I want to first point out that the government being corruptible is not a problem that capitalism just solves. Almost all countries today are capitalist, and that doesn’t prevent their governments from being totalitarian or corrupt or mismanaging their resources (Russia as an example).
The government still has all the power. But now there’s a small group of people who can influence that power (let’s not kid ourselves - mainly through corruption) to the detriment of everyone else.
A centrally managed economy is not the only alternative.
Workers of an organization can be the owners of that organization, rather than a few wealthy elites or the government. That way, they see the fruits of their labor rather than it being syphoned off. They have a say in how the organization is run, they can vote on who manages it and replace them when the way it’s managed is bad for the workers.
Let’s say ownership of a company automatically goes from its founders to all workers (this might well include the founders) when it reaches a certain size.
What would incentivize anyone to try to start a company in such an environment? Why not guarantee the founders a certain percentage of the profits even if they decide to stop working when the company changes ownership?
Where does the capital come from to build a company in the first place? Government - hear me out. Taxes still exist, and continue to pay for things like infrastructure and healthcare and education and housing (these things are probably better managed by government than markets). And part of the tax revenue goes into an investment fund that is managed locally (think city, and/or county level). Citizens have direct voting power over what projects get financed with their taxes.
More pragmatically, a first (I would say reasonable) step would be to limit the amount of power an individual can get. Nobody needs a billion dollars to live, much less hundreds. Change the incentives: implement aggressive progressive taxes.
Heavily tax vacant houses and invest in affordable housing.
Stop subsidizing the aviation industry and the fossil fuel industry and the meat industry and instead invest in healthcare and education and public transport and farmers.
Capitalism is a nightmare without regulation. Simply start by adding more (good) regulation and enforcing it consistently.
I’d be curious to know what the total compensation, and overall happiness, of employees and some of these companies are vs traditional public/private companies in the same industry. At the end of the day, is there a real meaningful difference, or is this more of an ideal that doesn’t result in any real shift in quality of life?
I agree that capitalism needs regulation to work. I think every system does. Any economic system in its pure form is a nightmare. That said, capitalism with proper regulation seems to work better than pretty much all the other alternatives on the table, which have ended very poorly in the past, which is probably why capitalism is so widely used as an economic base.
While I still think rental options need to exist for people, the number of homes which have been bought up be investors, especially on the low end of the market, has become a problem. I had a house I was trying to buy bought out from under me by an investor, and had to raise the price of home I was looking at to have it stop happening, which really hurts people trying to get their first starter home, as the market has artificially shrunk. I think if two offers are on the table, someone looking to live in the home should always win, if the offer is at least at asking price. Homes that aren’t owner occupied, are taxed at a higher rate (at least where I am), but that doesn’t deter many people. The main subsidy I want to see die is the one for growing corn and soybeans, redirect that to farmers growing real food the right way. Maybe then the affordable food options will be real fresh food, instead of incentivizing processed garbage.
My main hope around universal healthcare would be that it would finally incentivize the government to incentivize the health of the people, as it would save the government money to have a healthy population. A lot of the issues the US has with health are a result of bad government advice (the food pyramid), poorly structured farming incentives, and car-centric infrastructure, compounded over decades. Universal healthcare could incentivize the government to work on fixing all of that, if they’re smart. Of course, we’d need a functional government that is working to serve the people, instead of one that just fights and serves their party’s talking points.
A cursory read suggests that ownership increases job satisfaction and commitment, though the correlation with job satisfaction is less strong.
Overall a positive, perhaps mild effect on employee happiness and potentially positive effect on firm performance.
So your suspicion that ownership doesn’t have a strong effect on employee happiness seems to bear out.
My main argument wasn’t about individual employee satisfaction though. The point was that worker ownership of organizations gets rid of the owning class (effectively: if everyone is an owner, the class conflict dissolves) while keeping markets and competition, making central planning less relevant.
