied to, to make this kind of effort. And to save them the effort of doing so- even if they had established the presence of a slippery slope, they’d still need to prove it was the causal agent of the consequences they described.

Short of evidence to prove in advance that action A will lead to consequence B, this comes across as scaremongering.

[snidane]

The flaw here is talking about the 'rich'. You can divide rich into absentee landlords collecting hight rents and stifling the economy down and the actual rich who became so through entrepreneurship or other positive impact activities.

[Frondo]

I think the sequence of events you're proposing is implausible, on the order of likelihood of a zombie apocalypse or the apes rising up to overthrow mankind.

"If we decide that billionaires represent a policy failure that has allowed a few to concentrate wealth and power and society collectively wrests some of that back from those with such a disproportionate power and wealth, then that means eventually 'they' will come after my inconsequentially meager possessions."

I don't see it.