Wealth & Income Inequality

Silva said:
oh man we never considered this, just look at countries like Sweden, everyone left when they realised America has lower taxes
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To be fair to Cal, I know quite a few scientists (some of them being some of the best in the world) who have left universities (or even NASA) to work for companies like Google and co. While getting higher salaries has played a part, also having more resources and better teams has played a large part in their decisions too.

So, I guess that the reality is a bit more complex than the extreme positions Eboue (and to some degree you) and Cal have.
 
Silva said:
oh man we never considered this, just look at countries like Sweden, everyone left when they realised America has lower taxes
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Sweden does NOT tax to the point that after some threshold it becomes totally useless trying to own more.

Ingvar Kamprad was worth over $50 billion before his death.
 
Revan said:
To be fair to Cal, I know quite a few scientists (some of them being some of the best in the world) who have left universities (or even NASA) to work for companies like Google and co. While getting higher salaries has played a part, also having more resources and better teams has played a large part in their decisions too.

So, I guess that the reality is a bit more complex than the extreme positions Eboue (and to some degree you) and Cal have.
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Jumping companies isn't the same as jumping countries, you don't lose much if bill gates lived in Malta. But you do lose out if Malta's government had spent half a century investing in these skills instead of yours.
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
Regional advantage was more important than any single billionaire's contributions and none of them could have built their fortune without the Department of Defense and a dozen top academic institutions doing the heavy lifting with DARPANET. You could literally delete any tech billionaire from history and there would absolutely have been others that filled the game.

The infrastructure was light years more important to any of those innovations than any individual person.
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It is still a bit before the tech things you usually think about. The likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber etc.

Of course that these billionaires wouldn't exist without internet, same as internet wouldn't exist without electricity, and you can make the argument ad infinitum.
 
Silva said:
yeah the government you div, like they do now by giving paltry money to things like NASA which have outperformed your sociopathic friends with fewer resources
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Place your trust in the government? :lol: so Trump can give even bigger tax cuts to himself and his friends?
Revan said:
Yeah, I am advocating that anyone who is getting wealth on a country but doesn't want to pay taxes on that country, should get his entire wealth confiscated and then get jailed. It is pretty crazy that for the average Joe like me and you, avoiding taxes is a crime and not only you get fined more than what you had to pay in taxes, but you can go to jail, but for ultra rich people it is fine to not pay billions in taxes that they own the state.
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Avoiding tax is not a crime, evading tax is.

Most people try to avoid tax.
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
Regional advantage was more important than any single billionaire's contributions and none of them could have built their fortune without the Department of Defense and a dozen top academic institutions doing the heavy lifting with DARPANET. You could literally delete any tech billionaire from history and there would absolutely have been others that filled the game.

The infrastructure was light years more important to any of those innovations than any individual person.
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What's the logic behind this argument ? Has someone suggested today's billionaires invented the internet ?
 
Revan said:
To be fair to Cal, I know quite a few scientists (some of them being some of the best in the world) who have left universities (or even NASA) to work for companies like Google and co. While getting higher salaries has played a part, also having more resources and better teams has played a large part in their decisions too.

So, I guess that the reality is a bit more complex than the extreme positions Eboue (and to some degree you) and Cal have.
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How is my position at all extreme? I'm not advocating complete free market economy.
 
Raoul said:
What's the logic behind this argument ? Has someone suggested today's billionaires invented the internet ?
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Cal asserted that its the billionaire who are the important innovators in 'human history'. That is demonstrably untrue.
 
Cal? said:
Sweden does NOT tax to the point that after some threshold it becomes totally useless trying to own more.

Ingvar Kamprad was worth over $50 billion before his death.
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It makes it much harder than some other countries though. And surprisingly - or not - it has a very high standard of living, much higher than US for example.

I would want a much more extreme version of taxing though. Not to the point of 100% taxing after some threshold, but to the point of becoming that difficult to earn even more, that totally discourages people to do so.

At some stage, owning too much money becomes just a 'who has a bigger dick context'. If Jeff Bezos owned 15b instead of 150b, nothing on his life would change a single bit. If you spread those 135b to other people though, millions of lives are significantly improved.
 