I was trying to suggest approaches that are neither radical nor utopian, and like you pointed out yourself, that we already employ effectively. The main proposed difference is scale: past a certain size, all companies would be worker owned.
I don’t think markets are bad. Uncontrolled concentration of wealth is.
I’m skeptical of the claim that well-regulated capitalism is the best option, but depending on just how well-regulated it is, I agree that it can be a good option.
Though one might argue at that point whether you’re really still talking about capitalism. For instance, the main characteristic I have an issue with is capital accumulation. If we regulate that one out I think we’re going to get much better outcomes. Would the result still be considered capitalism?
The problem with just regulating capitalism while keeping the core mechanisms is that if wealth accumulation is still allowed to happen, resources will tend to concentrate in the hands of a few. This is not only inequitable and wasteful but more importantly it gives them power, which they will inevitably try to use to chip away at the regulations.
I mostly agree with your points on housing.
On health I’ll say that many of the issues you mention are either the result of or at least exacerbated by the influence of capital on government.
I tried looking into the compensation side of things.
There are different types of employee ownership plans. Trying to sort them all out is more work than I want to do right now, so I picked WinCo Foods, which is the biggest from my first link that is listed as 100% ESOP/worker-owned. Looking into it, it’s an ESOP, this page has some information, but not a lot of details in terms of how much. They give a $5,000 example from 1986, but that doesn’t really mean anything without context.
Looking at just base pay, I looked at WinCo (employee owned) vs Kroger (union) vs Walmart. There are some interesting things here I didn’t really expect. Walmart as the highest salary satisfaction, while Kroger has the lowest. This runs counter to what I often hear from the pro-union folks. i will say, management at Walmart seems to be paid very well, but I’d image the volume of lower level retail workers would bury that if there was a big problem. It’s hard to get exact apples to apples comparisons, due to the job titles and available data being different. But it does seem salary goes WinCo > Walmart > Kroger. That does speak well for the employee owned option, at least WinCo. My thought was that some of these may say employee owned, but at the end of the day, the employees would be in the same spot, so it’s a lot of hoopla for nothing. I do still have some questions about some of the other models, especially those you have to buy into. With the ESOP it’s fairly easy to see the upside, but I would like to see details on if there are selling restrictions. I get restricted stock as part of my compensation today, which I’m not going to turn down, but it’s not as good as having that same amount as part of my base salary. It vests over 3 years, so I don’t get access to it right away, and if I leave, I need to forfeit all of it that hasn’t vested. I’m not very happy with the way certain things are right now, but looking at the stock and thinking about essentially setting fire to it… it’s hard and makes me put up with more than I probably should (golden handcuffs).
On capitalism, in the US when people talk about changing things, they are generally using the Scandinavian countries as a reference point. They seem to be doing pretty well and are some of the happiest people on earth (although from what I’ve read that has something to do with expectations (culture) and not simply everything being amazing all the time). Those countries still have their roots in capitalism, they just layer on a bunch of social programs. The US does that too. People talk about military spending, but US spending on the military looks tiny compared to their spending on social programs… 20% of GDP on social programs vs 3% on the military. I think a lot of the funds around the social programs are likely being poorly managed, which is why a lot of people are against throwing even more money at it. At it’s core, capitalism a simple barter system using cash as means to facilitate trade. I make thing X, I sell it to people who need thing X, I use the profit from thing X to buy thing Y from someone else. It seems like the most natural system, that if not managed and regulated, would exist as a black market. This happened in Cuba, for example.
I do think we need to do a better job breaking up companies when they get too big. I think Google using their money from Adsense to fund all these “free” products, which basically serve as data collection for their ad engine, has been horrible for the technology startups. Everyone trying to come up with a new idea is required to complete with free. It’s hard enough to get a new business going without dealing with that completely unrealistic expectation. That might sound good for the consumer, but it means every new startup has one goal… to get acquired by one of the giants before their VC funding runs out. That led to a lot of consolidation in the tech space, or good ideas simply dying. Pretty much all the big tech companies use their cash cows to box everyone else out by providing free options. You could argue free products are great for the consumers, but is it? What’s the real cost?
