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On November 20 2020 07:08 BisuDagger wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 06:11 Nouar wrote:On November 20 2020 01:14 KwarK wrote:
I like to describe the issue as being comparable to a footrace. Let's say we line everyone up and make them do a 100m sprint. The guy who comes first gets 30% of the money, the next 10 get 5% each, and the 9 after that share 20% between them.
It's likely you'll know someone who was in the top 20 and if you look at them you'll see that they made some good choices. They looked after their health, they trained, they showed up on the day of the race, and so they earned it. And so if you look at them in a vacuum it'll appear the system works, they did the work and the system rewarded them.
But there are things that you're not seeing.
Firstly, that the game is rigged. That some people don't have the same biological capacity to win a footrace as others and that assigning success based on their capacity to sprint is arbitrary, cruel, and insulting to the basic human dignity we all deserve.
Secondly, that the guy you know who worked hard and earned his spot in the top 20 had a trainer, time off to train, access to sports facilities, and so forth that the guy who came 25th didn't. The guy you're seeing worked, but did he work harder than the guys he beat? Because if he didn't work harder than the guys he beat and he still got rewarded then we can't truly conclude that the system rewards hard work, even if it rewards people who did work hard.
Thirdly, it disincentivizes trying if you're not naturally advantaged. If you're from a background where you don't know many winners, where nobody in your family has been in the top 20, where you don't have access to sport facilities, and where none of your role models won, why would you spend all your time training for the day of the race? Everyone tells you the race is bullshit and looking at how the same group of people keep coming out on top each time you'd be inclined to agree. If white men always seem to win the footrace, even when they didn't work as hard, then as a black woman you'll be disillusioned with the race.
And most importantly, the footrace is intrinsically incapable of taking care of the participants. It's set up so 80/100 get nothing. All of them could be clones of Usain Bolt trained from childhood and it wouldn't make a difference because the inequality is built in, the 80 have to get nothing so the 20 can get more. As a system for allocating resources it can't ever take care of the group.
Advocates of the system point to someone like myself who was born with the capacity to make top 30 pretty easily but had to get their shit together and work hard to get into top 10. They will rightly say that if it hadn’t been for the foot race system I never would have gotten in shape and trained the way I did. That the foot race system has made me fitter and more productive, that instead of languishing in the top half I’ve been encouraged to work hard by the threat of competition and the promise of reward. But looking at the successes in isolation misses the forest for the trees. Ultimately it promises that if you’re a productive member of society you will be given permission to steal excess value from other members of society and that promise can never be universally fulfilled. Completely agree with that analogy. I take issue with the fact that a decent chunk, sometimes a majority, of the 80% that get shafted, vote to keep the current system going, instead of trying to change it to make it fairer, and are content with it. I'm really fast. I know that in most cases I would win a footrace. I've made good choices that allow me to win a foot race. Now I'm told everyone else will get a 5 second head start. I start losing a lot with my disadvantage. How is it fair that I don't get to earn my potential because a system tells me I should be held back to give others an opportunity to earn money off the foot race? The organizer might as well pay people money just for participating. Something like universal basic winnings prize just for being part of the race. That way I can still earn as much as my potential allows with out feeling like the system is working against me. Or better yet, everyone who can compete for the top prize leaves and goes somewhere else where they hold a footrace that has no structure in place to hold us back.
I am a bit confused at the state of the analogy, but i don't think anyone is talking about holding people back. They are talking about NOT giving people massive headstarts, and to also allocate reasonable amounts of resources to the people who are not winning, because we are talking about people and live here, not about a race for luxuries which ultimately don't matter.
If you are white, live in a western democracy and come from an educated family, you already have a massive headstart on anyone else.
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On November 20 2020 07:08 BisuDagger wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 06:11 Nouar wrote:On November 20 2020 01:14 KwarK wrote:
I like to describe the issue as being comparable to a footrace. Let's say we line everyone up and make them do a 100m sprint. The guy who comes first gets 30% of the money, the next 10 get 5% each, and the 9 after that share 20% between them.
It's likely you'll know someone who was in the top 20 and if you look at them you'll see that they made some good choices. They looked after their health, they trained, they showed up on the day of the race, and so they earned it. And so if you look at them in a vacuum it'll appear the system works, they did the work and the system rewarded them.
But there are things that you're not seeing.
Firstly, that the game is rigged. That some people don't have the same biological capacity to win a footrace as others and that assigning success based on their capacity to sprint is arbitrary, cruel, and insulting to the basic human dignity we all deserve.
Secondly, that the guy you know who worked hard and earned his spot in the top 20 had a trainer, time off to train, access to sports facilities, and so forth that the guy who came 25th didn't. The guy you're seeing worked, but did he work harder than the guys he beat? Because if he didn't work harder than the guys he beat and he still got rewarded then we can't truly conclude that the system rewards hard work, even if it rewards people who did work hard.
