They are not trolling. They are stating the simple, undeniable fact that there is more than enough to go around and if we had a more equitable distribution of resources, we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
I don't think people realize how much evening out society will impact them. This is a very US (and probably EU) way of thinking. Everyone thinks they are middle class but when it comes down to it there are far more people in poverty and that evening things out will bring down the quality of life for the people advocating for evening out things.
No. This is what capitalists want you to believe. The truth is that we are all subsiziding the capital gains of the wealthiest 2%. You could easily pay for generous social security programs by taxing property and capital more (as opposed to labor). But the ultra-wealthy point at the weakest and poorest and tell the average worker "look, they're coming for your house and your humble savings!". This is a very deliberate distraction.
I'm not sure taxing them more heavily will actually result in significantly more tax revenue in the long run.
Think about it: to pay for this tax, the rich will need to sell their assets. Who is going to buy those assets? What impact would that have on the asset price?
If that's true, it's odd that so many social welfare programs across the western world are consuming an ever-growing share of GDP, incurring massive debt, and grinding toward insolvency and collapse. Exactly how much more of our money and labor do you want to take from us in order to continue this madness?
European here. I left Europe 14 years ago. I tried to come back. My decision was to run away bc it is impossible to build a reasonable life in a stable way where you do not get smashed mercilessly...
The problem is that when you get more for less, it kills the incentive to do more. This is a really glaring problem, and people go to really great lengths to either sweep it under the rug or hand wave it away.
I'm an employee. I don't really benefit from doing more. When I do more, someone else makes money. In my experience that someone else is just as likely to lay me off for a cheaper worker as they are to give me a raise
The incentives our system produces are already really skewed, and it would be nice to see them skew the other way for once
It seems your complaint is a lack of recognition, and maybe redistribution would provide vengeance for this injustice. But that is different than "we ought to start giving raises to people who do less work, not more" which is what "skewing the other way" seems to imply.
I'll always liked this idea until trying to map it out myself, and always running aground, preferring performance bonuses instead.
You can't pay bills with equity, you will get paid a smaller salary, you need to be a mature adult to understand what "value can go to zero, and that is the game" entails, you likely will get diluted, your ownership stake isn't large enough to materially change the company, you cannot cash out whenever you want, having equity definitely doesn't make you rich automatically.
Besides, if you are savvy enough to be genuinely motivated by the idea of having equity, just go buy stocks in solid companies.
My observation is that if we leave our recognition up to people with power, they will choose to keep it for themselves or give it to their friends a majority of the time and that seems fucked up to continue to allow in a just society
> "we ought to start giving raises to people who do less work, not more"
This is completely beside the point, honestly
We should not use the most productive members of society as a measuring stick as though they were the average.
The average person does "way less work" than your very productive workaholic outliers, but that doesn't mean those people deserve way less.
Somehow we've all wound up being measured against the most exceptional people, instead of being measured against the average.
Keep in mind we're talking about a society where the median person only makes like $45k per year and exceptional people make many many times more than that
I'm not sitting here saying that some random shmuck should have Elon Musks income or anything, we could probably do better than 45k a year though
Incentives don't disappear at some arbitrary level of taxation. I think you can have both sufficient incentives and more equitable distribution. The frankly obscene levels of wealth concentration we are witnessing suggest that there is a lot of room for refinement.
I do find it interesting that a lot of people (not trying to imply that you are one) bang on about incentives while also fighting tooth and nail in favour of weighting taxes toward earned income (derived from doing useful/productive things) instead of unearned income (derived from simply owning things).
I get that some people view all forms of tax as theft and while I appreciate their honesty, I simply can't take them seriously.
Your tax dollars just go into a cesspool of fraud, corruption, waste, incompetence, distribution to cronies. Money taken and spent badly feels like theft.
There are still human societies on Earth that still live the same way they did 2,000 years ago. Most people would not want to live that way, and therefore they need to rely on people who did/do more. The best way to rely on them is to make then rely on you too.
"Valuable work leads to good outcomes for everyone" is probably one of the slipperiest slopes there is.
The only reason there's more than enough to go around is people work for the betterment of their own life. If you disconnect the link between work and material comfort that simple, undeniable fact will no longer be fact.
> > If you disconnect the link between work and material comfort that simple, undeniable fact will no longer be fact.
The disconnect is already there, any 5 year old already understands that stealing a comic book at the comic book store is better than paying for it. And more and more people are resorting to it at every level of society
Yes, remove the human incentive to produce, which is that the rest can consume in a way that is profitable enough for the producer and you will see the wxcess disappear in front of your eyes for killing the incentive to produce.
Infinitely redistributing does not yield products for all, but scarcity for all.
I see, so you are suggesting making black markets appear. Good, I see you studied economic history a lot...
There is no way around this, believe me.
Not sure why you call pigs to people producing actually. That is how things end up working.
Not waiting for people to produce fornyou while you insult them amd try to set infinite restrictions until they do what you want... which by the way looks to me like modern slavery.
> we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.