I think conflating capitalism with trade is wrong.
Trade (and markets) existed long before modern capitalism. So did the concept of money.
I agree that the way you described it, it sounds very natural (not that that really is an argument, but whatever).
But the reality of capitalism is that the Y I’m buying from my profits is not some other commodity (as your example implies).
Y is someone else’s business that also sells X. Or some completely unrelated business that sells Z. Or Y is a bribe to the mayor so that the city buys all its X from me, even though I don’t have the best quality or price. Or it’s a “donation” to the new mayor’s campaign, leading him to remove the rule that one person can not own more than 3 homes in the city, so I can buy more houses and rent them out and make more profit.
It’s capital I use to open X businesses in other cities. Maybe someone already sells X there and the local citizens quite like their service. They don’t care for my X. But I have enough capital to start aggressively underselling, at a loss to myself. Now it doesn’t matter that my service is worse, or that the people had some loyalty to the local X seller. I’m selling at half the price, it’s a no-brainer to buy from me. I wait a few months and the local X seller is now out of business. I can raise my prices back up, nice. This works quite well, I’ll repeat it in other cities. If someone catches on and complains, I’ll just bribe the mayor to look the other way. Or I’ll buy the local newspaper and have them paint me in a positive light.
I agree that blindly throwing money at a problem is not a good solution. Unfortunately this basic insight is often abused into an argument that spending on social programs shouldn’t be increased at all, or worse should be decreased.
Well targeted social spending is actually profitable for the government. Healthy, housed, educated citizens produce a lot of value.
Most of what you describe here I’d call either corruption or monopolistic actions. These are area where regulation should exist with harsh punishments, where the punishment is severe enough to not make the crime worth doing. Some laws exist today, but they take too long to be enforced, if at all, and the punishment is usually minor, and the damage is already done.
Agreed. But capitalism provides both the incentives and the means for corruption.
Why do you think it is that punishments are minor and sporadically enforced? Could it have something to do with people who have so much money that they can influence laws?
Do you think it’s unreasonable to say, as a way to combat monopolies and corruption: “You can’t have that much money. There’s clearly no other use for such sums than gaining undue power. Past [insert specific net worth maximum], 100% of what you make will be taxed and/or distributed to your workers”?.
There are always incentives for corruption. That’s what laws and regulations are for. That is required regardless of the system in place.
As far as having too much money. All the richest people are rich on paper, they don’t make anything until the asset is sold. It’s taxed at that point. I don’t think we can or should change that. Yearly income caps don’t make sense for these people, as it’s not income until sold. Taxing the net worth will just incentivize people to hide their assets. If it were to work as intended, there is still the potential for corruption from those taking the money. Where does the money go? How many palms are greased along the way.?
To bring it down to a smaller level. I bought a pair of shoes at retail years ago. They were $90. I only wore them a little inside (I wore them like slippers), so they were is almost new condition. A few years after I bought them sneaker collecting went nuts and out of curiosity I looked them up… $600. Now it’s down around $100-200. I didn’t sell the shoes. On paper my “investment” was worth $510 more. Should I be taxed on that? On paper today that “investment” may only be $10 more. Do I get a refund on the taxes I paid or am I screwed because I didn’t sell during the hype?
Yes, there are always incentives for corruption. But capitalism ads to and intensifies those incentives.
People with unfathomable amounts of wealth have power over others. And they’re not elected, you can’t vote them out. They can fuck your life and there’s really not much you can do about it.
Maybe the richest people don’t “make anything” until the asset is sold, but their incredible net worth still gives them power. That’s the issue at the end of the day.
Many critics of anti-capitalists seem to think workers are envious of the money that the ultra-wealthy have. I don’t think this is the case.