Thirdly, it disincentivizes trying if you're not naturally advantaged. If you're from a background where you don't know many winners, where nobody in your family has been in the top 20, where you don't have access to sport facilities, and where none of your role models won, why would you spend all your time training for the day of the race? Everyone tells you the race is bullshit and looking at how the same group of people keep coming out on top each time you'd be inclined to agree. If white men always seem to win the footrace, even when they didn't work as hard, then as a black woman you'll be disillusioned with the race.
And most importantly, the footrace is intrinsically incapable of taking care of the participants. It's set up so 80/100 get nothing. All of them could be clones of Usain Bolt trained from childhood and it wouldn't make a difference because the inequality is built in, the 80 have to get nothing so the 20 can get more. As a system for allocating resources it can't ever take care of the group.
Advocates of the system point to someone like myself who was born with the capacity to make top 30 pretty easily but had to get their shit together and work hard to get into top 10. They will rightly say that if it hadn’t been for the foot race system I never would have gotten in shape and trained the way I did. That the foot race system has made me fitter and more productive, that instead of languishing in the top half I’ve been encouraged to work hard by the threat of competition and the promise of reward. But looking at the successes in isolation misses the forest for the trees. Ultimately it promises that if you’re a productive member of society you will be given permission to steal excess value from other members of society and that promise can never be universally fulfilled. Completely agree with that analogy. I take issue with the fact that a decent chunk, sometimes a majority, of the 80% that get shafted, vote to keep the current system going, instead of trying to change it to make it fairer, and are content with it. I'm really fast. I know that in most cases I would win a footrace. I've made good choices that allow me to win a foot race. Now I'm told everyone else will get a 5 second head start. I start losing a lot with my disadvantage. How is it fair that I don't get to earn my potential because a system tells me I should be held back to give others an opportunity to earn money off the foot race? The organizer might as well pay people money just for participating. Something like universal basic winnings prize just for being part of the race. That way I can still earn as much as my potential allows with out feeling like the system is working against me. Or better yet, everyone who can compete for the top prize leaves and goes somewhere else where they hold a footrace that has no structure in place to hold us back.
The analogy breaks down very quickly as soon as you realize that no one becomes successful on their own in the modern world. From the day we are born, we use resources and services provided by people around us. To claim that anyone's success belongs to that single individual and them alone is incredibly naive and short-sighted, especially so when it comes to the corporate world where vast majority of fortunes are made. There is nothing more obnoxious than people claiming that it is the individual genius of someone like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk that made them their fortunes, and nothing further from truth. So no, paying taxes is nothing like holding people back or giving other competitors in a race a head start.
edit: anyway, these problems largely stems from what I spoke of in my previous post. People with incomes somewhere in 6 digits wouldn't ever be worried about taxes had our culture not had this overreaching obsession with money. Whether someone takes home 200k or 150k after all is said and done has much less impact on their happiness or well-being than how they spend that money or what they do to earn it. With envy out of the equation and a more balanced outlook as to what constitutes 'success' or 'achievement' in life, it would make pretty much no difference at all.
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United States43964 Posts
On November 20 2020 07:08 BisuDagger wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 06:11 Nouar wrote:On November 20 2020 01:14 KwarK wrote:
I like to describe the issue as being comparable to a footrace. Let's say we line everyone up and make them do a 100m sprint. The guy who comes first gets 30% of the money, the next 10 get 5% each, and the 9 after that share 20% between them.
It's likely you'll know someone who was in the top 20 and if you look at them you'll see that they made some good choices. They looked after their health, they trained, they showed up on the day of the race, and so they earned it. And so if you look at them in a vacuum it'll appear the system works, they did the work and the system rewarded them.
But there are things that you're not seeing.
Firstly, that the game is rigged. That some people don't have the same biological capacity to win a footrace as others and that assigning success based on their capacity to sprint is arbitrary, cruel, and insulting to the basic human dignity we all deserve.
Secondly, that the guy you know who worked hard and earned his spot in the top 20 had a trainer, time off to train, access to sports facilities, and so forth that the guy who came 25th didn't. The guy you're seeing worked, but did he work harder than the guys he beat? Because if he didn't work harder than the guys he beat and he still got rewarded then we can't truly conclude that the system rewards hard work, even if it rewards people who did work hard.
Thirdly, it disincentivizes trying if you're not naturally advantaged. If you're from a background where you don't know many winners, where nobody in your family has been in the top 20, where you don't have access to sport facilities, and where none of your role models won, why would you spend all your time training for the day of the race? Everyone tells you the race is bullshit and looking at how the same group of people keep coming out on top each time you'd be inclined to agree. If white men always seem to win the footrace, even when they didn't work as hard, then as a black woman you'll be disillusioned with the race.
