United States Politics Thread 46

[Ares Land]

I'm not terribly convinced by that counter-argument. (EDIT: I mean Hallow's) Talking about unrealized capital gains is I think a little specious. Wealthy investors are not stupid; they don't tend to own capital they have no hope to draw gains from.

It's not aimed at Elon Musk or indeed any particular individual (I know it's marketed as such, but I think that's an error) As I said, wealth accumulation is purely mechanical. The one aim is to slow down that mechanism a little and to try and cut the feedback loop. (And to raise a bit of state revenue more fairly than just taxing the poor and the middle class.)

Now you point a problem with corporate mismanagement. Fair point: we do have problems with corporate management. And it turns out the problem is so severe that -- supposedly -- you can't introduce a reform without completely breaking the system. That's a call for urgent action! Your solution is apparently to just do nothing, and let the problems fix themselves. That didn't work; that's not surprising, doing nothing never fixes anything. I'd suggest instead reforming corporate management. Getting different people on the board for instance: I'm really into stakeholder management, and I think corporate boards would work better with employee representation, or indeed customers or other interested parties. I wouldn't be adverse to company founders getting an extra say, either.

Another point. A wealth tax doesn't need to be spectacular. Ideally it should be like compound interest, low-profile and slow but steady. We don't necessarily need huge rates. This should leave more than enough time to adjust.

One last point: we really need to break out of that current train of thought, which basically goes: things are as they are, if we try to fix them, we'll only make things worse. It seems very popular these days to bemoan the excesses of capitalism but maintain that nothing can be done. That's a recipe for disaster.

[Linguoboy]

And yet they have no problem accepting millions in State or Federal funding for infrastructure projects, which is far less justifiable. It's in the common interest for all children to be well-educated, wherever they live. It's not in the common interest for people who want to live on one-acre lots to have their roads, transit, electric, water, sewerage, gas, etc. heavily subsidised so they don't have to pay the real cost of low-density living.

Getting big mad unprompted about people having space on which to live is an extremely normal thing to do.

Who's mad about people having space? What irks me is people who are already wealthy draining more wealth from cities in order to subsidise sprawl. Suburbs don't pay for themselves. With rare exceptions, they don't have enough of a tax base to cover infrastructure costs; they've been financed by kicking the can down the road and then gobbling up state and federal funds when the bills finally fall due. Where does the cash come from? Not from other suburbs, from denser, more cost-efficient settlements.

So again, live on one-acre lots if you want--but then either deal with septic tanks, well water, and driving on two-line rural highways or pay the real cost for all the amenities you demand.

It actually is in the common interest for the government to enable its subjects to have better lives

Sure, but why should a lucky few have much better lives at the expense of the many? That's not "common interest", that's just elites living off the labour of others like they've always done.

[Hallow XIII]

Redistributing equity in corporations away from wealthy individuals is the stupidest idea I have ever heard. Publically-traded corporations are already subject to a lot of pressure to behave extremely shortsightedly, because stockholders win when the market price of shares in the corporation rises; executives in these corporations being remunerated in shares thus incentivizes goosing the stock price in the short term to sell at a profit and then leave after a few years with no regard for the long-term health of the organization.

You have a point: American corporate management prioritizes stock value above anything else. However, the eternal Republican policy of giving rich people more money does nothing about this problem and indeed makes it worse.

The people most interested in the "long-term health of the organization" are the employees and the local community. The rich owner, who also wants his shares to rise quickly in value, has no interest in helping them, and directly benefits when they're screwed. The only way to make their voices heard is to give them a share of either managerial or ownership power.

If the company is privately held and not traded on the stock market, there is no incentive for the owner to want to goose its "value", as any sale of the company would be at prices that are difficult to predict. He obviously wants the company to be profitable, since that is how he derives his income, but the perspectives of someone owning stock in a publically traded corporation and someone owning all of or the majority of a private corporation are very different. I also think that while I would prefer to do away with equity markets entirely, individual majority owners of public companies are more likely to treat companies as long-term assets, especially if they founded them.