Silva said:
if only there was another recession that killed people so we could get rid of him and bring back the ACA, that's the dream baby
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Do you fail to grasp that recession are like death and taxes? They are unavoidable, it will happen sooner or later.
 
Revan said:
It is still a bit before the tech things you usually think about. The likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber etc.

Of course that these billionaires wouldn't exist without internet, same as internet wouldn't exist without electricity, and you can make the argument ad infinitum.
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Indeed. And that history debunks Cal?'s assertions that its the richest people that drive history with innovation as that is self-evidently false.
 
Cal? said:
Avoiding tax is not a crime, evading tax is.

Most people try to avoid tax.
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In planet Earth, what is a crime and what isn't has a lot to do on whom controls the politicians. Hint: it is those who have a lot of money.
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
Cal asserted that its the billionaire who are the important innovators in 'human history'. That is demonstrably untrue.
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I said many advancements happened because of billionaires, not all advancements happened because of them.
 
Cal? said:
How is my position at all extreme? I'm not advocating complete free market economy.
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You are making the exact same argument the Ayn Rand followers make. Ignoring every nuance that has been presented to you in this thread and instead just repeating meaningless dogma like "profit motive" blah blah which is just a red herring as you completely failed to even acknowledge the arguments.
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
Cal asserted that its the billionaire who are the important innovators in 'human history'. That is demonstrably untrue.
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True. They're obviously not by themselves. I just didn't see how the invention of the internet tied into that as its merely an infrastructure that allows entrepreneurs to do their thing.
 
Revan said:
You're essentially giving the same arguments that Tea Party gives.
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This started with @Eboue saying all billionaires deserve hate that I disagree with.

Followed by his suggestion that billionaires get executed.

I have not advocated for tax cuts or anything like that, just merely that many billionaires have made big contributions to the world.
oneniltothearsenal said:
You are making the exact same argument the Ayn Rand followers make. Ignoring every nuance that has been presented to you in this thread and instead just repeating meaningless dogma like "profit motive" blah blah which is just a red herring as you completely failed to even acknowledge the arguments.
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As above
 
Cal? said:
I said many advancements happened because of billionaires, not all advancements happened because of them.
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You completely over-emphasized the importance of billionaires and the super-rich to innovation. You even used the exact phrase "in human history". There is not a single innovation that was necessarily dependent on any billionaire. What is far, far more important to accomplishing innovation is public access and infrastructure not bending over backwards to give the rich everything they want as you seem to be arguing for.
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
Cal asserted that its the billionaire who are the important innovators in 'human history'. That is demonstrably untrue.
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On history of course. Nowadays, I think it is much more complex.

For example, I believe that humanity will go to other planets driven by private sector, and I believe that there is more likely that private companies will crack the fusion problem, rather than some country.

Science and engineering has become too complicated to be solved from a lone wolf, and for big problems, you need giant teams made by some of the smartest people in the planet. If some tech visionary is able to group them together (by offering high salaries, good conditions and infrastructure) and then they crack some important problem, I guess that the visionary/CEO should have a large part of the benefit for it. As should the company.
 
Silva said:
How do you explain European countries having a better standard of living that America with fewer billionares?
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So increase taxes to the level of Sweden or Norway, did I ever argue against that?

I was merely arguing against Eboue's assertion that all billionaires should be hated and no one should be allowed to become ultra rich.
 
Before Raoul clean up the thread, i just wanna say one thing:

Billionaires are cnuts because they have the power to change the system for the better, but they prefer to live with all the benefits of the current system instead.
 
Revan said:
On history of course. Nowadays, I think it is much more complex.

For example, I believe that humanity will go to other planets driven by private sector, and I believe that there is more likely that private companies will crack the fusion problem, rather than some country.

Science and engineering has become too complicated to be solved from a lone wolf, and for big problems, you need giant teams made by some of the smartest people in the planet. If some tech visionary is able to group them together (by offering high salaries, good conditions and infrastructure) and then they crack some important problem, I guess that the visionary/CEO should have a large part of the benefit for it. As should the company.
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Without public(meaning even the most poor) access to education this will simply take more time and not be accomplished in the most fair and efficient manner possible.