It would perhaps make sense to be envious of millionaires who can afford anything their heart desires and don’t have to work at a job they hate in order to be financially secure. I think for most people, that second part would already be more than enough.
But to be envious of billionaires? I think this is not the norm. What billionaires have over millionaires is power. Most people don’t want power, they just want a happy, meaningful life.
The problem with capitalism is that it facilitates and encourages those few that do want power. For most of them it would be more beneficial for society if they didn’t get it.
The rich are already hiding their wealth. Trillions in offshore accounts suggests they don’t need to be taxed aggressively in order to try to hoard their money like dragons.
Again, I was suggesting we don’t let it get that far. What’s the billion dollar asset you can’t make liquid? A company? If it’s that valuable you should simply not be allowed to own/control it alone. Really, if it’s that big it should be broken up in the first place.
Where does the money go? To the government, same as it does now.
I’m not really sure I understand the hand greasing fear: the government gets the money anyway, it’s in the law. What’s the scenario here? Rich guy bribes IRS bureaucrat to not take his money? That will be a lot harder when the rich guy doesn’t have billions and the IRS bureaucrat has enough money (and good enough social support) for a comfortable life.
I also think speculation isn’t good and we should get rid of it. I really don’t care about your $600 sneakers and neither should the government. But at a scale that matters (not hundreds but hundreds of thousands - if you’re buying 1000 sneakers you’re also not in the clear) you should not be allowed to buy things for the purpose of re-selling them, except if you’re actually providing a service (like a supermarket, for example) - and even then I think there should be limits on how much you’re allowed to mark up the products vs. what you paid for them.
I think in general there should be a cap on margins. You shouldn’t be able to ask for 10x what it cost you to make a product, especially if you make millions of them.
I want to first point out that the government being corruptible is not a problem that capitalism just solves. Almost all countries today are capitalist, and that doesn’t prevent their governments from being totalitarian or corrupt or mismanaging their resources (Russia as an example).
The government still has all the power. But now there’s a small group of people who can influence that power (let’s not kid ourselves - mainly through corruption) to the detriment of everyone else.
A centrally managed economy is not the only alternative.
Workers of an organization can be the owners of that organization, rather than a few wealthy elites or the government. That way, they see the fruits of their labor rather than it being syphoned off. They have a say in how the organization is run, they can vote on who manages it and replace them when the way it’s managed is bad for the workers.
Let’s say ownership of a company automatically goes from its founders to all workers (this might well include the founders) when it reaches a certain size.
What would incentivize anyone to try to start a company in such an environment? Why not guarantee the founders a certain percentage of the profits even if they decide to stop working when the company changes ownership? Where does the capital come from to build a company in the first place? Government - hear me out. Taxes still exist, and continue to pay for things like infrastructure and healthcare and education and housing (these things are probably better managed by government than markets). And part of the tax revenue goes into an investment fund that is managed locally (think city, and/or county level). Citizens have direct voting power over what projects get financed with their taxes.
More pragmatically, a first (I would say reasonable) step would be to limit the amount of power an individual can get. Nobody needs a billion dollars to live, much less hundreds. Change the incentives: implement aggressive progressive taxes.
Heavily tax vacant houses and invest in affordable housing. Stop subsidizing the aviation industry and the fossil fuel industry and the meat industry and instead invest in healthcare and education and public transport and farmers.
Capitalism is a nightmare without regulation. Simply start by adding more (good) regulation and enforcing it consistently.
There is nothing in the US stopping companies from being employee owned.
Here is a list of 100 companies with at least 50% employee ownership (most are 100% employee owned).
https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100
Wikipedia has a list as well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companies
I’d be curious to know what the total compensation, and overall happiness, of employees and some of these companies are vs traditional public/private companies in the same industry. At the end of the day, is there a real meaningful difference, or is this more of an ideal that doesn’t result in any real shift in quality of life?
