1596
Let's play the rich get everything. The rules are the rich get everything. participation is mandatory.
(lemmy.world)
Did I say mandatory? I meant optional! You're "free" to die in a cardboard box under a freeway as a market capitalist scarecrow warning to the other ants so they keep showing up to make us more!
Sure that perfectly works because salaries are so high, I don't need any other form of income at all. I'll just forego any other investments because some rich guy might use them. Seriously, this is your solution? You do know it's THAT rich guy that sets your salary, right?
The reason this is a conflict is that if profits are not managed democratically (as in a worker's cooperative), then they will be extracted as profits for a small oligopoly (the owners) who can choose by their whim who gets a piece of that profit.
Very often that's buddies in their back-scratching kickback network, with a smattering of highly productive workers.
Which is why they need to be reigned in in a hundred different ways including this one, to force...any... responsibility to the society that FACILITATED their accumulation of such ridiculous levels of wealth to begin with, from roads, to utilities, to the preliterate workforce Pool they utilize and tear up for private profit more than normal individuals but don't want to pay for.
Unfortunately, the self-hating laborers that would waste their lives advocating we get comfortable attempting to satiate the insatiable greed of our oligarchs in perpetuity seem to keep forgetting their greed disease has us on an ever dwindling clock to ecological collapse/apocalypse, meaning no salaries, just death. As much as you may not want it to for the sake of your passive income ~~earned~~ made without actual labor, this capitalist laborer hostage situation for basic survival will end, because the climate can't be bribed, negotiated with, bought out, cut in, or outsourced.
No one solution can solve the problem of our greed class, and the top economic 10% of Americans own 87% of American stocks, so your attempt to frame this as an everyman issue is hollow.
When we have conditionless housing available to everyone without shelter, when everyone has Healthcare, when no one goes to sleep hungry without enough to eat, then we can start talking about what people with asset portfolios are concerned about.
Maybe society should focus on getting Bezos's support mega yacht a support support mega yacht instead though.
Oh brother. Talking about a high horse.
So if you tax unrealized gains, the rich will still be rich but everyone else will simply stop investing. They will have no option but to only earn money from the rich guy. Oh but we'll all have collectives because everyone who works wants to be an owner. And the best way to make any decision is to have a whole bunch of people provide input.
Look I'm all for eliminating the unfair rules that allow people to become billionaires. This rule is not one of them. And I'm sorry, but there are millions of people in the US with 401k retirement plans and they all have unrealized gains. They would all be effected. So don't pretend this is ONLY a rich person thing. This isn't a tax on the rich. It's a tax on trying to become rich.
High horse? How? By explaining basic issues with capitalism that anyone who has paid attention to anything in the last 100+ years has recognized?
What an easy way to completely disregard an argument that makes you uncomfortable. I'll have to remember that one.
I love the way you think I don't understand these things. It's just another tablet of condescension you dole out of your anti-social Pez dispenser. Have you actually READ and DIGESTED anything I've posted?
We should tax extreme wealth into oblivion, with a 100% congratulations you won capitalism tax at some point so they can't collect enough wealth to start warping politics beyond their single vote.
No one should be able to live like modern pharoahs in a finite world with finite resources where others die of lack of resources.
Or, how about we just tax everyone equally and keep them from making the rules. Make a little money, pay a little money. Make a lot of money, pay a lot of money. As far as I'm concerned, if you can make a billion dollars on a level playing field, more power to you. Now pay up.
I don't know, Professor, why don't you learn some history to figure that one out for yourself? Why do progressive tax brackets exist? Do you think they just appeared one day?
And still no reasonable argument on how/why to tax unrealized gains. Just more rich people suck and so do you for daring to suggest that not EVERY law allowing it is horrible.
I'm out of touch with reality for suggesting that we actually just tax people equally but OP isn't out of touch for suggesting we suddenly put a tax on an imaginary number because many rich people might be able to abuse it. Classic.
Oh hey I just saw you a second ago... That's weird. Almost as if you went into my comment history to try to bother me elsewhere.
That's some weird shit, dude.
Who's the "anti-social" one?
Because capital is an expression of power beyond material needs/wants, and even government can't effectively govern a class of people that have enough capital to bribe officials en masse to literally bend the laws and regulations to their wills, including to make their bribery perfectly legal as they succeeded in doing here.
That's why fiscal conservatives were so aroused by the idea of making government, the government that is supposed to protect the citizenry from the whims of those with more power, "small enough to drown in the bathtub." They succeeded. Our government is subservient to Wall Street's dictates because we let a few citizens accumulate enough, and shrunk government oversight enough, to turn it into just another acquisition to manipulate to maximize short term private profit.
That's a really nice view point. I agree with what you said completely. The problem is, it doesn't stress the issue we're discussing.
I say, you should tax an unknown value. You say, billionaires are bad.