And most importantly, the footrace is intrinsically incapable of taking care of the participants. It's set up so 80/100 get nothing. All of them could be clones of Usain Bolt trained from childhood and it wouldn't make a difference because the inequality is built in, the 80 have to get nothing so the 20 can get more. As a system for allocating resources it can't ever take care of the group.
Advocates of the system point to someone like myself who was born with the capacity to make top 30 pretty easily but had to get their shit together and work hard to get into top 10. They will rightly say that if it hadn’t been for the foot race system I never would have gotten in shape and trained the way I did. That the foot race system has made me fitter and more productive, that instead of languishing in the top half I’ve been encouraged to work hard by the threat of competition and the promise of reward. But looking at the successes in isolation misses the forest for the trees. Ultimately it promises that if you’re a productive member of society you will be given permission to steal excess value from other members of society and that promise can never be universally fulfilled. Completely agree with that analogy. I take issue with the fact that a decent chunk, sometimes a majority, of the 80% that get shafted, vote to keep the current system going, instead of trying to change it to make it fairer, and are content with it. I'm really fast. I know that in most cases I would win a footrace. I've made good choices that allow me to win a foot race. Now I'm told everyone else will get a 5 second head start. I start losing a lot with my disadvantage. How is it fair that I don't get to earn my potential because a system tells me I should be held back to give others an opportunity to earn money off the foot race? The organizer might as well pay people money just for participating. Something like universal basic winnings prize just for being part of the race. That way I can still earn as much as my potential allows with out feeling like the system is working against me. Or better yet, everyone who can compete for the top prize leaves and goes somewhere else where they hold a footrace that has no structure in place to hold us back.
The solution isn’t giving other people a head start, it’s identifying that a foot race with a few winners and mostly losers is simply not a good way of allocating resources. Consider for a second a hypothetical world in which it really was a literal foot race. Your main issue with it wouldn’t be whether the winners deserved to win, it would be with the arbitrariness of using a foot race to allocate resources and how disproportionately top heavy the prizes were. If we made Usain Bolt king of the world for being the fastest the complaint wouldn’t be about whether he trained enough to earn his win, it’d be that making him king because of that would be dumb.
Same applies with the real economy. The issue isn’t whether I work hard at my spreadsheets, it’s whether that’s a good metric for deciding who starves and whether I deserve so much while others have so little just because I win at spreadsheets.
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While it's mostly fantasizing, wouldn't it make sense to receive personal incomes as percentiles?
I'm not a math wizard and mostly just discussing a rough idea but something like, capping the max income at the 95th percentile or anything close to that and instead of taxing it, the excess gets redistributed at the bottom percentiles.
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Bisutopia19343 Posts
On November 20 2020 07:40 Vivax wrote:
While it's mostly fantasizing, wouldn't it make sense to receive personal incomes as percentiles?
I'm not a math wizard and mostly just discussing a rough idea but something like, capping the max income at the 95th percentile or anything close to that and instead of taxing it, the excess gets redistributed at the bottom percentiles.
The final argument becomes, if I earned as much as I can and the government tells me I can't earn more, why wouldn't I move to another country that doesn't limit my earning potential? Why wouldn't all of the 1% just move? Can you take that risk as a country?
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On November 20 2020 07:26 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 07:08 BisuDagger wrote:On November 20 2020 06:11 Nouar wrote:On November 20 2020 01:14 KwarK wrote:
I like to describe the issue as being comparable to a footrace. Let's say we line everyone up and make them do a 100m sprint. The guy who comes first gets 30% of the money, the next 10 get 5% each, and the 9 after that share 20% between them.
It's likely you'll know someone who was in the top 20 and if you look at them you'll see that they made some good choices. They looked after their health, they trained, they showed up on the day of the race, and so they earned it. And so if you look at them in a vacuum it'll appear the system works, they did the work and the system rewarded them.
But there are things that you're not seeing.
Firstly, that the game is rigged. That some people don't have the same biological capacity to win a footrace as others and that assigning success based on their capacity to sprint is arbitrary, cruel, and insulting to the basic human dignity we all deserve.
Secondly, that the guy you know who worked hard and earned his spot in the top 20 had a trainer, time off to train, access to sports facilities, and so forth that the guy who came 25th didn't. The guy you're seeing worked, but did he work harder than the guys he beat? Because if he didn't work harder than the guys he beat and he still got rewarded then we can't truly conclude that the system rewards hard work, even if it rewards people who did work hard.