The idea that employees care most about a company seems prima facie silly to me -- if you don't own something, you're simply not going to care for its future in the same way. You care about continued employment and thus indirectly about the continuation of business, but that's not really a good proxy for "health"; I think I can assert without adducing further evidence that almost any company run for the benefit of its employees will deliver shoddy product, at least to the extent it can get away with it, which gets you strategyless floundering until the company is suddenly caught off-guard by a competitor and dies.

If you are now also going to force individual majority shareholders of public corporations or even owners of private corporations to surrender control of their corporations to large institutional investors,

Who is suggesting this, exactly? Most schemes of redistribution redistribute equity to the people actually doing the work, who, as Zompist points out, have a very strong interest in the continued health of the organisation.

Chairwoman of the Fed Janet Yellen, famously, whom I consider quite a bit more relevant than angry randos on the Internet.

...you will have made it completely impossible for any large commercial venture to operate for the long term.

Do we even want many particularly large commercial ventures?

In the continental United States you're not going to get around having them unless you're either on Ted Kaczynski levels of wanting to tank technology or are a new species of States' Rights extremist. The obvious proposal of nationalizing any such concern would get you the same as you have now, but worse.

The fact that the proposed measure is a tax on unrealized capital gains is telling -- it's sold politically on the back of resentment of publically visible billionaires

Bezos fleeces his employees and uses the proceeds to fly into space. The one thing he has earned in his life is public resentment.

Not wrong, but I'm still against taking the opinions of resentful people as input to any political process.

but the average american is nowhere near as likely to benefit from such a tax as are asset managers who can buy increased shares of corporations that their current owners would otherwise not give up to the market.

So we should eliminate asset management firms? Sounds good to me. Let's go ahead with eating the rich.

"Eat the rich" isn't a plan. Any sensible plan is probably going to involve confiscating the wealth of Zillionaires and dissolving firms that only exist to siphon wealth out of the economy, but if your entire idea is to want to go kill the rich people you're still going to be in exactly the same position when the house of cards that is current American civilization crashes on top of you. In fact, it'll probably make it worse.

[Ares Land]

"Eat the rich" isn't a plan. Any sensible plan is probably going to involve confiscating the wealth of Zillionaires and dissolving firms that only exist to siphon wealth out of the economy, but if your entire idea is to want to go kill the rich people you're still going to be in exactly the same position when the house of cards that is current American civilization crashes on top of you. In fact, it'll probably make it worse.

That's a bit odd. What is your plan for confiscating that wealth, when even taxing it a little strikes you as silly and unfeasible?

For that matter, confiscating wealth outright -- or dissolving firms is unconstitutional, not only in the US, but in just about any democracy. Good luck with that without violent revolution and going full Leninist.

[Hallow XIII]

"Eat the rich" isn't a plan. Any sensible plan is probably going to involve confiscating the wealth of Zillionaires and dissolving firms that only exist to siphon wealth out of the economy, but if your entire idea is to want to go kill the rich people you're still going to be in exactly the same position when the house of cards that is current American civilization crashes on top of you. In fact, it'll probably make it worse.

That's a bit odd. What is your plan for confiscating that wealth, when even taxing it a little strikes you as silly and unfeasible?

For that matter, confiscating wealth outright -- or dissolving firms is unconstitutional, not only in the US, but in just about any democracy. Good luck with that without violent revolution and going full Leninist.

Yeah I pick "military coup". The difficult part is figuring out how to orchestrate one, especially in the country where I live. In the US it's also damn near impossible but it strikes me as more doable, provided you have 20 years worth of patience and a bit of luck so you can work your way up the ranks in the infantry.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

If the company is privately held and not traded on the stock market, there is no incentive for the owner to want to goose its "value", as any sale of the company would be at prices that are difficult to predict.

To the contrary, they would certainly want to do this if they have plans to sell; the means would simply be different. The "goosing" might not be possible to the same extent, but anybody looking to sell something will typically want to get the most money they can for it.

He obviously wants the company to be profitable, since that is how he derives his income, but the perspectives of someone owning stock in a publically traded corporation and someone owning all of or the majority of a private corporation are very different. I also think that while I would prefer to do away with equity markets entirely, individual majority owners of public companies are more likely to treat companies as long-term assets, especially if they founded them.

