Re:Wealth of millionaires surges 10.6% to top $70 trillion f...
by s2g on Tuesday June 19, 2018 @05:48PM
(#17350538)
> Democracy seems to be working out decently well
Doesn't seem to be working particularly well in the US.
Re:Wealth of millionaires surges 10.6% to top $70 trillion f...
by debt on Tuesday June 19, 2018 @05:59PM
(#17350626)
Meh it has a few bugs, definitely currently on an unstable build, but it's a huge enterprise system with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and technical debt but it's still running though after almost 200+ years.
Re:Wealth of millionaires surges 10.6% to top $70 trillion f...
by cma on Tuesday June 19, 2018 @02:35PM
(#17349187)
When you make the Coase Theorem account for the marginal utility of money, the whole thing falls apart.
[dead]
Re:Wealth of millionaires surges 10.6% to top $70 trillion f...
by matthewmacleod on Tuesday June 19, 2018 @03:16PM
(#17349498)
Or maybe instead there are a huge number of views somewhere in the middle. Like, maybe a stable society is one that both rewards individual achievement while trying to maintain a level playing field and providing a basic level of support for everybody in society.
I don’t recognise your mischaracterisation and this sort of thinking is why we are presently so completely fucked.
Re:Wealth of millionaires surges 10.6% to top $70 trillion f...
by mnctvanj on Tuesday June 19, 2018 @03:08PM
(#17349442)
There are certainly public/tax policy sets that could serve both: to help and/or protect those who don't have the opportunity or ability to become an Ayn Rand hero, but also still allow for those that choose to fight down that path. Yes that means that the richer one becomes, the less they take home as a percentage of their gross (more so than current tax policy requires). But it means that there are more than two extremes to the issue.
Re:Wealth of millionaires surges 10.6% to top $70 trillion f...
by lovich on Tuesday June 19, 2018 @03:56PM
(#17349818)
The Marxist brigade? Even a pro capitalist should be against increasing wealth inequality.
A healthy market has plenty of competition and competition reduces profits. If the vast majority of wealth gets concentrated into relatively few people then that indicates a lack of competition and leads to inefficiencies.
Every billionaire or mega corp is a market failure
The concentration of wealth seems to undermine democracy.
Democracy seems to be working out decently well, concentration of wealth seems to run counter to democratic ideals. I guess that's how it has always been in capitalism: undemocractically-selected application of larger amounts of capital.
For instance, if one of these wealthy people decides to spend on a $1BB on PR campaign to run for office and they win; they will have effectively bought the outcome of the election like any other off-the-shelf product.
This level of wealth inequality could be a national security risk.
If the level of wealth concentration gets too high, we could start seeing a new market of privately-owned paramilitary sharing the space with what was originally occupied by branches of the military.