Capitalism is criticized a lot on here (especially by American users, it seems to me). Most of that seems well-founded, but I also have the feeling that most of these complaints are simply venting and not the first step to improvement.

So I would like to know what specific changes you (especially Americans) want to see from lawmakers.

  • CanadaPlusEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Alright, so my apologies for the wall of text, but I’d argue it’s a credit to you that you gave me this much to respond to.

    Firstly, you’ve just caused anyone with more liquid money than that to pull their money out of American banks and drop it in Canada

    To be clear, I’m Canadian. And yeah, the policy would have to be billed based on wealth as of a year ago or something so capital flight couldn’t happen. Capital flight is also why I think less severe wealth taxes are a bad idea.

    Secondly, “wealth” consists of a lot more than liquid cash, and isn’t even determined by you - but rather by what other people would pay for your stuff, which changes all the time.

    Sure, and assessing stuff for tax, insurance or collateral purposes is famously prone to fuckery - just look at notable court cases going on right now. We make do as a civilisation, though.

    Essentially every single plot of land in Manhattan and many other major American cities is worth more than $9,999,999, so what happens to that?

    They would have to be owned by multiple shareholders. I bet many already are.

    If a new company is founded, funded by investors, creates hundreds of jobs, and the value of some stakeholder’s shares pokes past $10 million, what exactly are you proposing should happen? Do we just pretend that the value stopped rising? Does the government seize the excess shares? Are the stakeholders forced to sell?

    Basically, they get the difference on their tax bill, and it’s their prerogative how they cover it. They probably would have to sell.

    Maybe they could get some sort of special recognition or ceremony for “winning capitalism”.

    How do you handle the massive decline in market investment that this would cause, not to say the total collapse in capital gains tax income?

    Government budgets would need heavy adjustment to accommodate this and several other policies I advocate for. Income taxes work the best, I’d chuck most of the other ones including capital gains and corporate. As for market investment, people who hold less total wealth than that account for most of the shares owned by natural persons, I’m pretty sure, so the transition won’t be too chaotic.

    These are all good points, nationality aside, but I’m a nerd and I have thought about them. Unfortunately, I’m also a nobody so it doesn’t really matter, but it’s nice to be able to say I have something constructive to add when a person like OP asks about it. When it comes to real life activism I focus most on basic income, because the poor end of class bites much harder.