Though their owning them like this is extremely problematic still. I have heard no believable justification for their owning them simply as a function of having founded them. A corporation is not a creative expression of a single person, it's a collaboration by its very nature, and people who do the work not being the primary beneficiaries of their labour is an enormous problem now. I don't see how this will do anything to mend that.

The idea that employees care most about a company seems prima facie silly to me -- if you don't own something, you're simply not going to care for its future in the same way.

Which is why they should own them, of course.

You care about continued employment and thus indirectly about the continuation of business,

Actually, I don't. If the business fails, I go and find another job, maybe draw some unemployment in-between.

I think I can assert without adducing further evidence

If you have to put it this way, I'd like some evidence.

that almost any company run for the benefit of its employees will deliver shoddy product, at least to the extent it can get away with it, which gets you strategyless floundering until the company is suddenly caught off-guard by a competitor and dies.

Companies run for the benefit of shareholders already do this.

If you are now also going to force individual majority shareholders of public corporations or even owners of private corporations to surrender control of their corporations to large institutional investors,

Who is suggesting this, exactly? Most schemes of redistribution redistribute equity to the people actually doing the work, who, as Zompist points out, have a very strong interest in the continued health of the organisation.

Chairwoman of the Fed Janet Yellen, famously, whom I consider quite a bit more relevant than angry randos on the Internet.
[/quote]
I'd never heard of her suggesting this. Where did she do it?

This is also, incidentally, not something I think anybody taking part in this discussion suggested, which was is what I was meaning to query.

...you will have made it completely impossible for any large commercial venture to operate for the long term.

Do we even want many particularly large commercial ventures?

In the continental United States you're not going to get around having them unless you're either on Ted Kaczynski levels of wanting to tank technology or are a new species of States' Rights extremist.

How do you figure this?

The obvious proposal of nationalizing any such concern would get you the same as you have now, but worse.

Or this, in fact? I prefer breakups to nationalisation except in certain key sectors, but on what do you base this, and how do you determine it to be worse than the current economic situation?

Bezos fleeces his employees and uses the proceeds to fly into space. The one thing he has earned in his life is public resentment.

Not wrong, but I'm still against taking the opinions of resentful people as input to any political process.

Why not? How are the opinions of those affected by a problem not the most relevant on the matter?

but the average american is nowhere near as likely to benefit from such a tax as are asset managers who can buy increased shares of corporations that their current owners would otherwise not give up to the market.

So we should eliminate asset management firms? Sounds good to me. Let's go ahead with eating the rich.

"Eat the rich" isn't a plan.

Sure it is. Break up corporations, tax and force the sale of excessive wealth, setting limits on the amount of wealth accretion individuals, families, and businesses may have, and so on and so on.

Any sensible plan is probably going to involve confiscating the wealth of Zillionaires and dissolving firms that only exist to siphon wealth out of the economy, but if your entire idea is to want to go kill the rich people you're still going to be in exactly the same position when the house of cards that is current American civilization crashes on top of you. In fact, it'll probably make it worse.

What a bizarre strawman. "Eat the rich" does not generally mean "engage in literal human cannibalism", in my experience at least. I also don't like the term "confiscation", since it plays into the right-wing fiction that billionnaires earned their wealth, rather than extracting it through coercive means ("work within the capitalist system or starve and be exposed to the elements" is an excellent, but grossly immoral, motivator).

[Ares Land]

Yeah I pick "military coup". The difficult part is figuring out how to orchestrate one, especially in the country where I live. In the US it's also damn near impossible but it strikes me as more doable, provided you have 20 years worth of patience and a bit of luck so you can work your way up the ranks in the infantry.

That definitely doesn't sound like an angry Internet rando, no, not at all

Did any plan involving a military coup ever end well?

[rotting bones]

Militaries are incentivized to produce the kind of government Myanmar had until recently, and still does to an extent.

(Note: None of these objections apply to anything I said in the Capitalism thread.)

[Torco]

About key functions of society, have you thought of state investment in worker cooperatives to provide them funding for things that are necessary for society but which are not profitable in and of themselves? E.g. in capitalist countries like the US, much of what the government does is in practice contracted out to other entities.(...)

I don't mean to turn this into the communism thread, but I mean...

