this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Why can’t any government in the world aim to tax ultra rich more whilst making easier for small to medium large businesses to thrive. And policies on property supply rather than property buyers like all sorts of first time buyers programs.

Why are only same old policies keep being peddled when the world is still going to shit?

That doesn’t involve reducing the government size and budget entirely or subscribing to any extreme left or right?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

That's literally China's policies. The problem is most westerners are lied to about China's model and it is just painted it as if Deng Xiaoping was an uber capitalist lover and turned China into a free market economy and that was the end of history.

The reality is that Deng Xiaoping was a classical Marxist so he wanted China to follow the development path of classical Marxism (grasping the large, letting go of the small) and not the revision of Marxism by Stalin (nationalizing everything), because Marxian theory is about formulating a scientific theory of socioeconomic development, so if they want to develop as rapidly as possible they needed to adhere more closely to Marxian economics.

Deng also knew the people would revolt if the country remained poor for very long, so they should hyper-focus on economic development first-of-foremost at all costs for a short period of time. Such a hyper-focus on development he had foresight to predict would lead to a lot of problems: environmental degradation, rising wealth inequality, etc. So he argued that this should be a two-step development model. There would be an initial stage of rapid development, followed by a second stage of shifting to a model that has more of a focus on high quality development to tackle the problems of the previous stage once they're a lot wealthier.

The first stage went from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin, and then they announced they were entering the second phase under Hu Jintao and this has carried onto the Xi Jinping administration. Western media decried Xi an "abandonment of Deng" because western media is just pure propaganda when in reality this was Deng's vision. China has switched to a model that no longer prioritizes rapid growth but prioritizes high quality growth.

One of the policies for this period has been to tackle the wealth inequality that has arisen during the first period. They have done this through various methods but one major one is huge poverty alleviation initiatives which the wealthy have been required to fund. Tencent for example "donated" an amount worth 3/4th of its whole yearly profits to government poverty alleviation initiatives. China does tax the rich but they have a system of unofficial "taxation" as well where they discretely take over a company through a combination of party cells and becoming a major shareholder with the golden share system and then make that company "donate" its profits back to the state. As a result China's wealth inequality has been gradually falling since 2010 and they've become the #1 funder of green energy initiatives in the entire world.

The reason you don't see this in western countries is because they are capitalist. Most westerners have an mindset that laws work like magic spells, you can just write down on a piece of paper whatever economic system you want and this is like casting a spell to create that system as if by magic, and so if you just craft the language perfectly to get the perfect spell then you will create the perfect system.

The Chinese understand this is not how reality works, economic systems are real physical machines that continually transform nature into goods and services for human conception, and so whatever laws you write can only meaningfully be implemented in reality if there is a physical basis for them.

The physical basis for political power ultimately rests in production relations, that is to say, ownership and control over the means of production, and thus the ability to appropriate all wealth. The wealth appropriation in countries like the USA is entirely in the hands of the capitalist class, and so they use that immense wealth, and thus political power, to capture the state and subvert it to their own interests, and thus corrupt the state to favor those very same capital interests rather than to control them.

The Chinese understand that if you want the state to remain an independent force that is not captured by the wealth appropriators, then the state must have its own material foundations. That is to say, the state must directly control its own means of production, it must have its own basis in economic production as well, so it can act as an independent economic force and not wholly dependent upon the capitalists for its material existence.

Furthermore, its economic basis must be far larger and thus more economically powerful than any other capitalist. Even if it owns some basis, if that basis is too small it would still become subverted by capitalist oligarchs. The Chinese state directly owns and controls the majority of all its largest enterprises as well as has indirect control of the majority of the minority of those large enterprises it doesn't directly control. This makes the state itself by far the largest producer of wealth in the whole country, producing 40% of the entire GDP, no singular other enterprise in China even comes close to that.

The absolute enormous control over production allows for the state to control non-state actors and not the other way around. In a capitalist country the non-state actors, these being the wealth bourgeois class who own the large enterprises, instead captures the state and controls it for its own interests and it does not genuinely act as an independent body with its own independent interests, but only as the accumulation of the average interests of the average capitalist.

No law you write that is unfriendly to capitalists under such a system will be sustainable, and often are entirely non-enforceable, because in capitalist societies there is no material basis for them. The US is a great example of this. It's technically illegal to do insider trading, but everyone in US Congress openly does insider trading, openly talks about it, and the records of them getting rich from insider training is pretty openly public knowledge. But nobody ever gets arrested for it because the law is not enforceable because the material basis of US society is production relations that give control of the commanding heights of the economy to the capitalist class, and so the capitalists just buy off the state for their own interests and there is no meaningfully competing power dynamic against that in US society.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

we can always count on lemmygraders to do some quality theoryposting.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

You're the first person ever that was able to explain to me the difference and make me yearn for it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago

