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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 (8 children)
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.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 28 2020, @01:46PM (7 children)
Convertible to wealth (easily too)? Makes income wealth right there. The classic way to convert income to immediate wealth is to borrow money. Keep in mind under the current terrible metrics of wealth, someone who owes more money than they have assets, even when they can readily pay it back, is poorer than some starving homeless person in Africa who has a shirt to their name. But when you count income, the African is appropriately poorer than the person who borrowed money.
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!
Actually, our social technology has vastly improved over the past few centuries. Economic technology is a good example of this, but so is communication technology. The combination of the two allows for coordination of huge numbers of people. Law has grown somewhat more humane, though it has plenty of room for improvement. Constitutional democracies are a vast improvement over what came before.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday October 28 2020, @11:02PM (6 children)
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.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday October 29 2020, @03:24AM
The same can be said of computation and information storage technology in the first place. Little has changed except for massive, many-orders-of-magnitude changes in our ability to compute and store information. Expansion of scale changes everything.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 29 2020, @03:43AM (4 children)
I missed this humdinger.
High income US person habitually spends to the nub on ephemeral things like ski trips and parties. On their last trip to Vegas, they bet too much and had to borrow from the House. Now, they're moderately in debt to some casino (plus their credit card bills) which they'll gradually pay back over the subsequent year, just in time for their next Vegas foray. No serious assets (future income is not an asset, remember?) and they owe some money. By the metric of wealth inequality they are poorer than the above African.
That's how it can happen. Sure they could easily slide into the "cannot readily pay it back" scenario by borrowing more and more, but it's quite easy to owe more than you own, and yet small enough that you could pay it back quickly.
Moving on
Will any government survive? No, they all die just like people. I'll note that the US's ~233-244 year stretch is really good by such standards. The US has had a good run.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday October 31 2020, @03:19PM (3 children)
You're missing your own point. They *might* be able to pay it back, but as you admit, they do not have the assets to do it immediately. They're relying on an expectation of future income - an expectation that may not come true, for any number of reasons. The credit-vampires want you to think that's just fine - because that's how they wind up with all the money.
"I'll note that the US's ~233-244 year stretch is really good by such standards."
Not really. The Republic of Venice lasted 1100 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Venice
San Marino has been around even longer, and still exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Marino
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 31 2020, @03:43PM (2 children)
All wealth has risk associated with it. Maybe Apple has been stuffing the channel for years and there's ten billion iPhones gathering dust in a warehouse in Texas. Maybe your house burns down. Maybe the country you bought those highly reliable bonds from, decides to default. Maybe credit default swaps aren't as sure thing as advertised. It's not a particularly big risk in comparison that one might lose their job and fail to get another comparable job in a timely manner.
All wealth has expectations. And while it is uncommon, it's not rare that those expectations aren't met.
I think out of the few dozen countries in Europe, there are maybe two or three present countries that have an older constitution than the US: definitely Switzerland and Iceland. The EU, a government over comparable population, is probably on the verge of needing a new constitution already.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday October 31 2020, @05:44PM (1 child)
But you're just evading by changing the scope. The question is, can they pay it now? Not in some imaginary future time that may or may not come to be; now.
A lot of bad economics is built on the same sort of evasion.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 31 2020, @07:36PM
Of course they can. The required payments for that debt are all in the future.
Sorry that's no different than any other sort of wealth. It's all dependent on expectations not just of the present, but of the future.
So is a lot of good economics. Much of this depends on scale and the value of the activity in question. Borrowing money just to gamble on Vegas is not good economics. I never claimed it was. But you can as a result appear to be poorer than dead broke by the metrics of wealth inequality, even though it'd be a reasonable expectation that you could pay that debt off in a short while. That informs me that wealth inequality as currently measured is also bad economics.