I'm not against state investment in things... if you're gonna have a society revolve around money, it's kind of a sine qua non: profit doesn't work that well... But that's kind of the point, isn't it? sure, you can keep the profit motive and just try to steer it here or there, but that's not socialism, that's just public spending. Profit has problems and is a suboptimal system, and we should try to figure out better ones. I bet a couple hundred geeks could come up with a fine computer system that allocates production without all the 'oh and also bob gets like a borizillion dollars' externalities, which generate immense waste.... not to mention the unnecesary human suffering that the profit motive as the organizing principle of society causes: poverty, homelessness, stress, bad work environments, environmental degradation, lack of access of people to very important things... you can try to sort of ameliorate this or that through subsidies, taxing the bobs of the world and putting money into fixing some of the people's lives his profitseeking destroyed, but it sure would be better if the damage hadn't been done in the first place. But I mean, yeah, federations of coops are going to probably be more nice and cool that megacorps, but if you make them compete for who gets the most profits in order to have the system allocate resources to them, they're quickly going to become something kind of similar: worker ownership is great, but it doesn't stop people following their incentives.

and like... big C communism wasn't that bad, it was a first attempt and all in all those guys did pretty good. the first attemps at democracy weren't all that great either, early Chile was literally, legally, explicitly a class dictatorship, and a lot of places had literal slaves in concentration camps as a core part of their economic system. sure, stalin was pretty tyrannical, and the gulags were no joke, and the governments of the soviet union, and yugoslavia, and china, all have done and do now very bad things, unconscionable things sometimes. but so do all the bougie governments now, too, as it is widely known.

but, on the other hand, they had their merits too (not saying western democracies don't). the soviets... they stopped the nazis, made great advances in worker's rights and standards of living (which I remind you, are the overwhelming majority of people, if their situation gets better that is amazingly good) not just in material terms* but also in spiritual terms**

More: show

* but they did do amazingly, though! the soviet everyman went from an illiterate peasant serf living in misery to a not-well-off-but-decent-to-do factory worker with an appartment, some time for vacation, decent healthcare coverage and opportunities to get an education and maybe choose what he does for a living. that's not nothing. and they did it very fast too!
** or psychological, if you prefer: it is good to be forced to work less hours, to have vacation time and pre and post natal PTO and it's good for women to join the workforce and so on and so forth, unions are good, etcetera. many older russians today look back at the soviet days as the good old days, when everyone had jobs and life was less difficult. many of these things were spearheaded by big c communists, and by big c communist governments.

don't get me wrong, market socialism would be *better* than what we have now, but not by that much.

[Travis B.]

About key functions of society, have you thought of state investment in worker cooperatives to provide them funding for things that are necessary for society but which are not profitable in and of themselves? E.g. in capitalist countries like the US, much of what the government does is in practice contracted out to other entities.(...)

I'm not against state investment in things... if you're gonna have a society revolve around money, it's kind of a sine qua non: profit doesn't work that well... But that's kind of the point, isn't it? sure, you can keep the profit motive and just try to steer it here or there, but that's not socialism, that's just public spending. Profit has problems and is a suboptimal system, and we should try to figure out better ones. I bet a couple hundred geeks could come up with a fine computer system that allocates production without all the 'oh and also bob gets like a borizillion dollars' externalities, which generate immense waste.... not to mention the unnecesary human suffering that the profit motive as the organizing principle of society causes: poverty, homelessness, stress, bad work environments, environmental degradation, lack of access of people to very important things... you can try to sort of ameliorate this or that through subsidies, taxing the bobs of the world and putting money into fixing some of the people's lives his profitseeking destroyed, but it sure would be better if the damage hadn't been done in the first place. But I mean, yeah, federations of coops are going to probably be more nice and cool that megacorps, but if you make them compete for who gets the most profits in order to have the system allocate resources to them, they're quickly going to become something kind of similar: worker ownership is great, but it doesn't stop people following their incentives.

The thing is that market economies have shown that they can largely provide for the needs of the populace of a modern society (especially in the case of social democracy), while the non-market economies that have worked have all been in pre-modern societies, with most attempts at non-market economies within modern societies failing miserably (look at living standards in most big-C Communist countries). I am skeptical that central planning can effectively provide for both the needs of the entire populace and the necessary supply chains necessary for making everything work, where with any hitches things will quickly fall apart. Of course, market economies do not ensure this either, as we see with the current chip shortage, but at least market economies have shown that they can work significantly better than the centrally-planned economies that have been attempted.