I agree that capitalism needs regulation to work. I think every system does. Any economic system in its pure form is a nightmare. That said, capitalism with proper regulation seems to work better than pretty much all the other alternatives on the table, which have ended very poorly in the past, which is probably why capitalism is so widely used as an economic base.
While I still think rental options need to exist for people, the number of homes which have been bought up be investors, especially on the low end of the market, has become a problem. I had a house I was trying to buy bought out from under me by an investor, and had to raise the price of home I was looking at to have it stop happening, which really hurts people trying to get their first starter home, as the market has artificially shrunk. I think if two offers are on the table, someone looking to live in the home should always win, if the offer is at least at asking price. Homes that aren’t owner occupied, are taxed at a higher rate (at least where I am), but that doesn’t deter many people. The main subsidy I want to see die is the one for growing corn and soybeans, redirect that to farmers growing real food the right way. Maybe then the affordable food options will be real fresh food, instead of incentivizing processed garbage.
My main hope around universal healthcare would be that it would finally incentivize the government to incentivize the health of the people, as it would save the government money to have a healthy population. A lot of the issues the US has with health are a result of bad government advice (the food pyramid), poorly structured farming incentives, and car-centric infrastructure, compounded over decades. Universal healthcare could incentivize the government to work on fixing all of that, if they’re smart. Of course, we’d need a functional government that is working to serve the people, instead of one that just fights and serves their party’s talking points.
I was curious too so I did a quick search. Here’s what I found:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aaron-Buchko/publication/229592641_The_effects_of_employee_ownership_on_employee_attitudes_An_integrated_causal_model_and_path_analysis/links/5fc6ea9245851568d132333d/The-effects-of-employee-ownership-on-employee-attitudes-An-integrated-causal-model-and-path-analysis.pdf.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w5277/w5277.pdf
A cursory read suggests that ownership increases job satisfaction and commitment, though the correlation with job satisfaction is less strong. Overall a positive, perhaps mild effect on employee happiness and potentially positive effect on firm performance.
So your suspicion that ownership doesn’t have a strong effect on employee happiness seems to bear out.
My main argument wasn’t about individual employee satisfaction though. The point was that worker ownership of organizations gets rid of the owning class (effectively: if everyone is an owner, the class conflict dissolves) while keeping markets and competition, making central planning less relevant.
I was trying to suggest approaches that are neither radical nor utopian, and like you pointed out yourself, that we already employ effectively. The main proposed difference is scale: past a certain size, all companies would be worker owned.
I don’t think markets are bad. Uncontrolled concentration of wealth is.
I’m skeptical of the claim that well-regulated capitalism is the best option, but depending on just how well-regulated it is, I agree that it can be a good option.
Though one might argue at that point whether you’re really still talking about capitalism. For instance, the main characteristic I have an issue with is capital accumulation. If we regulate that one out I think we’re going to get much better outcomes. Would the result still be considered capitalism?
The problem with just regulating capitalism while keeping the core mechanisms is that if wealth accumulation is still allowed to happen, resources will tend to concentrate in the hands of a few. This is not only inequitable and wasteful but more importantly it gives them power, which they will inevitably try to use to chip away at the regulations.
I mostly agree with your points on housing. On health I’ll say that many of the issues you mention are either the result of or at least exacerbated by the influence of capital on government.
I tried looking into the compensation side of things.
There are different types of employee ownership plans. Trying to sort them all out is more work than I want to do right now, so I picked WinCo Foods, which is the biggest from my first link that is listed as 100% ESOP/worker-owned. Looking into it, it’s an ESOP, this page has some information, but not a lot of details in terms of how much. They give a $5,000 example from 1986, but that doesn’t really mean anything without context.