Thirdly, it disincentivizes trying if you're not naturally advantaged. If you're from a background where you don't know many winners, where nobody in your family has been in the top 20, where you don't have access to sport facilities, and where none of your role models won, why would you spend all your time training for the day of the race? Everyone tells you the race is bullshit and looking at how the same group of people keep coming out on top each time you'd be inclined to agree. If white men always seem to win the footrace, even when they didn't work as hard, then as a black woman you'll be disillusioned with the race.
And most importantly, the footrace is intrinsically incapable of taking care of the participants. It's set up so 80/100 get nothing. All of them could be clones of Usain Bolt trained from childhood and it wouldn't make a difference because the inequality is built in, the 80 have to get nothing so the 20 can get more. As a system for allocating resources it can't ever take care of the group.
Advocates of the system point to someone like myself who was born with the capacity to make top 30 pretty easily but had to get their shit together and work hard to get into top 10. They will rightly say that if it hadn’t been for the foot race system I never would have gotten in shape and trained the way I did. That the foot race system has made me fitter and more productive, that instead of languishing in the top half I’ve been encouraged to work hard by the threat of competition and the promise of reward. But looking at the successes in isolation misses the forest for the trees. Ultimately it promises that if you’re a productive member of society you will be given permission to steal excess value from other members of society and that promise can never be universally fulfilled. Completely agree with that analogy. I take issue with the fact that a decent chunk, sometimes a majority, of the 80% that get shafted, vote to keep the current system going, instead of trying to change it to make it fairer, and are content with it. I'm really fast. I know that in most cases I would win a footrace. I've made good choices that allow me to win a foot race. Now I'm told everyone else will get a 5 second head start. I start losing a lot with my disadvantage. How is it fair that I don't get to earn my potential because a system tells me I should be held back to give others an opportunity to earn money off the foot race? The organizer might as well pay people money just for participating. Something like universal basic winnings prize just for being part of the race. That way I can still earn as much as my potential allows with out feeling like the system is working against me. Or better yet, everyone who can compete for the top prize leaves and goes somewhere else where they hold a footrace that has no structure in place to hold us back. The solution isn’t giving other people a head start, it’s identifying that a foot race with a few winners and mostly losers is simply not a good way of allocating resources. Consider for a second a hypothetical world in which it really was a literal foot race. Your main issue with it wouldn’t be whether the winners deserved to win, it would be with the arbitrariness of using a foot race to allocate resources and how disproportionately top heavy the prizes were. If we made Usain Bolt king of the world for being the fastest the complaint wouldn’t be about whether he trained enough to earn his win, it’d be that making him king because of that would be dumb. Same applies with the real economy. The issue isn’t whether I work hard at my spreadsheets, it’s whether that’s a good metric for deciding who starves and whether I deserve so much while others have so little just because I win at spreadsheets.
This is slightly far afield, but this topic (and all the discussions we're having about cultural perceptions of "success" and "capability") reminds me of a book that I read recently called Black Lamb, Grey Falcon. It's ostensibly the travelogue of a British journalist/novelist as she tours through Yugoslavia in 1937 just before the Nazi invasion, but it's really a massive collection of her societal observations / rants of basically anything and everything that was culturally relevant at the time. It's very long-winded so it's hard to recommend, but I loved it.
Early in the book, she is on the train to Croatia on a first-class car when a young couple boards. The husband is sick with a "nervous condition." They chat together pleasantly for a while.
Just before arriving in Croatia, a group of Germans boards the car. They don't think the young couple belongs there, so they ask if that couple has first-class tickets. They do not, so the Germans shame them into going to the second-class cars that they paid for.
When the train arrives at the Croatian border, a ticket collector boards the train and discovers that these Germans never bothered to buy tickets at all. Worse, they forgot to bring any money with them. The author is obviously miffed about how these jerks treated the nice couple from earlier when they themselves didn't have tickets, and the rant that follows hit me in the gut. I felt like if I replaced "1937 Germany" with... many places on Planet Earth right now, I would feel like this was a modern commentary.