[Torco]

I disagree. the fact that planned economies didn't work better than market economies during the 20th century does not entail in an of itself that planned economies don't work: they do. they didn't send a guy to the moon, but they were close: no non-functioning economic system beats the premier global superpower at the time in a space race. and sure, china's planned phase went extremely poorly, but people's standards of living in the soviet union rose, they didn't fall: and after the switch to capitalism they went down. there's this famous CIA doc that says that soviets ate better than americans at one time, and it was not a fair race let me tell you: the east was always the underdog.

And besides, no one's saying that planned is the only route to go. surely there are systems that are neither the soviet union nor capitalism. we could have, just as an example off the top of my head, something like this: imagine one of those p l a t f o r m s were open source and changes to the code were decided on by every user democratically... or by a body of coders elected by the userbase: if you were to do that to, say, the economy, boom, you've decapitalized, decommodified the exchange of goods and services. you could have coops of programmers compete for the franchise to make this or that fix to the thing, mostly tweaking parameters I bet, and you could build a wants-and-needs/work coordinator system that isn't profit based. hell, you could have a bunch of them, and have the c o m p e t e for users if we think competition is as great as they say it is.

[Nortaneous]

While we can debate whether or not that was legal (the Supreme Court waffled extremely on it), wealth taxes (a property tax is one) have a long precedent. Unless you're about to argue property tax is also unconstitutional (good luck with that), I don't see why you felt the need to comment.

The constitutionality of a wealth tax has been extensively debated in the literature; thus far the consensus is such that even NPR says it probably wouldn't be.

And yet they have no problem accepting millions in State or Federal funding for infrastructure projects, which is far less justifiable. It's in the common interest for all children to be well-educated, wherever they live. It's not in the common interest for people who want to live on one-acre lots to have their roads, transit, electric, water, sewerage, gas, etc. heavily subsidised so they don't have to pay the real cost of low-density living.

Getting big mad unprompted about people having space on which to live is an extremely normal thing to do.

Who's mad about people having space? What irks me is people who are already wealthy draining more wealth from cities in order to subsidise sprawl. Suburbs don't pay for themselves. With rare exceptions, they don't have enough of a tax base to cover infrastructure costs; they've been financed by kicking the can down the road and then gobbling up state and federal funds when the bills finally fall due. Where does the cash come from? Not from other suburbs, from denser, more cost-efficient settlements.

So again, live on one-acre lots if you want--but then either deal with septic tanks, well water, and driving on two-line rural highways or pay the real cost for all the amenities you demand.

Oh no, well water! The municipal water here isn't potable, and not for lack of a tax base - this is one of the most heavily Democratic places in the country, as well as one of the richest, and most people who live here work for the federal government.

And is good governance really about cost efficiency?

It actually is in the common interest for the government to enable its subjects to have better lives

Sure, but why should a lucky few have much better lives at the expense of the many? That's not "common interest", that's just elites living off the labour of others like they've always done.
[/quote]
The vast majority of the US population lives in single-family homes.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

While we can debate whether or not that was legal (the Supreme Court waffled extremely on it), wealth taxes (a property tax is one) have a long precedent. Unless you're about to argue property tax is also unconstitutional (good luck with that), I don't see why you felt the need to comment.

The constitutionality of a wealth tax has been extensively debated in the literature; thus far the consensus is such that even NPR says it probably wouldn't be.

A Google search turns up wildly varying results on the subject. The "Enumeration Clause" noting that "direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers" is clearly in reference to capitations. Further, only a capitation, a tax on real property, or on personal property, would be considered a "direct tax" for purposes of constitutionality. Income is already none of these things, and that an amendment was required to circumvent an incompetent ruling speaks more of the problems of judicial review (beyond the scope of the present conversation) than anything else. Financial instruments are not "real property", and whether or not they are "personal property" is a point of debate, though I don't think they are, being nonphysical objects that serve a purely commercial function, and are not for personal use, nor for consumption, as an item of furniture, or a piece of food. The answer is, simply looking at the text of the document, together with established precedent, would be, "probably yes, it is constitutional, but the present Supreme Court, containing at least two unqualified members, would be apt to misrule on the matter".

