I agree, Amazon isn't a public good. There is no way that Jeff Bezos owning Amazon shares makes me worse off.
Land is a public good. We have to compete for it but that doesn't mean private individuals should get a cut of the public wealth around the plot of land merely by owning it. It only makes sense to tax it or to turn it over to public ownership (the transition would obviously take decades).
> There is no way that Jeff Bezos owning Amazon shares makes me worse off.
They use their market dominance to reduce the income of authors resulting in less choice and lower quality books for you to read, while increasing the price of available books.
They use their vast wealth to buy out or strike deals with competitors, preventing any challenge to their hold on the industry.
As market maker and participant they use their exclusive market data to undercut their own providers resulting in more hoarded wealth for them but a less creative and productive society for all.
They engage in continual astro-turfing which alters public debate away from whatever is really going on and toward what the mega wealthy owners want people to believe.
Efforts to obtain monopoly rent ("supernormal profits by restricting output and hence increasing prices above its perfectly competitive level."[1]) is a subset of rent-seeking. The problem again, isn't the wealth itself, it is the fact that wealth is being expended to seek monopoly rent at great social cost.
Rent-seeking might not be the only problem. Worker exploitation is also a serious issue on my list. How on earth can someone defend not paying a living salary for a full time job?
Add to that that the legal framework (talking about the USA) is seriously skewed to favor employers and disadvantages workers and any attempts to unionize. This has to stop.
Great point, but worker exploitation (like so many other problems) flow out of perverse rentier structures. In fact this is one of the first principles discovered about how rent works, termed the "law of rent" by David Ricardo over 200 years ago. I.e. that the rent collected from productivity will always be such that the remaining wages are only exactly as good as the "margin of production", a.k.a. the next best alternative to engaging with the labor economy, subsistence living. This is why you can have exploding productivity and still subsistence standard of living for labor, where the entirety of the excess is captured by rentiers.
> How on earth can someone defend not paying a living salary for a full time job?
Putting the employer on the hook for more aspects of the employee's well-being (healthcare, living wage) only increases the gap between employed and unemployed, therefore increasing the bargaining power of employers. I think it's better to have society provide a basic standard of living (most importantly housing and healthcare) to all poor people, employed or not.
Money is a public good as well. Money taken out of circulation is bad for the economy and drives a big chunk of economic problems in society. It's easy to tax so the valuation argument doesn't even make sense. There are companies with $100 billion or more in their bank accounts. That's a million paychecks that didn't happen.
Isn't it weird how it is possible to prevent other people from working by simply withholding money? Meanwhile we expect the people who couldn't work as a result of this withholding of money to keep working, we consider them lazy and not worthy of sympathy.
This is a total misconception. Anyone's $100B in a bank account has no bearing on money supply. In the short term, yes, money is taken out of circulation. But if that causes increased demand for liquidity, and banks are willing to meet that demand at the interest rate set by the central bank, money will be created by the loan that is initiated.
What dries up money circulation is not any one company's hoarding, but the banks' willingness to lend as a whole, and the economy's desire to borrow and spend as a whole.
Short introduction to definitions in the field of applied economics, see OECD and WHO publications for details. A living salary is a colloquial phrase, more precisely we should talk about the net equivalised household income. Gender and marital status is irrelevant for the calculation.
Let us assume both household's single earner brings in 15382 €/a (EU-27/28 average net income for 2013). Household 1 with two juveniles and one child is 6688 €/a, poverty. Household 2 remains 15382 €/a.
Pretty low quality question. Of course the salary will not adapt according to individuals expenses and neither will it here in Scandinavia. However, the father will of course be obliged to pay child support. The mother will also receive a monthly allowance for each child. She will also likely be eligible to rent support. So children is a special case, but a living wage doesn't involve that.
No. I've already written that obviously the amount of children of each individual can't determine what a living wage is supposed to be, but then you still twist this to be a question of subsidy to the business in bad faith?
It’s not bad faith. Plenty of arguments in the US have been around wages where the govt has to provide additional support. It’s called “corporate welfare”. The argument is the company should pay enough on its own.
I’m surprised that people continue to share that graphic with a straight face.
If “rent-seeking” contributes to people becoming wealthy then the two notions don’t remain orthogonal. The chances of finding more rent seeker among the wealthy is far higher than more rent seekers among the non-wealthy.
Additionally the size of “problems” that a single low-wealth rent-seeker causes is not equivalent to the amount of “problem” created by a single high-wealth rent seeker.
I agree with all of your points and still believe that rent seeking is the root cause to be addressed, not wealth in and of itself. Wealth is just stored labor. It is value neutral, and everyone has the right to the fruits of their own labor. It is only rent, unjustly collected from others' labor via force or monopoly that is illegitimate.
Taxing the ultra-wealthy is possible, and they still get to be ultra-wealthy afterward. We already do it, the discussion is only “how much?” and what to do with the money. That’s a tractable problem. (Incidentally - the rich have been winning this argument for a long time, as their effective taxes fall and fall and fall.)
On the other hand, proving that a specific piece of income is “economic rent” - I think that’s intractable and only produces loss on both sides. It’s a fight to the death for the accused, a hill they’ll die on. The idea is appealing at a surface level but I can’t see any way forward with it.
Tax people who can afford to be taxed. The alternative is hardly going to work.
Declaring the clearest and most effective ways of solving it as "unjust" because they clash with your particular ideology perpetuates a vastly worse injustice—one that costs millions of lives, rather than merely feeling wrong.
I simply disagree. A tax on rent is the most effective and efficient method of redistribution, justified by well studied economic principles. It will create more wealth and save more lives than the alternative. No other tax is clearer or more effective, even in theory.
The ultra-wealthy's what? Their wealth is held offshore, their income is more than offset. You want to tax yachts? They'll buy jets. Taxing the symptom is playing tax law whack-a-mole (and the mole is rich and the hammer is limp, and the mole pays the hammer's mortgage). Tax the cause. Their rent-collecting mechanisms are much more immobile and difficult to hide.
> and they still get to be ultra-wealthy afterward.
Not a justification.
> We already do it
Doesn't mean it's right.
> the discussion is only “how much?”
It's not right to presume we can take from someone just because they can afford it. The only policy that makes sense to me is to reclaim the portion of the public good that is privatized via rent seeking. If someone got ultra wealthy by their blood, sweat, and tears, as long as they did so without collecting rent or causing negative externalities, I don't care if they can buy and sell Andromeda.
> and what to do with the money.
The reasonable thing to do with the money is to offset negative externalities (pollution, climate change, illiteracy, etc.) and equally redistribute the rest (citizen's dividend).
> (Incidentally - the rich have been winning this argument for a long time, as their effective taxes fall and fall and fall.)
The only way to reverse this trend without massive deadweight loss is a tax on land rent.
> On the other hand, proving that a specific piece of income is “economic rent” - I think that’s intractable and only produces loss on both sides. It’s a fight to the death for the accused, a hill they’ll die on. The idea is appealing at a surface level but I can’t see any way forward with it.
I disagree. The simplest form of economic rent is that on nature. A tax on the unimproved value of land, and a carbon tax are simple, straightforward examples anti-rent, anti-externality measures.
Land is a public good. We have to compete for it but that doesn't mean private individuals should get a cut of the public wealth around the plot of land merely by owning it. It only makes sense to tax it or to turn it over to public ownership (the transition would obviously take decades).