+ Show Spoiler +
It was disconcerting to be rushing through the night with this carriageful of unhappy muddlers, who were so nice and so incomprehensible, and so apparently doomed to disaster of a kind so special that it was impossible for anybody not of their blood to imagine how it could be averted. It added to their eerie quality that on paper these people would seem the most practical and sensible people. Their businesses were, I am sure, most efficiently conducted. But this only meant that since the Industrial Revolution capitalism has grooved society with a number of deep slots along which most human beings can roll smoothly to a fixed destination. When a man takes charge of a factory the factory takes charge of him, if he opens an office it falls into a place in a network that extends over the whole world and so long as he obeys the general trend he will not meet any obvious disaster; but he may be unable to meet the calls that daily life outside this specialist area makes on judgment and initiative. These people fell into that category. Their helplessness was the greater because they had plainly a special talent for obedience. In the routine level of commerce and industry they must have known a success which must have made their failure in all other phases of their being embittering and strange. Now that capitalism was passing into a decadent phase and many of the grooves along which they had rolled so happily were worn down to nothing, they were broken and beaten, and their ability to choose the broad outlines of their daily lives, to make political decisions, was now less than it had been originally. It was inevitable that the children of such muddlers, who would themselves be muddlers, would support any system which offered them new opportunities for profitable obedience, which would pattern society with new grooves in place of the old, and would never be warned by any instinct for competence and self-preservation if that system was leading to universal disaster. I tried to tell myself that these people in the carriage were not of importance, and were not typical, but I knew that I lied. These were exactly like all Aryan Germans I had every known; and there sixty millions of them in the middle of Europe.
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On November 20 2020 07:46 BisuDagger wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 07:40 Vivax wrote:
While it's mostly fantasizing, wouldn't it make sense to receive personal incomes as percentiles?
I'm not a math wizard and mostly just discussing a rough idea but something like, capping the max income at the 95th percentile or anything close to that and instead of taxing it, the excess gets redistributed at the bottom percentiles. The final argument becomes, if I earned as much as I can and the government tells me I can't earn more, why wouldn't I move to another country that doesn't limit my earning potential? Why wouldn't all of the 1% just move? Can you take that risk as a country?
Before you ask those questions, you should consider why there are so many 1%ers who have "earned" their wealth outside the US, yet decide to subject themselves to the laws of the US by parking massive amounts of that wealth here anyways. It's not too helpful to discuss why money goes this way or that without a nod towards the places it goes and the forms it takes on.
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On November 20 2020 07:46 BisuDagger wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 07:40 Vivax wrote:
While it's mostly fantasizing, wouldn't it make sense to receive personal incomes as percentiles?
I'm not a math wizard and mostly just discussing a rough idea but something like, capping the max income at the 95th percentile or anything close to that and instead of taxing it, the excess gets redistributed at the bottom percentiles. The final argument becomes, if I earned as much as I can and the government tells me I can't earn more, why wouldn't I move to another country that doesn't limit my earning potential? Why wouldn't all of the 1% just move? Can you take that risk as a country?
At that percentile you usually earn your wealth by selling stuff to the bottom percentiles. And you have more than you will ever be able to spend.
You drag along low wage earners who then in turn can buy more of your stuff instead of locking them into basic subsistence (if that isn't what you're selling). You add value to society through your business, not your net worth. And you increase spending for everyone.
Of course if your country has an average wage of 400 randombucks in nominal terms, the effect would be negligible (actually that was nonsense because prices should adjust to a similar value, if not, what's the point of putting things for sale).
Oh and if you just threaten to take your money to another country, why should the country allow you to do business there? That would violate a bunch of basic principles in place nowadays obviously, but in the case of America, that would be a good disincentive from capital flight (that happens anyway whenever there is the chance, Jersey, Caymans etc.)
Must be a terrifying prospect to be locked at just being 95% better than anyone else in terms of income.
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United States43964 Posts
On November 20 2020 07:46 BisuDagger wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 07:40 Vivax wrote:
While it's mostly fantasizing, wouldn't it make sense to receive personal incomes as percentiles?
I'm not a math wizard and mostly just discussing a rough idea but something like, capping the max income at the 95th percentile or anything close to that and instead of taxing it, the excess gets redistributed at the bottom percentiles. The final argument becomes, if I earned as much as I can and the government tells me I can't earn more, why wouldn't I move to another country that doesn't limit my earning potential? Why wouldn't all of the 1% just move? Can you take that risk as a country?
The fundamental issue with that is the word "earned".
Consider the footrace again. The winner comes first and therefore we might rationally conclude that he earned the victory. But if the winner is given a million dollars should we therefore conclude that he earned a million dollars? What if it's a billion? What if the billion dollars were taken from raised by taking $10 out of the bank accounts of 100,000,000 working Americans? Would we still conclude that the winner of the footrace had earned a billion dollars? The key distinction I'm making here is the difference between what you get and what you earn.
In our economic system you compete against others and if you win the competition you get things. And what you get is weighted in an absurdly disproportionate and top heavy way.
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My suggestion violates the principle of shareholder capitalism that is heavily footed on first come first serve. You'd make everyone in your country a shareholder of successful businesses, which is probably why it will never happen considering the influence of companies like Blackrock which have a stake in almost every bluechip and pick winners and losers.
Though it has the little quirk that it's based on personal income and not business revenue, so why not? You want to milk your business earnings for personal gains? Then pay up.
