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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: 2) by Arik on Wednesday October 28 2020, @04:24AM
Through a microscope, that is true. Through a macroscope, that is false.
"For people not in the top 10% or so, most of their wealth is in income not assets, homes or otherwise."
Income is not wealth. At best, futures on income could be convertible to wealth, in some fantasy scenario where that wouldn't wind up necessarily conflicting with the prohibition on slavery. Or where slavery were permissible, obviously.
"Second, the wealth at the top is grossly overvalued."
Probably true.
"We don't even know there has been a change in wealth inequality to be honest, because we have no idea what assets are really worth. A classic example is the current valuations of high tech companies. Is Tesla really worth twice as much as Toyota, for a glaring example? Is Apple really a two trillion dollar company? Is the US high tech industry really worth more than the stock markets of all of Europe?"
And that's the thing. The straight answer is, yes they are. Yes, we know that. What we don't know is what they will be worth *tomorrow.*
But if there's a better way to measure the current value of something than to put it up for sale to the highest bidder, we haven't yet invented it.
Obviously lots of times this malfunctions horribly. See the entire text of 'Madness of Crowds' in support.
Yet, it's still clearly superior to its predecessor.
As I keep trying to tell you, while our material technology has improved dramatically in just the past few decades, our social technology has remained virtually unimproved for tens of thousands of years.
This is our challenge as a species. If we wish to survive. We simply must find a better way of organizing ourselves, and keeping the peace between us.