Designing an economic system for "fairness" is a horrible idea. I would rather live in an economic system with high inequality, high standards of living, and high social mobility, than in a system with low inequality, low standards of living, and low social mobility. Inequality is bad in the same way that debt or medicine is bad: the danger is in the dose. A society with extreme inequality is probably screwed, but a society with moderate inequality is not necessarily worse off than a society with low inequality.
Wealth taxes have been tried many times, they don't work very well.
> In the natural world hoarding works in the opposite way. A stash of nuts doesn't magically grow. Quite the opposite. Real effort has to be expended to preserve the stash.
So you would prefer to spend your time roaming the forest in proletariat ecstasy looking for more nuts, rather than using the nuts to plant some trees?
Planting trees would be productive activity, not hoarding. This is exactly the type of behaviour that should be rewarded. Of course, we need people to have access to resources in order to engage in productive activity (in this case land).
Regarding your comment about the world not being zero sum, I agree to an extent (hence my comment that it is largely zero sum). Obviously we can - through productive activity - 'create wealth' in many ways. Another commenter gave the example of turning sand into silicon chips. My concern though - and where I think a zero sum situation exists - is with those resources that are fundamental to security, agency, and well being like land and clean water. I don't want my children to grow up in a world where they live to 120 but all of those resources are already hoarded and the prices are so high that they have little to no chance of getting a share. A world where only a few have access to use natural resources for their own benefit is a crappy world however you look at it.
> Wealth taxes have been tried many times, they don't work very well.
There's a whole debate to be had here, but I think I'll just say that I don't think that this is the case.
If the economy is growing (not a zero sum game as you say), but the economic ability to own assets is decreasing then you are creating a situation where after some time all assets are owned by only very few. I'm not sure if you consider that a good basis for society. I certainly would prefer my children not to live in a cyberpunk distopia.
Wealth inequality of our magnitude doesnt come about as a result of creating wealth. It's parasitic in nature - siphoning off either natural wealth or labor wealth from others. There are multiple ways to do this, many of which are lauded in Forbes magazine.
So, the question we should probably not asking while stroking our chins is not "what is the precise level of wealth inequality that is fair?"
It is "who are the parasites? and how do we kill the parasites?"
I don't. The world is not so simple, person "making" something sure creates something. Who prices it? How do you price it? Is a man entitled to the price he sets? How do you ensure a man who mines silicone today is pricing it correctly so that he does not "unfairly" disadvantage a man who is going to be born 300 years later that will live next to the now depleted silicone mine? Would that man born 300 years later even matter?
Where should people live? Do we maximize the utility for the average? Do we maximize utility for the most productive?
> So, the question we should probably not asking while stroking our chins is not "what is the precise level of wealth inequality that is fair?"
No, we're still there, you can't pretend like you've convinced me with jumps in logic and then continue talking past me. Or you can, see how far that gets you in getting support.
> It is "who are the parasites? and how do we kill the parasites?"
You haven't even established what a "parasite" is, and you're jumping to culling them already?
When does someone turn into a "parasite", exactly? See, we're back to asking what amount level of "wealth inequality" is OK again. This is what happens when you skip or ignore questions.
Why would you assume forming a fair economic system would be easy and simple? Is a fair justice system easy and simple? Do you want to destroy the justice system and replace it with "king decides" like we used to have because it's oh, just too complicated to have a legal system?
>No, we're still there
You're still here. You're still asking the question "what's the exact volume of blood a human body is supposed to have? Answer me that!" while I'm asking "how can we better identify and kill mosquitoes?"
It's worth noting that in nature, parasites often try to "trick" hosts into believing that an exchange is necessary or mutually beneficial. That can make killing parasites complicated. Nature doesn't give up though. Hosts will form elaborate defenses to protect themselves.
>You haven't even established what a "parasite" is
I gave a very clear definition above. If you take a greater than equal share of the world's wealth then you are a parasite on somebody else's share. This includes Saudi Princes who contribute nothing and sell access to oil from under "their" sand. If you extract the value of somebody's labor you are a parasite. This includes Alice Walton. This includes every businessman who exploits his workers. This includes shareholders of those businesses.
Some parasitic wealth transfers are more obvious than others. Some are legal. Some are not. Some are subtle. Some are not. A person's wealth can constitute a mix of parasitic wealth transfers and earned wealth. A parasite can also be a host. Sometimes these transfers can cancel each other out.