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Bisutopia19343 Posts
On November 20 2020 08:03 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 07:46 BisuDagger wrote:On November 20 2020 07:40 Vivax wrote:
While it's mostly fantasizing, wouldn't it make sense to receive personal incomes as percentiles?
I'm not a math wizard and mostly just discussing a rough idea but something like, capping the max income at the 95th percentile or anything close to that and instead of taxing it, the excess gets redistributed at the bottom percentiles. The final argument becomes, if I earned as much as I can and the government tells me I can't earn more, why wouldn't I move to another country that doesn't limit my earning potential? Why wouldn't all of the 1% just move? Can you take that risk as a country? The fundamental issue with that is the word "earned". Consider the footrace again. The winner comes first and therefore we might rationally conclude that he earned the victory. But if the winner is given a million dollars should we therefore conclude that he earned a million dollars? What if it's a billion? What if the billion dollars were taken from raised by taking $10 out of the bank accounts of 100,000,000 working Americans? Would we still conclude that the winner of the footrace had earned a billion dollars? The key distinction I'm making here is the difference between what you get and what you earn. In our economic system you compete against others and if you win the competition you get things. And what you get is weighted in an absurdly disproportionate and top heavy way.
I don’t think that you guys are wrong, because your heart is in the right place and I understand what you mean. My concern is once the momentum for this train of though is put into political motion, those in power won’t know when to stop. Once you start telling someone they can’t make X amount, four years later people will start yelling that wasn’t enough. Everyone can live happy with 1 million dollars. Why should they make more? And then that goes down and down until it’s all completely government controlled. It’s knowing this could happen and the way communism ruined so many other countries that I have trouble getting behind it.
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Most people I've seen who draw the line do so at $1 Billion, which is still such a ridiculously stupidly huge amount of money even compared to $1M that most people don't really appreciate. Nobody ever genuinely needs to be making billions of dollars, they could start a new country with that shit. Having stronger social components in our markets preventing abuse, and actually fucking taxing the rich could accomplish so much, and you'd still have all the same people living all the exact same extravagant lifestyles. They literally wouldn't even notice.
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On November 20 2020 09:22 NewSunshine wrote:
Most people I've seen who draw the line do so at $1 Billion, which is still such a ridiculously stupidly huge amount of money even compared to $1M that most people don't really appreciate. Nobody ever genuinely needs to be making billions of dollars, they could start a new country with that shit. Having stronger social components in our markets preventing abuse, and actually fucking taxing the rich could accomplish so much, and you'd still have all the same people living all the exact same extravagant lifestyles. They literally wouldn't even notice.
Do people not understand wealth/assets =/= money. What are you going to do, expropriate assets and stocks? Now tell me how thats going to end up differently than every time thats been done.
There's also not enough assets that the "rich" have to temporarily subsidize the masses. The fact is you'd have to expropriate from the middle class as well. Then there is the other moral issue that you yourself are a 1%er. Why shouldn't you be expropriated to give to the poor in Nigeria, Cambodia, or Uzbezkistan?
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On November 20 2020 07:08 BisuDagger wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 06:11 Nouar wrote:On November 20 2020 01:14 KwarK wrote:
I like to describe the issue as being comparable to a footrace. Let's say we line everyone up and make them do a 100m sprint. The guy who comes first gets 30% of the money, the next 10 get 5% each, and the 9 after that share 20% between them.
It's likely you'll know someone who was in the top 20 and if you look at them you'll see that they made some good choices. They looked after their health, they trained, they showed up on the day of the race, and so they earned it. And so if you look at them in a vacuum it'll appear the system works, they did the work and the system rewarded them.
But there are things that you're not seeing.
Firstly, that the game is rigged. That some people don't have the same biological capacity to win a footrace as others and that assigning success based on their capacity to sprint is arbitrary, cruel, and insulting to the basic human dignity we all deserve.
Secondly, that the guy you know who worked hard and earned his spot in the top 20 had a trainer, time off to train, access to sports facilities, and so forth that the guy who came 25th didn't. The guy you're seeing worked, but did he work harder than the guys he beat? Because if he didn't work harder than the guys he beat and he still got rewarded then we can't truly conclude that the system rewards hard work, even if it rewards people who did work hard.
Thirdly, it disincentivizes trying if you're not naturally advantaged. If you're from a background where you don't know many winners, where nobody in your family has been in the top 20, where you don't have access to sport facilities, and where none of your role models won, why would you spend all your time training for the day of the race? Everyone tells you the race is bullshit and looking at how the same group of people keep coming out on top each time you'd be inclined to agree. If white men always seem to win the footrace, even when they didn't work as hard, then as a black woman you'll be disillusioned with the race.