Looking at just base pay, I looked at WinCo (employee owned) vs Kroger (union) vs Walmart. There are some interesting things here I didn’t really expect. Walmart as the highest salary satisfaction, while Kroger has the lowest. This runs counter to what I often hear from the pro-union folks. i will say, management at Walmart seems to be paid very well, but I’d image the volume of lower level retail workers would bury that if there was a big problem. It’s hard to get exact apples to apples comparisons, due to the job titles and available data being different. But it does seem salary goes WinCo > Walmart > Kroger. That does speak well for the employee owned option, at least WinCo. My thought was that some of these may say employee owned, but at the end of the day, the employees would be in the same spot, so it’s a lot of hoopla for nothing. I do still have some questions about some of the other models, especially those you have to buy into. With the ESOP it’s fairly easy to see the upside, but I would like to see details on if there are selling restrictions. I get restricted stock as part of my compensation today, which I’m not going to turn down, but it’s not as good as having that same amount as part of my base salary. It vests over 3 years, so I don’t get access to it right away, and if I leave, I need to forfeit all of it that hasn’t vested. I’m not very happy with the way certain things are right now, but looking at the stock and thinking about essentially setting fire to it… it’s hard and makes me put up with more than I probably should (golden handcuffs).
On capitalism, in the US when people talk about changing things, they are generally using the Scandinavian countries as a reference point. They seem to be doing pretty well and are some of the happiest people on earth (although from what I’ve read that has something to do with expectations (culture) and not simply everything being amazing all the time). Those countries still have their roots in capitalism, they just layer on a bunch of social programs. The US does that too. People talk about military spending, but US spending on the military looks tiny compared to their spending on social programs… 20% of GDP on social programs vs 3% on the military. I think a lot of the funds around the social programs are likely being poorly managed, which is why a lot of people are against throwing even more money at it. At it’s core, capitalism a simple barter system using cash as means to facilitate trade. I make thing X, I sell it to people who need thing X, I use the profit from thing X to buy thing Y from someone else. It seems like the most natural system, that if not managed and regulated, would exist as a black market. This happened in Cuba, for example.
I do think we need to do a better job breaking up companies when they get too big. I think Google using their money from Adsense to fund all these “free” products, which basically serve as data collection for their ad engine, has been horrible for the technology startups. Everyone trying to come up with a new idea is required to complete with free. It’s hard enough to get a new business going without dealing with that completely unrealistic expectation. That might sound good for the consumer, but it means every new startup has one goal… to get acquired by one of the giants before their VC funding runs out. That led to a lot of consolidation in the tech space, or good ideas simply dying. Pretty much all the big tech companies use their cash cows to box everyone else out by providing free options. You could argue free products are great for the consumers, but is it? What’s the real cost?
I think conflating capitalism with trade is wrong. Trade (and markets) existed long before modern capitalism. So did the concept of money.
I agree that the way you described it, it sounds very natural (not that that really is an argument, but whatever).
But the reality of capitalism is that the Y I’m buying from my profits is not some other commodity (as your example implies).
Y is someone else’s business that also sells X. Or some completely unrelated business that sells Z. Or Y is a bribe to the mayor so that the city buys all its X from me, even though I don’t have the best quality or price. Or it’s a “donation” to the new mayor’s campaign, leading him to remove the rule that one person can not own more than 3 homes in the city, so I can buy more houses and rent them out and make more profit.
It’s capital I use to open X businesses in other cities. Maybe someone already sells X there and the local citizens quite like their service. They don’t care for my X. But I have enough capital to start aggressively underselling, at a loss to myself. Now it doesn’t matter that my service is worse, or that the people had some loyalty to the local X seller. I’m selling at half the price, it’s a no-brainer to buy from me. I wait a few months and the local X seller is now out of business. I can raise my prices back up, nice. This works quite well, I’ll repeat it in other cities. If someone catches on and complains, I’ll just bribe the mayor to look the other way. Or I’ll buy the local newspaper and have them paint me in a positive light.
I agree that blindly throwing money at a problem is not a good solution. Unfortunately this basic insight is often abused into an argument that spending on social programs shouldn’t be increased at all, or worse should be decreased.
Well targeted social spending is actually profitable for the government. Healthy, housed, educated citizens produce a lot of value.
