| HN Mirror

But that has always been the way how Capitalism works. It's never meant to serve the mass as only the fittest, or the luckiest shall I say to avoid the meritocracy mentality, will reap the majority of benefits. In most industries we look at, there are only very few main players that will completely dominate 80-90% of the market, while the rest are just there to pick up the remaining 10% scraps. Same situation in current society where the 1% elites own the majority of wealth compared to the 99%. This is just how Capitalism works as everything in the system is structured this way to facilitate achieving such an outcome.

People complain about inequalities but then unwilling to modify or upgrade the current capitalism model to a higher more advanced version. Everything has its own lifecycle in life, the current model has achieved many incredible results in the past but it may be approaching a maturity stage and is in need of an upgrade. America is always about pursuing the current capitalism model to the max so if one is navigating under this version and yet expecting something different in contrast, that would be unrealistic. Again under this model and structure if you leave something running for a while, it always ends up with very few luckiest players who will receive the most. It might work well when under small to medium population as the negative effects are negligent, but as the number keeps on growing, the ratio of amount of people between the 1% and 99% will become drastically different and those negative effects will also increase tenfold. Globalization process will only help speeding this up and accelerating it more.

How do you solve this? If putting a cap on the elites' earnings, arguably it may stop innovations as they may lose the incentives to invest. But everything in life is a trade off, you get one thing by giving up another. Even things that are seemingly good now can become destructive if you leave it running by itself for too long without re-balancing it. Real world example is medicine, it may help your health but if you take too much or too long it may kill you, same with our food if you eat too much you become obese then you die. Excess is good only to a certain point then it will become bad. This is the law of nature that is timeless and never going to change, anyone who goes against this rule they will cease to exist it's that simple.

Our real world is dynamic and ever changing, we could have a model that worked very well from 30-40 years ago but it would have also produced a lot of baggages and side effects along the way, and one day it will reach a point where those side effects will take over what used to be good, the unexpected negativity will gain larger as they will become devastating and lead to self-destructive result of this model, that is if it's not re-adjusted or re-modeled in time to lessen those unwanted consequences. Anyone who believes they can keep running well on the same model to eternity without re-adjusting to avoid self-destruction are in complete disillusion. They are attempting to go against the unchanged universal law stated above and the end result will always be the same.

To solve inequalities, it's important to set a cap NOT at the maximum wealth level, but rather at the wealth difference ratio between the 1% (or arguably 10%) and the remaining 99% (or 90%). This way people at the top can keep growing but they will also need to pull those below them up as well, because let's face it we are all living daily depending on each other, nobody among the 1% would have gotten to the top or can keep remaining there without the 99%. This is very different than tax as it correlates and connects wealth ownerships directly between the two groups of population. Besides, tax is never intended for the goal of wealth distribution anyway or at least it is not being used efficiently for that purpose, most of it goes to funding other also critical but unrelated government projects and even wars.

However, any forms of such re-distribution is against the fundamentals of current capitalism model and some people will start screaming communist before they even attempt to understand the real issues at hand so I'm not sure if it's even possible. Similar to how everyone knows exactly what needs to be done to prevent climate change but that doesn't mean they will do it. Who knows? Maybe I would be biased too if I were among the 1%. Here's the catch 22, people who care don't really have the power to make changes because they're not among the 1%. The 1% don't care about the system because they think they can sustain themselves even in the face of collapse. The history of Rome empire was the definite proof of such an outcome. We cannot go against the law of nature. To prolong ourselves we have to keep changing.