And most importantly, the footrace is intrinsically incapable of taking care of the participants. It's set up so 80/100 get nothing. All of them could be clones of Usain Bolt trained from childhood and it wouldn't make a difference because the inequality is built in, the 80 have to get nothing so the 20 can get more. As a system for allocating resources it can't ever take care of the group.
Advocates of the system point to someone like myself who was born with the capacity to make top 30 pretty easily but had to get their shit together and work hard to get into top 10. They will rightly say that if it hadn’t been for the foot race system I never would have gotten in shape and trained the way I did. That the foot race system has made me fitter and more productive, that instead of languishing in the top half I’ve been encouraged to work hard by the threat of competition and the promise of reward. But looking at the successes in isolation misses the forest for the trees. Ultimately it promises that if you’re a productive member of society you will be given permission to steal excess value from other members of society and that promise can never be universally fulfilled. Completely agree with that analogy. I take issue with the fact that a decent chunk, sometimes a majority, of the 80% that get shafted, vote to keep the current system going, instead of trying to change it to make it fairer, and are content with it. I'm really fast. I know that in most cases I would win a footrace. I've made good choices that allow me to win a foot race. Now I'm told everyone else will get a 5 second head start. I start losing a lot with my disadvantage. How is it fair that I don't get to earn my potential because a system tells me I should be held back to give others an opportunity to earn money off the foot race? The organizer might as well pay people money just for participating. Something like universal basic winnings prize just for being part of the race. That way I can still earn as much as my potential allows with out feeling like the system is working against me. Or better yet, everyone who can compete for the top prize leaves and goes somewhere else where they hold a footrace that has no structure in place to hold us back.
You're misunderstanding universal programs if you think they grant some an advantage and not everyone an advantage. They aren't granting "racers" a 5-second head start. Universal Healthcare isn't provided to only those in poverty. Everyone receives the benefit of it existing. I'll ignore the part where you compared life to a game(something I personally find is a troubling mindset for society to have but diving into that isn't the point of my reply): Universal programs are more akin to making tournament prize pools less top-heavy. The people at the top still reap the greater rewards their efforts have brought them and the people underneath them still receive enough support to survive. The ecosystem thrives and everyone benefits, not just those who are skilled and lucky enough to break into the top.
EDIT: Sticking with sport analogies, another way you can view Universal programs are creating standards for equipment. Everyone has the same tools at their disposal to create a fair playing field to compete. If Football had no standard for shoes, pads, helmets, grass/turf conditions, away room locker conditions, etc, then how do you know the most skilled people win on Sunday? How much of the result is dictated by one team having nicer equipment that other teams just can't afford? Why would you want a sport run like this? Why would you want something more serious, like life, run like this?
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On November 20 2020 09:48 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 09:46 Wegandi wrote:On November 20 2020 09:22 NewSunshine wrote:
Most people I've seen who draw the line do so at $1 Billion, which is still such a ridiculously stupidly huge amount of money even compared to $1M that most people don't really appreciate. Nobody ever genuinely needs to be making billions of dollars, they could start a new country with that shit. Having stronger social components in our markets preventing abuse, and actually fucking taxing the rich could accomplish so much, and you'd still have all the same people living all the exact same extravagant lifestyles. They literally wouldn't even notice. Do people not understand wealth/assets =/= money. What are you going to do, expropriate assets and stocks? Now tell me how thats going to end up differently than every time thats been done. You don't do it all at once you just change the tax code to have it happen within the current system.
Well the fact that you cant tax ex post puts a hamper on eat the rich. They dont make their money primarily via income. Their wealth is in assets not money. You guys have some weird Scrooge Mcduck fascination going on.
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On November 20 2020 09:15 BisuDagger wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 08:03 KwarK wrote:On November 20 2020 07:46 BisuDagger wrote:On November 20 2020 07:40 Vivax wrote:
While it's mostly fantasizing, wouldn't it make sense to receive personal incomes as percentiles?
I'm not a math wizard and mostly just discussing a rough idea but something like, capping the max income at the 95th percentile or anything close to that and instead of taxing it, the excess gets redistributed at the bottom percentiles. The final argument becomes, if I earned as much as I can and the government tells me I can't earn more, why wouldn't I move to another country that doesn't limit my earning potential? Why wouldn't all of the 1% just move? Can you take that risk as a country? The fundamental issue with that is the word "earned". Consider the footrace again. The winner comes first and therefore we might rationally conclude that he earned the victory. But if the winner is given a million dollars should we therefore conclude that he earned a million dollars? What if it's a billion? What if the billion dollars were taken from raised by taking $10 out of the bank accounts of 100,000,000 working Americans? Would we still conclude that the winner of the footrace had earned a billion dollars? The key distinction I'm making here is the difference between what you get and what you earn. In our economic system you compete against others and if you win the competition you get things. And what you get is weighted in an absurdly disproportionate and top heavy way. I don’t think that you guys are wrong, because your heart is in the right place and I understand what you mean. My concern is once the momentum for this train of though is put into political motion, those in power won’t know when to stop. Once you start telling someone they can’t make X amount, four years later people will start yelling that wasn’t enough. Everyone can live happy with 1 million dollars. Why should they make more? And then that goes down and down until it’s all completely government controlled. It’s knowing this could happen and the way communism ruined so many other countries that I have trouble getting behind it.