Most of what you describe here I’d call either corruption or monopolistic actions. These are area where regulation should exist with harsh punishments, where the punishment is severe enough to not make the crime worth doing. Some laws exist today, but they take too long to be enforced, if at all, and the punishment is usually minor, and the damage is already done.
Agreed. But capitalism provides both the incentives and the means for corruption.
Why do you think it is that punishments are minor and sporadically enforced? Could it have something to do with people who have so much money that they can influence laws?
Do you think it’s unreasonable to say, as a way to combat monopolies and corruption: “You can’t have that much money. There’s clearly no other use for such sums than gaining undue power. Past [insert specific net worth maximum], 100% of what you make will be taxed and/or distributed to your workers”?.
There are always incentives for corruption. That’s what laws and regulations are for. That is required regardless of the system in place.
As far as having too much money. All the richest people are rich on paper, they don’t make anything until the asset is sold. It’s taxed at that point. I don’t think we can or should change that. Yearly income caps don’t make sense for these people, as it’s not income until sold. Taxing the net worth will just incentivize people to hide their assets. If it were to work as intended, there is still the potential for corruption from those taking the money. Where does the money go? How many palms are greased along the way.?
To bring it down to a smaller level. I bought a pair of shoes at retail years ago. They were $90. I only wore them a little inside (I wore them like slippers), so they were is almost new condition. A few years after I bought them sneaker collecting went nuts and out of curiosity I looked them up… $600. Now it’s down around $100-200. I didn’t sell the shoes. On paper my “investment” was worth $510 more. Should I be taxed on that? On paper today that “investment” may only be $10 more. Do I get a refund on the taxes I paid or am I screwed because I didn’t sell during the hype?
Yes, there are always incentives for corruption. But capitalism ads to and intensifies those incentives. People with unfathomable amounts of wealth have power over others. And they’re not elected, you can’t vote them out. They can fuck your life and there’s really not much you can do about it.
Maybe the richest people don’t “make anything” until the asset is sold, but their incredible net worth still gives them power. That’s the issue at the end of the day.
Many critics of anti-capitalists seem to think workers are envious of the money that the ultra-wealthy have. I don’t think this is the case.
It would perhaps make sense to be envious of millionaires who can afford anything their heart desires and don’t have to work at a job they hate in order to be financially secure. I think for most people, that second part would already be more than enough. But to be envious of billionaires? I think this is not the norm. What billionaires have over millionaires is power. Most people don’t want power, they just want a happy, meaningful life.
The problem with capitalism is that it facilitates and encourages those few that do want power. For most of them it would be more beneficial for society if they didn’t get it.
The rich are already hiding their wealth. Trillions in offshore accounts suggests they don’t need to be taxed aggressively in order to try to hoard their money like dragons.
Again, I was suggesting we don’t let it get that far. What’s the billion dollar asset you can’t make liquid? A company? If it’s that valuable you should simply not be allowed to own/control it alone. Really, if it’s that big it should be broken up in the first place.
Where does the money go? To the government, same as it does now.
I’m not really sure I understand the hand greasing fear: the government gets the money anyway, it’s in the law. What’s the scenario here? Rich guy bribes IRS bureaucrat to not take his money? That will be a lot harder when the rich guy doesn’t have billions and the IRS bureaucrat has enough money (and good enough social support) for a comfortable life.
I also think speculation isn’t good and we should get rid of it. I really don’t care about your $600 sneakers and neither should the government. But at a scale that matters (not hundreds but hundreds of thousands - if you’re buying 1000 sneakers you’re also not in the clear) you should not be allowed to buy things for the purpose of re-selling them, except if you’re actually providing a service (like a supermarket, for example) - and even then I think there should be limits on how much you’re allowed to mark up the products vs. what you paid for them. I think in general there should be a cap on margins. You shouldn’t be able to ask for 10x what it cost you to make a product, especially if you make millions of them.