One thing that is always true is that the more parasitic a wealth transfer is, the more absurdly insistent the parasite is that they've really earned it. Hence all those stupid fawning Forbes articles about how they work long hours and sleep under their desk. That is the parasite trying to trick the host.
It's worth remembering that the justice system is not perfect. Perfect justice is impossible. Mediocre justice is hard. Good justice is very complicated. So the logical corollary of your argument that "perfection is impossible, why bother trying" is that we should trash the entire justice system and return to something nice and simple like "king decides". Is that what you want though?
>See, we're back to asking what amount level of "wealth inequality" is OK again.
You certainly seem really keen to keep dragging the question back to "what is the exact volume of blood a mosquito victim is supposed to have, anyway, huh?"
If mosquitoes could speak, I'm sure it'd be something a mosquito would say :)
Because you avoid describing it, you avoid taking a position, so only you can have a position, but no one knows what it is, so there is no way for anyone to argue against you, so you, and only you, get to talk.
If that's your only goal then by all means, talk to yourself.
> If mosquitoes could speak, I'm sure it'd be something a mosquito would say :)
Why not just outright say what you mean instead of being a coward?
Because I'm obviously going to take an opinion of "however much blood a person has before a mosquito bites them is however much they should have" rather than specifying a precise amount in liters.
The technical term for what you're doing here is "red herring".
However, the way that parasitic wealth extraction is currently growing is geometric. It is not sustainable given the levels of economic growth we currently have. This will, sadly, inevitably lead to violence.
I think you have to ask yourself where this newly minted money ends up first. I think you'll find that it largely just increases the nominal value of assets.
> The pie grows every year.
The 'pie' is the world's resources - not the money. If new money essentially just increases the nominal value of assets it doesn't invalidate what I've said. Quite the opposite. An increase in the money supply exacerbates wealth inequality as can be seen recently with historically low interest rates.
Except that's not zero sum either. Oil that was in the Permian Basin was there all along, but before the invention of fracking it might as well not exist because of how hard it was to get out of the ground. If some company gets rich because they were able to extract said oil, is the world really worse off because "inequality"?
If so, then its always increasing, we have not fully discovered all the world's resources.
You are just being obstinate all over this thread not even rebutting points, just straw-manning.
You read like an argumentative'AI'.
No, humanity has not discovered them all, or know the actual quantity available to us. Like how discovery of silicon leads to enrichment of a country pretty much immediately (relative scale, still may take a few decades). The resource was there the entire time, the economic output was not, it was not a part of the market until it's discovery.
> You are just being obstinate all over this thread not even rebutting points, just straw-manning.
If I am, then its in opposition to another's "strawman".
> You read like an argumentative'AI'.
Thanks, I do like to defeat other people's logic by the most simplest means. If you can't answer, then you don't have a solution, you have an opinion of dubious quality.
If your imagination limits "resources" to bare materials, yes, of course they're limited—though there's an awful lot of sand in the Earth's crust. But it's a stunted view of economics, so stunted as to be worthless as a model.
We're on HN and I don't know if you got the memo but there's this thing called computing and digital information.
Zeros and ones, which can be copied near infinitely and make nowadays a huge part of the GDP.
I listen to music, watch movies, participate in discussion, read books, etc. without it eating much of the world's natural resources.
I know Marx totally missed that that would happen but, well, shocker, it happened: Microsoft, Google and Meta are three of the top 10 companies by market cap in the world. Software.
Software. It's time for people to get their head out of Marx's ass.
I find Henry George's much more accommodating.
His definition of land is important to distinguish between different sorts of wealth. We are a part of nature and as such natural resources have particular importance to us.
Capitalism is an effective system for motivating productive activity, but it also has an inherent tendency to concentrate wealth.
If we want to avoid a situation where a few people control such a large proportion of the world's resources that there is not enough left over to meet the needs of others, then we need to balance this tendency. Income taxes are one approach, but wealth taxes deal with the actual issue.
Taxing wealth is not unfair if you accept that the economic system we have chosen is itself unfair. We give too many advantages to those that gather income through owning things (i.e. unearned income) compared with those that engage in productive activity (i.e. earned income).
I say we 'give' those advantages because they are not due to some inherent law of nature. It is a choice we have made as a society. In the natural world hoarding works in the opposite way. A stash of nuts doesn't magically grow. Quite the opposite. Real effort has to be expended to preserve the stash.