The vast majority of the US population lives in single-family homes.

64.2%. While "vast" is an ambiguous term, I would expect a "vast majority" to be over 80%. Home ownership rates are also declining.

Also, answer the question. Why should a privileged few own vastly more?

[Nortaneous]

A Google search turns up wildly varying results on the subject.

A Google search turns up wildly varying results on, to pick the last thing I read about, the mass extinction of North American megafauna. Some sources say it probably had something to do with the expansion of humans into North America, which it obviously did. Others say that it just happened to be approximately coterminous with Beringian expansion and was really caused by some kind of unspecified climate event that left no other record than the extinction of the megafauna, because, like, everyone who got here before Columbus or maybe Leif Ericsson lived in perfect harmony with the environment, man.

Further, only a capitation, a tax on real property, or on personal property, would be considered a "direct tax" for purposes of constitutionality.

That "only" would require the Supreme Court to rule that the currently established list of forms of taxation known to be direct is exhaustive. This would be as difficult to defend as the Mormon doctrine of hot drinks, which is manifestly ridiculous to anyone who isn't a Mormon. If Joseph Smith, by "hot drinks", meant "tea and coffee", why didn't he just say "tea and coffee"?

Income is already none of these things, and that an amendment was required to circumvent an incompetent ruling speaks more of the problems of judicial review (beyond the scope of the present conversation) than anything else. ... The answer is, simply looking at the text of the document, together with established precedent, would be, "probably yes, it is constitutional, but the present Supreme Court, containing at least two unqualified members, would be apt to misrule on the matter".

Everything you don't like is incompetent and everyone you disagree with is unqualified. Whatever.

64.2%. While "vast" is an ambiguous term, I would expect a "vast majority" to be over 80%. Home ownership rates are also declining.

That's the figure for homeownership. Single-family homes can also be rented, and apparently, about a third of rental properties are single-family homes.

Also, answer the question. Why should a privileged few own vastly more?

That's a campaign statement, not a question. What's the connection between the quality of life that a given political order is able and willing to provide to its subjects and the precise valuation of Elon Musk's share of Tesla stock? When $TSLA goes up, does the water get less potable?

Sure, there's a connection according to a thousand-page tome by some French guy, but it's the kind of connection that you need a thousand-page tome to draw, and there's no shortage of thousand-page tomes. Have we run out of things that don't need thousand-page tomes?

[KathTheDragon]

I think I can assert without adducing further evidence that almost any company run for the benefit of its employees will deliver shoddy product, at least to the extent it can get away with it

I emphatically disagree. Workers (given a good working environment) generally want to do the best job they can, if for nothing else than personal satisfaction. Give workers control of their company and they'll make themselves a good working environment, and so enable themselves to do better work.

[Moose-tache]

I think I can assert without adducing further evidence that almost any company run for the benefit of its employees will deliver shoddy product, at least to the extent it can get away with it

I emphatically disagree. Workers (given a good working environment) generally want to do the best job they can, if for nothing else than personal satisfaction. Give workers control of their company and they'll make themselves a good working environment, and so enable themselves to do better work.

Ask me how I know you've never had to deal with unionized construction workers.

I mean, the idea that people like doing a good job is broadly true, and there are plenty of cases where the well being of your employees should be your chief concern, and we'd all rather live in a world where workers come before product, but there is no correlation between putting workers above customers and improving customer experience. You can't have it both ways.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

A Google search turns up wildly varying results on the subject.

A Google search turns up wildly varying results on, to pick the last thing I read about...

So some topics are still being debated. Fascinating. I had no idea.

Further, only a capitation, a tax on real property, or on personal property, would be considered a "direct tax" for purposes of constitutionality.

That "only" would require the Supreme Court to rule that the currently established list of forms of taxation known to be direct is exhaustive. This would be as difficult to defend as the Mormon doctrine of hot drinks, which is manifestly ridiculous to anyone who isn't a Mormon. If Joseph Smith, by "hot drinks", meant "tea and coffee", why didn't he just say "tea and coffee"?

