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If you bring up UBI, or other reforms, you'll inevitably get someone who brings up: "voting yourself someone else's money".
You could convince me, except that things have gotten to an absurd state.
I look at some graphs of wealth inequality and it is unimaginably shocking. I never dreamed it could be this bad. More than 50% of the US wealth is owned by 5% of the people. [1] 35% is owned by only 1% of the population.
This image from this article also tells the story.
I'm not going to argue how accurate those numbers are. Rather, I will extrapolate the trend.
Let's continue the current trend to its logical absurd conclusion. The entire planet is owned by one single person. You (and everyone else) are one of the wage slaves in the bottom 99.99999999 % of the population (at least 8 decimal places). [7.5 billion people, minus that one person who owns everything, then divided by 7.5 billion people.]
Naturally, we should respect property ownership. Somehow this one person deserves and "earned" the wealth of the entire planet through his hard and diligent efforts and deserves to own everything and everyone. It is absurd on its face.
At this logical endpoint, it clearly seems that the rest of the planet should seize the wealth of the one person.
Wealth transfer has already happened. And is still happening. Republicans are just fine with this as long as it is all trickling upward.
Yes, "voting yourself someone else's money" involves taking away some of the absurd amounts of wealth hoarded up by a few. Amounts of individual wealth that one person couldn't spend in a lifetime; then leaves to others, who themselves can't spend it in their lifetime.
Not as a proposal, but just to make a point, hypothetically, if all of these people who exceed this threshold had their net worth capped at $100 Million, they would still be just fine. Yes, really! They would still live in fabulous homes, drive fabulous cars, and eat whatever they wanted, travel wherever and whenever they wanted -- for the rest of their natural lives.
In case my "one man owns the world" didn't get the idea across, I'll be more blunt. Any time too few people have owned way, way too much, and too many had nothing, there is always an uprising. I'm not proposing an uprising. I'm merely warning it is inevitable. Hopefully not in my lifetime. Maybe it would be better to solve this peacefully where the wealthiest, while heavily taxed, still end up, after taxes, fabulously wealthy beyond the dreams of most everyone else. I'm not proposing reducing all the rich people's wealth to some cap. Just that they should pay their fair share. Why are they the ones who get the tax cuts?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 28 2020, @04:18AM
Why do you consider that a logical conclusion? My view is that there are considerable diminishing returns to greater wealth. In particular, if one person had that much wealth as in your global example, then they'd be unable to fend off a massive feeding frenzy from the 7.5 billion people you just mentioned (they might be able to buy off militaries or something to fend off the rest, but they'll have to pay out a lot of their holdings just to reduce the losses).
Capitalist societies among other things have grown very effective at parting people from their money. And the extreme rich are a far bigger target than the average person by your metric. Even in absence of that, it takes a small army to manage great wealth and that increases as the assets held get larger and more complicated.
I think we already see that in your metric as I remarked earlier. Supposedly, the highest levels are much wealthier than before. But much of it is a house of cards (such as the US high tech industry by itself being valued by the stock markets as more valuable than the entire listing of European stock markets). I think the sweet spot is somewhere around a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars. Below that, transaction fees and such take up a larger portion of investment costs. Above that, it becomes too much for a single person to manage (unless they are really competent and knowledgeable).