On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 9:45 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > It was a totalitarian government, like within a single corporation. > Nothing at all like Marx imagined. Where Marx's idea has been realized is > in the Amana colonies in the US and the kibbutz in Israel. So why didn't > they devolve into totalitarian states? > My bet would be size. I have no doubt that communism works at the tribal level. We are evolved for it to work at that scale. > Why aren't corporations as oppressive as the GDR? I'd say it has little > to do with their economics. It's because people can stay or leave. > I agree, but isn't this just the fundamental idea of capitalism? If you can go somewhere else, this means that businesses have to compete and the competition drives progress. Of course, in crony capitalism, one can use capital to interfere with the regulatory bodies with the goal of artificially restricting competition. In real capitalism this remains a problem, because the wealthiest businesses can make their adversaries go bankrupt by selling at a loss for long enough. But this strategy is less stable: the monopoly can always be challenged in the future. > > > Still, many citizens of the GDR risked their lives to get to the other > side. There were never attempts in the opposite direction. This is an > almost perfect experiment because both groups had the same cultural > background, ethnicity, language, etc. > > >> John Locke thought owning land was an oxymoron...you could only "own" >> the temporary use of land. Didn't matter for hunter-gatherers, but it was >> problem that had to be solved for agricultural society. >> > > John Locke won, at least in Europe. > > > He didn't have to win in England; the land already belonged to the crown > in principle. The exceptions were called "free holds". Even today much of > England is nominally the crown's and is occupied on 100yr leases. > > The property taxes are so high that you don't really feel that you own > land or property. You lease it, and the government will take it away if you > are no longer willing or capable of paying said tax. > > >> >> That now a lot the world's GDP comes from capital has created the same >> kinds of questions about ownership of capital. Given that r>g in Piketty's >> analysis, is it a good idea to allow the Koch brothers to inherit a billion >> dollar business (that their father built by drilling for Stalin). >> > > The question is if there is a better alternative. My country did exactly > that in 1974 -- nationalize big factories. > > > Where did I say anything about nationalizing?? It think the Koch brothers > inheritance should have been taxed at a much higher marginal rate and I > think property, beyond homesteads, should be taxed whether it is investment > capital or land or machinery. > It's hard to disagree that the world would be better if the Koch brothers had to pay a hefty inheritance tax. In fact, inheritance tax might be the most ethically justifiable. Taxation of investment capital or means of production seems more of a mixed bag, because it also makes it harder for businesses to survive, pursue large longer-term projects, etc. In the end the cost is transferred to the buyer anyway, so why not just have sales tax instead? It also incentivizes the wealthier to allocate more resources to business ventures and less to hedonism. > > > After 6 months almost none were left. I grew up in front of the ruins > of a previously thriving flour mill. The currently richest guy in the > country was a chemical engineer at one of these factories. He bought it > back from the government for almost nothing when it was about to collapse > and grew it back to a thriving business. Now he owns a multinational retail > chain, which no longer pays taxes in my country because we moved the HQ > elsewhere after a law was passed to increase taxes on capital gains. My > point being: wealth inequality is a real problem but I believe all attempts > to fix it so far have been worse. > > At the risk of being repetitive, I believe that withdrawing the power of > nations to print money out of thin air and determine interest rates would > reduce inequality. > > > I don't see how that would address the problem at all. The problem is > that capital (money, machinery, land,...) can be used to earn more > capital. And ownership of that capital can be passed on. So it's an > unstable system. As my grandfather used to say, "The richer get richer and > the poor get poorer." There are some countervailing factors: economic > mobility of individuals, dispersion of inheritance to multiple heirs, loss > of wealth through war or mismanagement,... But on average they are > overwhelmed. > Indexing currency to a limited resource would stop the central bank -> normal bank -> rich investor supply of credit. Notice that anytime the central bank prints money, it is in fact uniformly extracting resource-buying power for all of the existing money and centralizing that extracted buying power in the new money. The new money is then preferentially distributed, because the richer you are the cheaper credit you get. It is true that the rich have more resource buying-power extracted in absolute value per capita, but the power-law distribution of wealth means that the largest volume of buying-power will be extracted from the poor. The story would be different if the newly minted money was used to do things like bail out homeowners, but this never seems to be the case. It is, effectively, a tax on poverty. Interest rates should be determined by market demand, like any other price. When controlled by politicians, they can and are adjusted to always benefit the wealthy at any given moment -- instead of being controlled by the majority of capital, that would be dispersed amongst the majority of the non-wealthy population in a more self-adaptive system. > That's the historical conclusion of Piketty, r>g. > Have you seen Matthew Rognlie's rebuttal? http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/19/meet-the-26-year-old-whos-taking-on-thomas-pikettys-ominous-warnings-about-inequality/ > > > > >> >> >> >> >>> >>> >>> Capitalism - in my view an advanced form of slavery, following >>> feudalism - started to destroy the entire human experiment on this Globe - >>> way before the "warming" entered the picture. >>> It never 'faced' a competition of any 'socialistic' challenger. It >>> succumbbed to the authoritarian religious tyrannies (brutal and violent, or >>> just retracting and philosophical). >>> >> >> As with communism, there is a big gap between the theory and the >> implementation. "Advanced form of slavery" might be a way to put it, but an >> even more cynical view would be that there's always been slavery to some >> degree. >> >> I believe that the big challenge that we face is how to move to a >> jobless society. Worse, I think this transition already started but there >> is still no political will to admit it. Robotics and AI are Marx's worse >> nightmare. In the limit, the number of employees required by a business >> will tend to zero, while the ability of a business to provide goods for the >> rest of us keeps being more and more leveraged by technological advance. >> One of the realities about the current economic crises that few are willing >> to admit: there simply are no longer jobs for everyone. >> >> I think the best idea that we have so far is the universal flat salary. >> >> >> The trouble with that is that when everyone has the same income nobody >> feels rich...and people like to feel rich. It's Nietzsche's "will to >> power". So people who have $100 billion don't want to give up $99 billion >> to the general welfare, even though it would make the world better and make >> no discernible difference in their life style. So they instead use a few >> billion to persuade people to vote for politicians who won't tax them. >> > > This is why I think it can work. Everyone gets a base salary, but anyone > can still get a job or start a business. If you want to be above average, > you will have to do one of those things. > > > That's almost the system in the western social-welfare democracies. It's > not a base salary, but the social safety net is good enough that one can > survive without working (just not very comfortably). But I agree that a > base salary would be better. > The fundamental thing I propose that is different from the social-welfare system is that base salary would be an incentive to destroy jobs, thus allowing humanity to reap the rewards of automation. Political success would be measured by unemployment rates in the opposite direction. Telmo. > > Brent > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