It's really easy to convince a huge number of poor people that the elites are the only ones defending them from poor people they aren't personally familiar with. This trick has worked for 10,000 years at least.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

because that goes against the concerns of the elites. the rich, who pay for the campaigns of most politicians (surely they pay for all of those who have a chance to win the post of president or prime minister), will try to squeeze every dime they can from everyone else, specially from the poor.

small to medium business won't thrive because that would be another entrant in the market to split profits with the larger, more established business. they have already large advantages because they purchase raw materials and utilities in bulk, hence they can get a lower price and larger profit margins than the smaller, newer entrants to the market. still, they want to be sure that everything remains like that and therefore have politicians to keep things that way. the idea that new business will make a difference in well-established markets is an illusion.

as for property supply, well, land in our system is not a resource, but a commodity. take the real estate market for example: investors are buying property to serve as a financial asset, they buy houses when they're cheap, rent them and sell for a profit when the market conditions are good for that. they don't think of housing as something that should serve their primary purpose - as the place of living for families. they don't want to lose value on their properties, and that's why they have politicians to represent their interests and keep things the way they are. same logic applies in big cities where investors buy commercial buildings and don't want to see them not valued enough - by not having people actually working on them. that's why they're so radically against remote jobs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

Brazil is currently fighting to increase the income tax of the top earners. I don't expect it to pass because congress and senate are, by and large, protector of the interests of the wealthy.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 days ago

Because our governments are largely bought and paid for.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

Because there is no profit it helping the poor.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

Because the rich just pay politics to provide the law they want to have.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago
[–] [email protected] -3 points 4 days ago

In the current pseudo-capitalist world economy, the rich do help in pushing a circular economy, in a variety of industries. If the rich are too taxed they'll more easily leave the country and move elsewhere. Your country loses a lot of its GDP. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but it's also how the government of today runs, where everything is run on credit and paid for later.

Lean-governments are possible, but in such a case a government can never spend more than its GDP produces. No government would go that way right now, mainly because people aren't educated enough to make a decent argument for it, verbally or otherwise.

Your country either welcomes the rich, or answers to the IMF.

In summary//TL;DR: In a credit-based, credit-ran, loan-promised economy, greatly successful small and medium businesses are not enough to keep GDP high enough to pay off national debt.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago (1 children)

huh?

90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes

Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j

People in China enjoy high levels of social mobility https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html

The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9

Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it's the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI

The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf

From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China%E2%80%99s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4

From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&amp%3Blocations=CN&amp%3Bstart=2008

By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html

Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience

None of these things happen in capitalist states, and we can make a direct comparison with India which follows capitalist path of development. In fact, without China there practically would be no poverty reduction happening in the world.

If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/5-myths-about-global-poverty

The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15.

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/12-things-we-can-agree-about-global-poverty

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

why don't rulers see as clearly as you? are they stupid, these most powerful men in the world?

CGP grey made a pretty interesting video about this:

https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

CGP Grey is bad ass!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Governments were formed and exist to protect property rights. As much as they can be said to have an underlying purpose, it's to protect property rights, and those who own more property will always have a greater level of protection.

The thing the liberal revolutions of the 19th century, socialist revolutions of the 20th century, and the development of social democracies in the 20th century taught governments is that there comes a point where wealth inequality gets so extreme that it threatens the stability of government, which poses the largest possible threat to property rights. Governments learned that they need to have some form of wealth redistribution in order to prevent a violent revolution. To the degree that governments do address wealth inequality, it's focused on doing it just enough to prevent the system from collapsing.

That's why there's really nobody focused on complete wealth equality. They don't want that. They want to maintain status quo property rights.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 days ago (3 children)

If anyone wants to read up more on “Governments were formed and exist to protect property rights” you might want to read The State and Revolution. It is pretty short and very relevant to this discussion

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago

Excellent rec, and one of Lenin's best works, alongside Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism IMO

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

State and Rev also has some of Lenin's best one liner quips ever written, definitely recommend that one. I should probably give it a second reading, it's a real banger of a book.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Lenin's uncontrollable urge to take any chance possible to shit on Kautsky will always make me laugh, lmao. For State and Rev in particular, (don't laugh!) is my favorite jab of his

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

Keeping with Marx's proud tradition of dunking on Proudhon for an entire book then dunking on him whenever he could later too.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

My first interaction with that text was Marx Madness podcast, they had plenty of love for Kautsky dunking as well.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

He's incredibly easy to dunk on, to be fair

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I've never read Kautsky, so I'll have to take Lenin at his word since he was the first author to successfully lead a socialist revolution.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

Kautsky does have some very good books to his name from before he became social imperialist that are worth reading even today like his summary of 1st book of Capital* or his history of early christianity.

*except the one chapter he allowed Bernstein of all people to write, but it's useful too, shows how Bernstein was clueless hack even then.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

Lenin does a pretty good job elaborating on Kautsky's mistakes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago
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