Well, going with a "conservative" reading of the Constitution, and precedent, this is, as far as I can discover, what the Constitution actually defines as these things. Intellectual property didn't really exist as a concept at the time beyond the right to make literal copies, though it's been deemed a "necessary and proper" sort of thing. Financial instruments also weren't nearly what they are now, though they did, again, exist.

Income is already none of these things, and that an amendment was required to circumvent an incompetent ruling speaks more of the problems of judicial review (beyond the scope of the present conversation) than anything else. ... The answer is, simply looking at the text of the document, together with established precedent, would be, "probably yes, it is constitutional, but the present Supreme Court, containing at least two unqualified members, would be apt to misrule on the matter".

Everything you don't like is incompetent and everyone you disagree with is unqualified. Whatever.

Then why did I not say "disqualified majority"?

64.2%. While "vast" is an ambiguous term, I would expect a "vast majority" to be over 80%. Home ownership rates are also declining.

That's the figure for homeownership.

I know, and I state this figure because...

Single-family homes can also be rented, and apparently, about a third of rental properties are single-family homes.

Renting sucks.

Also, answer the question. Why should a privileged few own vastly more?

That's... not a question.
[/quote]
Yes it is. It begins with "What" and ends with a question point, and indicates that further explanation is desired. That is certainly a question, and a very valid one. So answer it.

What's the connection between the quality of life that a given political order is able and willing to provide to its subjects and the precise valuation of Elon Musk's share of Tesla stock?

Who cares? Why does he get to own this much when other people also did work to build the wealth up, and a huge amount of public investment was poured into his company?

When $TSLA goes up, does the water get less potable?

I'm sure some chemical company's stock has gone up as a result of something that made water less potable (have you, by chance, ever heard of teflon?), but do you ever engage a topic without inserting dumb distractions? Once you demanded to know something about some pharmaceutical company (without presenting evidence they did anything) to distract from Trump politicising a pandemic, which is irrelevant to whether or not he did it. "Look, somebody else did a murder, why don't you prosecute them and not me?" is not a defence when you commit a murder.

So answer the question already. Why should they get to own all this when so many others did significant work to build it?

[Hallow XIII]

They should get to own all this because they made it, simple as. Property at its core can never have a basis that isn't the right of conquest. That huge companies required the labor of thousands to become huge is obvious; the people who got in at the right time and the right level got pretty damn rich for themselves along with Messrs. Bezos and Musk, the people who are unskilled labor in the warehouse, like, what did you expect? Market dynamics are power dynamics, if you're some poor schmuck stacking boxes in a globalized economy you're trivial to replace and therefore powerless.

If you want to actually improve the bargaining conditions for labor, your best tool bar none is to cut off supply. With rock-bottom birth rates in every country that knows what the word "industry" means, proper immigration restriction over a period of one to two decades would probably be enough to seriously change the labor market dynamics to the detriment of capital. You can buttress this with government regulation where appropriate; Americans seem extremely in love with price-fixing of various kinds but banning work contracts with no fixed, or at least no minimum hours, introducing a sensible minimum quota for vacation days or requiring a buffer period before employment can be terminated by the employer are all classic European socialist measures that are unlikely to reduce total productivity and would even provide some ammunition for the fight to cut down some of the more dysfunctional unions.

Of course, such a program would have severe to cataclysmic consequences for every demographic that is currently politically important, so it is somewhere between Hitler and Satan on the popularity scale.

[Ares Land]

That's a campaign statement, not a question. What's the connection between the quality of life that a given political order is able and willing to provide to its subjects and the precise valuation of Elon Musk's share of Tesla stock? When $TSLA goes up, does the water get less potable?

Sure, there's a connection according to a thousand-page tome by some French guy, but it's the kind of connection that you need a thousand-page tome to draw, and there's no shortage of thousand-page tomes. Have we run out of things that don't need thousand-page tomes?

The TL;DR version of the connection, as presented by some other French guy earlier in the thread , takes about a paragraph and two graphs to explain.
I think the 'eat the rich' thing has gotten unnecessarily personal. I know Elon Musk's taking it personally, but he's kind of an over-sensitive person. Elon Musk is unimportant in the great scheme of things (if anything he perhaps slightly improves things): there are other billionaires, some other person will probably be the world's richest person in ten years.
Water supply is probably a whole different issue. However, under the current economy, anything you might improve, any time you work a little harder or smarter... a great deal of the benefits will go to the 1%, some of the benefits will go to the 10%. Standards of living will always remain the same for you, no matter what you do. If you're lucky: there's a significant chance things will get worse.