It's a bit provocative to say, but we're already living in socialism for the rich. Their wealth is so intricated with nations that their central banks have no choice but to support or enlarge it by any means. That may be what Buffett meant when he said that in the battle of rich vs poor the rich are winning.
Government expenditure worldwide exploded this year and the system relies on forcing people and nations into debt to keep money velocity up. That debt is being kept alive at any cost.
Plus I've already mentioned the issue that we're still reliant on forcing people into unattractive but systemically relevant jobs with a nurse example that had quite the backlash. But yeah that was possibly because I was defending the concept of capitalism with it.
In capitalism you'd go for such a job because the low amount of workers would force higher wages, in communism you'd be assigned to it or baited into it at a wage the government wants to pay. We have neither.
The situation here is that wages stagnate but the companies can't afford to raise them to get workers they require.
Unattractive jobs are also badly paid if I think about cooks, nurse assistants, construction workers, cashiers.
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Northern Ireland26740 Posts
On November 20 2020 09:52 Wegandi wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 09:48 JimmiC wrote:On November 20 2020 09:46 Wegandi wrote:On November 20 2020 09:22 NewSunshine wrote:
Most people I've seen who draw the line do so at $1 Billion, which is still such a ridiculously stupidly huge amount of money even compared to $1M that most people don't really appreciate. Nobody ever genuinely needs to be making billions of dollars, they could start a new country with that shit. Having stronger social components in our markets preventing abuse, and actually fucking taxing the rich could accomplish so much, and you'd still have all the same people living all the exact same extravagant lifestyles. They literally wouldn't even notice. Do people not understand wealth/assets =/= money. What are you going to do, expropriate assets and stocks? Now tell me how thats going to end up differently than every time thats been done. You don't do it all at once you just change the tax code to have it happen within the current system. Well the fact that you cant tax ex post puts a hamper on eat the rich. They dont make their money primarily via income. Their wealth is in assets not money. You guys have some weird Scrooge Mcduck fascination going on.
So you’re saying the focus is wrong and bringing out the old historical favourite of the guillotine is in order?
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On November 20 2020 08:03 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2020 07:46 BisuDagger wrote:On November 20 2020 07:40 Vivax wrote:
While it's mostly fantasizing, wouldn't it make sense to receive personal incomes as percentiles?
I'm not a math wizard and mostly just discussing a rough idea but something like, capping the max income at the 95th percentile or anything close to that and instead of taxing it, the excess gets redistributed at the bottom percentiles. The final argument becomes, if I earned as much as I can and the government tells me I can't earn more, why wouldn't I move to another country that doesn't limit my earning potential? Why wouldn't all of the 1% just move? Can you take that risk as a country? The fundamental issue with that is the word "earned". Consider the footrace again. The winner comes first and therefore we might rationally conclude that he earned the victory. But if the winner is given a million dollars should we therefore conclude that he earned a million dollars? What if it's a billion? What if the billion dollars were taken from raised by taking $10 out of the bank accounts of 100,000,000 working Americans? Would we still conclude that the winner of the footrace had earned a billion dollars? The key distinction I'm making here is the difference between what you get and what you earn. In our economic system you compete against others and if you win the competition you get things. And what you get is weighted in an absurdly disproportionate and top heavy way.
I feel like the analogy is breaking down here. The arbitrariness of the race and how much each runner gets is different from real life. In a real market economy, people are paid based on value. You get paid well because you do a job that your employer values and your skillset is somewhat rare. If your skillset was more common, you'd be paid less. If your employer did not need your skillset, then you would not be hired.
It may seem that being good at spreadsheets is not really valuable when looking at basic human needs, but society is much more complex than basic human needs. Sometimes the rewards seems absolutely ridiculous, but they are always tied to something that people want/need. In your case (from what I understand), a complex set of regulations has created a value in being good at spreadsheets in a specific way.
Certainly from a government perspective on how to guide the economy, I would make some adjustments to tax brackets and welfare programs to take more from the rich and give more to the poor. However, that's still quite different from the completely arbitrariness of the amount given for winning the fictional race that everyone must participate in.
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