[lapinot]

I think any wealth (not income!) over something like 1M should be confiscated. :) There's no reason to have that much money and there's no way you personally have generated that wealth, most likely you just invested money early enough in something sucessful to extort money from it. This may sound provocating but it's actually quite a sound model, but which would also mean reconstructing what we mean by the economy... No capitalistic ownership (eg investment is at most a loan, you don't get propriety shares in exchange), no for-profit renting, ...

And obviously funnelling all that money and economic capital to some central state isn't gonna go well so levels below and above the state need to be reinforced.

[eloff]

This is a terrible idea put forward by people with no grasp of either economics or history.

First off you can't buy a home in some parts with that kind of money. But that aside, you'd stifle most incentive to innovate, provide jobs, and live in your country. Anyone who thought they might pass your 1M limit will just leave to a country that doesn't do that. No offense, but I've never been interested in living in the US and you'd have to pay me quite a lot to accept a green card. I certainly wouldn't take it if offered freely, because it comes with a major tax liability. There are nicer places in the world by a variety of metrics.

So if you chase away everyone with wealth you'll be left paying 100% of the taxes instead of 60% and with no jobs to pay them with. Good luck with that!

Look to Soviet Russia, Cuba, Venezuela for examples of how that plays out.

[lapinot]

> This is a terrible idea put forward by people with no grasp of either economics or history.

Thanks for the compliment. I guess you must know better than Picketty (he doesn't exactly say what i said, but does promote very aggressive taxation of capital, which is the same goal more gently said). Go study for yourselve before insulting right and left. I know i did, i'm reading monthly issues of "le monde diplomatique".

> First off you can't buy a home in some parts with that kind of money.

Perhaps instead of 1M$ you'd prefer if i say "the equivalent of 100K ton of wheat at retail price"? Obviously i'm talking from the perspective of my local living standard which is west-european 500M people city.

> No offense, but I've never been interested in living in the US

None taken, me neither.

> So if you chase away everyone with wealth you'll be left paying 100% of the taxes instead of 60% and with no jobs to pay them with. Good luck with that!

Ok so that's the only argument of your comment. It has been debunked time and time again that for individuals, fleeing a country because of taxes is minimal. Corporations do that. And it can be fought by taxing international transactions (which every sane economy but the EU does anyway). Yes, in the end, it becomes a frontal fight between the financial and industrial establishment and your local economy, which obviously will need some negotiation because they can hurt you, but let it be clear that without them, it would work quite well (and in reverse, in my economy, it would be quite hard to practically be capitalistic). I don't even want to eradicate capitalism, i'd just want to not mainly depend on it for living and tip the balance to a much more reasonable state.

> Look to Soviet Russia, Cuba, Venezuela for examples of how that plays out.

You realize that my arguments were communist-ish? You're not gonna scare me off pointing at these countries! Obviously things went bad because the liberals virtually control the world, so these countries had to fight for everything, which breaks at some point. And obviously i'm not defending dictatorship (and please note i'm not using this strawman of the numereous capitalistic dictatorship against you).

[andrepd]

>I guess you must know better than Picketty

>(he doesn't exactly say what i said, but does promote very aggressive taxation of capital, which is the same goal more gently said).

Well true, he doesn't say exactly what you said, because he doesn't anything like what you're saying. Taxing wealth above the relatively low ceiling of 1M USD at 100% would be ridiculous. He is, though, in favour of a progressive tax system that, crucially, reduces inequality below “tolerable” levels, where an “intolerable level” is a level which results in imbalances of power which undermine or destroy democratic rule and oppress those without wealth.

So his practicable suggestion is a global coordinated effort to tax wealth and reduce inequality, which his utopian suggestion is a trans-national socialist economy with true democratic control over the economy.

