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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, @11:02PM
That can't exist, it's like a black white or an round square. Either they have the assets, or they cannot readily pay it back. End of story.
"The classic way to convert income to immediate wealth is to borrow money."
Never a borrower or a lender be.
And this goes back to the prohibition on slavery, which I notice you tried to avoid confronting. If you're a free man, you'll have a hard time getting a loan based on your future earnings. Because there would be no way for the loan provider to collect if you decide later not to pay. When you see these sorts of loans going on, that's a clue to look deeper. If the loan provider is confident of their ability to collect, you might just be living in a slave society.
"is poorer than some starving homeless person in Africa who has a shirt to their name. "
Yes, that's exactly how it works. A starving, homeless freeman is still not as poor as a slave in a gilded cage.
"Nope. Because you aren't putting it up for sale to the highest bidder! The highest bidder on the market is just going to buy a small sliver of the company - not the whole company!"
Nope? Nah, that's a yes. That's, again, just how it works. That's a game rule.
"Actually, our social technology has vastly improved over the past few centuries."
Really?
There have been some advances, but from my point of view they are quite small. I wonder what you're talking about...
"Economic technology is a good example of this,"
New and better ways to enslave and steal from people don't impress me.
"but so is communication technology."
And that's not /social/ technology. It affects the social sphere, yes. It makes communication faster, cheaper, easier - but it's still fundamentally the same communication, just more of it, faster and cheaper.
"The combination of the two allows for coordination of huge numbers of people."
Yes, it lets us coordinate millions instead of thousands. But that's the main difference. Other than the expansion of scale, little has changed since the neolithic.
"Law has grown somewhat more humane, though it has plenty of room for improvement."
Has it really?
Sure, it's easy to think of an earlier millieu that was worse... but not all earlier times were clearly worse. It doesn't look like a steady climb to me, it looks like a lot of ups and downs and relatively little solid progress. Certainly the law as applied in the US today is vastly worse than the law as applied a few decades ago when I was learning it.
"Constitutional democracies are a vast improvement over what came before."
But will they survive?
Signs are not encouraging on that front.