Its really obvious. If only the richest 25% of the world are getting the education required to make advances then you are slowing down human advanced compared to what it would be if that was more like 99% of the world's human have access to the kind of education required to make advancements.

In other words, even the most greedy selfish private companies benefit from having the most educated population possible. And we are far past the point where someone can self-learn at certain levels. For technological and scientific advances, the population needs access to the best education. We are probably already less advanced than we could be as a species due to the limited access created by the most greedy trying to protect their wealth and not let nature evolve naturally.
 
Cal? said:
So increase taxes to the level of Sweden or Norway, did I ever argue against that?

I was merely arguing against Eboue's assertion that all billionaires should be hated and no one should be allowed to become ultra rich.
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those billionares are the reason your taxes are so low
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
Without public(meaning even the most poor) access to education this will simply take more time and not be accomplishment in the most fair and efficient manner possible.

Its really obvious. If only the richest 25% of the world are getting the education required to make advances then you are slowing down human advanced compared to what it would be if that was more like 99% of the world's human have access to the kind of education required to make advancements.

In other words, even the most greedy selfish private companies benefit from having the most educated population possible.
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This is absolutely true. I think that a more benign system exists when there is less inequality, but that doesn't mean that there should be no billionaires. Systems like Switzerland or Norway are in fact very good, and that should be the medium-term target.
 
Silva said:
yes those are the only options cal, only full communism where you're in a gulag is a system where people don't hoarded 150 billion dollars of wealth sarcasticsmilie.jpg
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How does individuals becoming ultra rich affect the economic cycle? Recessions will happen as long as there is economic activity.
 
Cal? said:
The only way not to ever have a recession is full communism. :rolleyes:
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That is an extremely narrow view. In the modern history of this planet, there have been essentially three systems: capitalism (US), communism (USSR) and absolute monarchies (Saudi Arabia) with some slight variations. Just because capitalism is the best of these three, it doesn't mean that better systems cannot potentially exist and we should be content with what we have. To cite my friend YB, 'what is the point if we don't aim to leave the world a better place than we found'.
 
Revan said:
This is absolutely true. I think that a more benign system exists when there is less inequality, but that doesn't mean that there should be no billionaires. Systems like Switzerland or Norway are in fact very good, and that should be the medium-term target.
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there is a connected problem and that is inherited wealth and how that can lock out access. Its immoral in my opinion to have a system without inheritance tax. Rags to rags in three generations needs to be a possibility. Right now too many systemic protections are place to privilege the children of the rich. Upward and downward mobility needs to exist within a system.
 
Cal? said:
How does individuals becoming ultra rich affect the economic cycle? Recessions will happen as long as there is economic activity.
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because they own almost everything, economic cycles wouldn't be so brutal if wealth were better distributed among everyone, people wouldn't die needless deaths because they don't have the means to live
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
there is a connected problem and that is inherited wealth and how that can lock out access. Its immoral in my opinion to have a system without inheritance tax. Rags to rags in three generations needs to be a possibility. Right now too many systemic protections are place to privilege the children of the rich. Upward and downward mobility needs to exist within a system.
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Oh yeah, I think that a large part of inherited money should in fact be taxed. Not all of it (that is ridiculous, considering that family is a motivation for most people and they work hard to make the lives of their children better), but some part (especially after some threshold *) should be taxed.

* For example, I don't advocate taxing someone who inherited a house, but someone who inherited 10, should definitely be taxed.
 
@Cal? you say you are not for unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism but almost every argument you make here I have heard only from Ayn Rand followers in the past.

What exactly differentiates your views from those of Ayn Rand, Hayek and von Mises?
 
Revan said:
That is an extremely narrow view. In the modern history of this planet, there have been essentially three systems: capitalism (US), communism (USSR) and absolute monarchies (Saudi Arabia) with some slight variations. Just because capitalism is the best of these three, it doesn't mean that better systems cannot potentially exist and we should be content with what we have. To cite my friend YB, 'what is the point if we don't aim to leave the world a better place than we found'.
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There have been plenty of variations, the more socialist models in part of Europe, there have been attempts at government controlled economies.

None escapes recessions.
 
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