Wealth translates directly into political influence - just look at Alabama!
Also - consider that a good amount of wealth is locked up in real estate. Whoever falls in that bucket has political influence and no interest at all that more housing will be built, because that will diminish their wealth.
> Wealth translates directly into political influence - just look at Alabama!
Is this bad on net? From what I've heard, the main political difference between the rich and the rest of the population is that they tend to be more pro-business. That sounds like a good counterweight to the popular antipathy toward business.
> Also - consider that a good amount of wealth is locked up in real estate. Whoever falls in that bucket has political influence and no interest at all that more housing will be built, because that will diminish their wealth.
NIMBYism is overwhelmingly driven by non-rich people, and most people who are rich have most of their wealth in stocks, which gives them an incentive to favor the construction of housing as a complementary good. Again, I'm not seeing the harm here.
Personally I think absurd wealth inequality indicates at least two issues:
1) A lack of re-investment of positive economic activity into the “common good” (infrastructure, education, social services, etc) that were almost certainly instrumental in creating the environment for that wealth to grow in the first place.
2) An undemocratic concentration of political power in a small number of individuals
> 1) A lack of re-investment of positive economic activity into the “common good” (infrastructure, education, social services, etc) that were almost certainly instrumental in creating the environment for that wealth to grow in the first place.
The amount of money spent on those things, adjusted for inflation, has been going up over time in the US. Are we actually under-investing in those things? And how does wealth inequality indicate under-investment?
I think we are definitely under investing in infrastructure.
Amazon builds an empire on cheap-to-use interstate highways and we can’t take a train across the country in less than 3 days.
Bridges falling down, power grids starting wildfires, levees failing, towns with abysmal drinking water quality.
We spend more on healthcare with worse results than other countries, with private profits being skimmed at every step.
We have normalized needing a college degree on your resume for “entry level” jobs and graduating with tens of thousands in debt to achieve this checkmark.
I think it’s an indication because if you were paying back society as you prospered, these black-hole pockets of increasing wealth wouldn’t be so large or common.
Economic prosperity is great. But that was generated in the framework of our society and should be re-invested in it.
You're pointing at something real and important, but I think you've misdiagnosed the problem. We are spending more -- but we're getting a lot less bang for the buck, because costs in those sectors are spiraling out of control [1]. There's some structural reason why things like education are increasing in cost way faster than inflation, and that is what we really need to fix. Spending more money on those things is like bailing water out of the Titanic; it just makes the ship sink a little slower.
I'll take your "very rich" and primarily include billionaires and the extremely affluent in my following statement:
Billionaires shouldn't exist. They shouldn't. We should re-implement proper progressive tax rates (like the US had in the 50s), and ensure that that type of wealth can never happen again.
Billionaires should exist. They should. Just as reasonable.
People have this idea that if we could just harvest all of that money and spread it out, the problem would be solved. Fleece the billionaires. So let's run the numbers.
Currently, there are seven hundred fifty-six billionaires in the United States. I'll do 750 for ease of calculation. Let's say they have three billion each (this is wildly overshooting it, there's some power law and they probably average 1.5 billion, since for every Bezos there are likely fifty people at 1.1 billion). What we get is 2.250 trillion dollars.
We could throw that out to each person (say three hundred million people) for a one-time boon of $7,500. That's it, it's gone. Whoosh. A little more than our COVID payments. Nice to have. Or, you could do about two years of our United States budget deficit. Or you could even knock a little over seven percent off of the $30.93 trillion US debt.
My question is: now that you've harvested the billionaires, what do you do next year? What's the follow-up? Be sure to include the knock-on effects of a lot of slightly less wealthy people hustling their money out of the country.
Billionaires are a glittering distraction to the crabs in the bucket. Hauling them down to your level is satisfying in a monkey way. It isn't much of a solution, though.
The Soviets thought the same thing, but on a different scale. They thought that peasants who owned two cows shouldn't exist, so they sent every peasant who owned two cows to the Gulag in order to re-educate them about equity. Taxation is theft, my friend.
Also - consider that a good amount of wealth is locked up in real estate. Whoever falls in that bucket has political influence and no interest at all that more housing will be built, because that will diminish their wealth.
It's not envy, it's rational self-interest.