Yes, like the 40%[1] of Stanford undergrads who have disabilities. The greatest long term impediment to what you're suggesting is folks who don't need the help taking advantage of the resource distribution. It both massively increases the costs and sours those who have to pay into the system on the whole thing leading to a backlash.
If we could just solve this quirk of human nature, we'd be all set.
Yeah, disability accommodation like having single dorm room and being allowed to cook for themselves rather then using cantine. Maybe the question is why the cantine is obligatory anyway.
You've just arrived back at capitalism: it's the least bad resource allocation optimization algorithm assuming everyone is an amoral asshole and willing to take every advantage they can.
Superior systems exist, but they require relaxing the adversarial asshole constraint.
You would not end up in the same place because then you'd be in a world without billionaires, so you would not have people who can too easily just buy every politician and law they wish for their own perpetuation.
It's not the ~50 billionares I'm worried about. They are human. You can appeal to Bill Gate's desire to leave a legacy he's proud of. You can appeal to Elon Musk's desire for technological progress.
What worries me are the god knows how many "billionaire equivelent" entities and institutions that swing their dicks around in the same manner but do so with the sociopathic ruthlessness of corporations and governments.
Peter Thiel may be evil but he'll almost certainly never knowingly instigate genocidal war in a foreign land for marginal benefit to his interests whereas that's exactly the kind of thing that nonhuman entities do because no person is singularly responsible.
I'm so sick and tired of hearing about this mythical "excess". I can't afford housing. Millions like me can't. There is no excess. Unless it's being hoarded by the capital class.
I mean, it is very obviously being hoarded by the capital class! there has been tons of writing on the subject, no one can credibly deny that that's what's happening right now.
The wealth of the "capital class", whatever that means, is dwarfed by the debt being run up by governments.
My favorite example: if you confiscated all of the wealth from all of the billionaires in the USA, it would fund the federal government for around six months. If you add state and local governments, those funds would last just weeks.
The rich don't have your money. Your government does, and they're flushing it down the toilet (and bombing Iran).
The wealth of the capital class is, unsurprisingly, capital - the facilities, equipment, organizational structures, etc. used to make stuff. What does it mean for capital to be hoarded?
Certainly, and notably the 'capital class' that's 'hoarding' the housing he's talking about are what look like normal people. You'd make more money taxing half of the value of those who own SFHs in Santa Clara alone than you would Elon Musk - and hurt productive capacity and jobs far less. The disconnect between the desire to extract what people describe as a fair share from the 'capital class' comes up rapidly against the wall of realizing they themselves are the 'capital class' in question. Everything else then becomes a war of definition as they try to narrowly constrain the scope of this such that they can send their kids to Monta Vista while simultaneously having everyone else pay much higher taxes.
> > and hurt productive capacity and jobs far less
This is so BS, the productivity of a company is given by cash flow and Discounted Cash Flow (output>input) , not stock market value , taxing Musk would force him to sell stock and dilute the ownership of Tesla and SpaceX down among the population proportionally and according to the brackets of taxation applied.
The fear that you are describing is exactly what's wrong with society, the virus of the mind that attributes to CEOs and especially tech CEOs demigod properties and if their ownership and decision making control were to be diluted the company would collapse and die.
If anything it's the opposite, the oldest companies in America have their ownership much more diluted than they once were . JPMorgan is not controlled by John Pierpont Morgan, same for all the companies which make up what once was Standard Oil
If anything history is showing that for the survival of a company it is almost a condition non negotiable that its ownership and decision making has to be diluted among millions of people with a low inequality factor, or at least lower than the one necessary in the first years of the company
People say this, but I'm not sure I understand how it could be true. For example, taxing billionaires is often cited as the solution to this problem. But if we took Elon Musk's $730 billion fortune and divided it evenly among the US population, people would receive a one-time payment of about $2000, and then that fortune would be gone, and any opportunities or advancements it was creating. So I'm genuinely curious where you see this incredible excess coming from.
It also misunderstands that nature of Musk's fortune. He's not Scrooge McDuck and they pretend he is. Sell SpaceX at a fire sale. What's it worth? A lot less then it is now. Who would buy it? Poor people? Somehow I don't think so.
Musk is a golden goose and there are people who think the best move is to cut him in half and get at all the gold inside.
Anyone who thinks that it's "controversial" to discuss where the benefits from productivity gains go isn't worth talking to: they are either ideologues set in their ways, or underinformed on recent economic history.
You’re missing the point of the article and of the post. Why do you assume that someone who reads and takes breaks is unproductive? Should we get a second job instead? I spend 8 hours sleeping. Would you like me to work those hours as well? I spend some of my day cooking and cleaning and raising my son. Would you rather I keep working instead?
Maybe it’s time that we worked together to gain that time back for you instead of you fighting for us to lose our free time.
More than half of employment is “bullshit jobs” needed only for capitalism. There’s artificial scarcity but artificial scarcity in minds of people is much worse problem.
Recently, I had a conversation with a bunch of people who have worked in the tech industry since the 90s. Someone asked which technologies have greatly improved our lives. Outside of some specific medical innovations, we struggled to agree on more than three.