[lapinot]

How would you reduce wealth inequality without directly or indirectly limiting the maximum amount of wealth? I believe the citation of Picketty is appropriate given that. I believe that the main solution is indeed limiting indirectly, but that there should additionally be a hard cap on the wealth an individual is able to control. 1M, 100M, i could've said any number, it's not the point (i said 1M because that's probably a level above which your lifestyle doesn't meaningfully improve, you're just having more luxuous luxury). One deep problem with current capitalism imho is the implicit goal of unending growth. Putting a hard cap would break that down. It's the same thing for corporation: they always want/need to get larger. It's not useful for anybody but the owners and actually it creates wrong incentives: optimizing for relative efficiency (result/resources) with no regard for constants instead of minimizing absolute resources for a given fixed production goal.

Also i'm not really sure what's so "ridiculous" about it. I'm not saying the next president of random country should do that. But after sufficient transitioning, in a state of the economy where we have "tolerable" inquality, we should lock it with a hard cap.

To make it even clearer, i believe most "things" should have a cap on how much you're able to posess (perhaps with exceptional derogations, or additional taxation): the number of houses, cars, land, gas, plane travels, eletronics, clothes. For most people it wouldn't be a constraint as the cap would be on the level at which you can realisticaly use it personally, but i think achieving that would prove a deep shift in mentality.

[slashdev]

> Thanks for the compliment. I guess you must know better than Picketty (he doesn't exactly say what i said

Yes, he didn't say anything remotely like you said. It's disingenuous to cite Picketty as if he would support your position.

> has been debunked time and time again that for individuals, fleeing a country because of taxes is minimal.

Because the difference in taxation is minimal. I used to live in Panama, I've personally meet people who fled tax rates in their home country. The low taxes was also my favorite thing about living in Panama. Personal anecdotes aside, what you're proposing is drastic enough that the emigration won't be minimal, it will be a mass exodus of the wealthy - you know the people paying for 40% of the services you benefit from.

> You realize that my arguments were communist-ish? You're not gonna scare me off pointing at these countries! Obviously things went bad because the liberals virtually control the world, so these countries had to fight for everything, which breaks at some point.

I don't know where to start with that without violating site guidelines and being uncivil to your intellect. Actually are you trolling me? I have trouble believing you could be serious right now.

There's a lot of bigger reasons communism failed. Your proposal would fail for much the same reasons. This comment of yours is so ignorant of history it is mind boggling.

[whydoibother]

You are quick to insult people's intellect while spouting western propaganda.

People love to trot out the USSR as a failure, ignoring that a major part of that failure was due to Perestroika and Gorbachev.

As for Cuba, the US has waged terrorist campaign against them for 70ish years. Venezuela has had to deal with US interference and attempted coups as well.

You can't talk about communist/socialist societies and completely ignore the external forces acting against them.

[slashdev]

If you believe communism works, how is that not an indictment of your intellect after a century of examples to the contrary - and not just a few, there had been a 100% failure rate. The only communist counties they did well essentially embraced capitalism. Either you are totally ignorant of history and arguing out of your depth or you are probably not that bright.

[whydoibother]

You didn't even address what I said, and instead resorted back to black and white thinking. All while telling me I am the stupid one. Okay.

P.S. Cuba and Vietnam are still around and still socialist.

Edit: Actually, looking at all your arguments here, you just scream about how socialism doesn't work and if you disagree then you're dumb. Get better, please.

[AnimalMuppet]

Things went bad in Soviet Russia because liberals virtually control the world? Baloney. Liberals controlling the non-communist world didn't make Soviet central planning less able than capitalism to deliver goods. It didn't make Soviet workers less motivated than capitalist workers.

[lapinot]

forgot to answer about jobs:

Jobs don't need to be "created". Either there's stuff to do for people to live correctly or there isn't. If there is, try to find people who'd like to do it. If nobody wants, either people don't really need it, or it's a chore and organize it fairly and locally (division of labour makes no sense for non-qualified chores, it's just a byproduct of inquality: i'm not taking out my neighboors trash, what we could do tho is mutualize our chores). Then distribute the result of this work fairly. Everything else than life-support can be done without too much constraints, but i strongly believe that even that won't "naturally" be too much capitalistic.

[eloff]

That's pretty clueless about how jobs are created in the economy.

[lapinot]

Yes, i too believe you are wrong and want to express it without substance.