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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29605 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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Well, that doesn't solve the problem - the emergence of a semi permanent rentier/leisure aristocracy. Personally I'm inclined to say that this sort of thing is possibly unavoidable in any kind of complex economy with a free market and for various reasons our economy wouldn't allow too many people to do this.

Well, that doesn't solve the problem - the emergence of a semi permanent rentier/leisure aristocracy.

This problem doesn't exist in any meaningful capacity, and if it does it's self correcting. Regression to the mean and all that.

I'm watching multiple upper-middle rentier families implode as we speak by a single addict or the adoption of a psychopath or a cripplingly expensive sickness. None of these reasons are fair, but bad luck comes for everyone. The number of families with enough wealth to weather even these caliber storms is less than a rounding error.

It's a "problem" in the sense that it makes clear how much culture leads into luck. If you have a strong nuclear family where each child has to be successful to reap the benefits of the previous generation, then you get to pass wealth down. If your parents can't control their finances or let you slide into taking heroin, the ship is going down.

I don't know if the existence of petty rentiers is a problem, but there are some people who do see it that way, and I think a lot of rentierism in an economy is potentially dangerous.

Ah! I'm with you now. How do we get more people/everyone into the leisure aristocracy? It seems like (until 50 years ago or so) this had been solving itself, you're never going to get everyone in (because of self-sabotage), but that class had been expanding wildly.

How do you curb the excesses of the (pick a word really) illegitimate leisure aristocracy? Tax the shit out of it. We know taxes discourage behavior so, off the top of my head example, you get 6 houses property tax free but house #7 is taxed at something unfathomable like 10% a year. This will create other problems of course (people buying all of their relatives exactly 6 houses, what is a house, etc) but 99.9% of us are on the same team on this one and that or something similar would theoretically drive investment away from property.

I don't really know if that class has expanded wildly. If you consider the Victorian age, it was considered seemly and even normal to simply live off unearned income from property. Not all who did so were very rich. I recall reading somewhere that as much as 50% of the adult population of Spain were not in the labor force. Note that this was in a country that was also quite poor by European standards and would remain so until the 1950s. So it's not even that inequality bought them prosperity.

The only person I ever knew with more than 6 houses (I think he had 9) wasn't particularly wealthy and certainly wasn't "leisure aristocracy". He was a landlord who did a large part of his own maintenance and still had a salaried job.

Yeah, that's another gnarly problem. I know someone similar who owned a dozen or so quadplexes and died quite young from the stress. How about a combo law, either 6 properties or $10 million value combined, whichever is last?

How about not trying to use the tax code to micromanage people's lifestyles?

Well, that doesn't solve the problem - the emergence of a semi permanent rentier/leisure aristocracy.

How about offering solutions in addition to criticisms?

It hasn't even been established that either this "semi permanent rentier/leisure aristocracy" exists or that if it does, that it's a problem needing solving. Instead, the spectre of it is being used to push for more punitive taxation (which, as it happens, will generally fall not only or even mainly on these 'leisure aristocrats')

I phrased it as a problem, but I would agree that it isn't necessarily so, and a solution might well be worse. The optimum number of parasites in the economy is not zero.

Parasites? The proposal is to increase taxes to destroy those who are living off investments made either by themselves or their parents/grandparents, and then transfer those resources to those who are living off of tax money. That's certainly not going to reduce parasitism.

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