Another point: I know you Americans like to fantasize about taking the state away. You won't. You'll keep on having a state, and that state will draw income. Let's be realistic, the bulk of that income will still come from the poor and working classes, but you know, having even a bit of it coming from wealthier people (who can actually afford it; Elon Musk definitely can shrug off a bit of extra tax) is fairer and helps a little.

You mentioned the French wealth tax earlier. When it was reformed a couple years ago, the state lost some income. That had to be compensated, so taxes on gas were increased. This affected, guess who, the poor and the middle class, and there was a net decrease in standards of living. (Plus mass demonstrations.)

(There's an environmental aspect to it too. But let's keep in mind that there's no alternative to driving in most places.)

If you want to actually improve the bargaining conditions for labor, your best tool bar none is to cut off supply. With rock-bottom birth rates in every country that knows what the word "industry" means, proper immigration restriction over a period of one to two decades would probably be enough to seriously change the labor market dynamics to the detriment of capital.

That seems to be the standard conservative approach these days: blame capitalism and then reject all possible solutions except immigration restriction.

The problem with that approach is that it doesn't actually improve things. Immigration restriction won't do much, or anything about the labor supply. First, we have outsourcing, container ships and Zoom conferences. People don't need to be there to compete with you on the job market. Second, a natural consequence of 'proper immigration policy' is illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants don't have any legal protection -- they're very cheap labor. Third, all political debate centers on immigration, racism, and bashing minorities -- while we're busy discussing this, the nice government regulation you enjoy can safely be taken away.

You can buttress this with government regulation where appropriate; Americans seem extremely in love with price-fixing of various kinds but banning work contracts with no fixed, or at least no minimum hours, introducing a sensible minimum quota for vacation days or requiring a buffer period before employment can be terminated by the employer are all classic European socialist measures that are unlikely to reduce total productivity and would even provide some ammunition for the fight to cut down some of the more dysfunctional unions.

These are excellent measures that should definitely be taken. I'm very happy, as an European, to have these in place.
They are not sufficient though. First, these tend to slowly erode over time. Second, we do suffer, in Europe, from the same inegalitarian tendancies as Americans. Various measures (including those you mention) have taken the edge off of these tendancies, but still, standards of living are about as they were twenty years ago, possibly a little worse. (The share of the poorest 50% in national income actually went down.)

The standard explanation is that standards of living are stagnant because the labor market is over-regulated, so naturally the measures you mention are slowly being phased out.

[zompist]

If the company is privately held and not traded on the stock market, there is no incentive for the owner to want to goose its "value", as any sale of the company would be at prices that are difficult to predict. He obviously wants the company to be profitable, since that is how he derives his income, but the perspectives of someone owning stock in a publically traded corporation and someone owning all of or the majority of a private corporation are very different. I also think that while I would prefer to do away with equity markets entirely, individual majority owners of public companies are more likely to treat companies as long-term assets, especially if they founded them.

Apparently you haven't met any owners. I have; every one I've worked for has been principally motivated by the desire to sell the company they founded as quickly as possible.

Curiously, you seem to be aware of the bad consequences of plutocracy-- you've simply responded by dividing the plutocracy conceptually in two: virtuous owner-founders and evil investors.

Nice try. But a) you underestimate the effect of the stock market on private owners, and b) you overestimate the virtue (and brains) of private owners.

The idea that employees care most about a company seems prima facie silly to me -- if you don't own something, you're simply not going to care for its future in the same way. You care about continued employment and thus indirectly about the continuation of business, but that's not really a good proxy for "health"; I think I can assert without adducing further evidence that almost any company run for the benefit of its employees will deliver shoddy product, at least to the extent it can get away with it, which gets you strategyless floundering until the company is suddenly caught off-guard by a competitor and dies.

Owners are highly incentivized to produce shoddy product and ignore the long term, and they do.

I haven't read this book, but it provides an argument that co-ops survive longer and deal better with financial crises than capitalist-owned firms.