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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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How do you solve it without the revolution?

You don’t. Every society has had a leisure class of gentry.

Obviously we can’t have 40% of the population be in it. But simultaneously, you can’t actually get rid of it. So I think what you’re asking is ‘how do we prevent the amassing of generational fortunes that take large portions of the most talented out of the workforce, and also make it harder for the workers to acquire assets of their own’. There’s a couple of solutions here, and the obvious one is to just let there be a recession, collapse asset prices, make a bunch of heirs have to go to work. Society doesn’t owe them a living for doing nothing anymore than it does the people on welfare.

The other solution, or part of the solution, is to make inheritance taxes positively ruinous on small families but meaningless on large ones. High fertility doesn’t accumulate generational fortunes like that, you only need a confiscatory tax regime for small families. And really only wealthy small families, at that.

Wealth is going to reduce the incentive to work of whoever has it, whether it's the rich or the poor. The advantage of letting heirs keep their wealth is that you are letting the people who earned it decide what to do with it, which increases their incentive to work. I don't understand why people think the effect of inheritance taxes would be any different than that of income taxes. They're even more distortionary and less fair because they tax equally rich people differently based on how they spend their money, and the ones who decrease income inequality by giving their wealth away to their heirs instead of spending it on themselves are punished for doing so.

Recessions don't help because the point of producing wealth is to have and spend it, not to produce it for the sake of producing it.

If you’d actually read my comment you’d know the point of my proposed inheritance taxes was to prevent the expansion of the leisured class.

I did read your comment. Why are you trying to prevent the expansion of the leisure class?

To keep the dependency ratio from getting worse than it’s already going to be.

And why does that matter if they're supporting themselves with their own money?

You don’t. Every society has had a leisure class of gentry.

Obviously we can’t have 40% of the population be in it.

Part of the problem is that economic policy in the West is based on the idea that 20+% of the population should be leisure-class gentry - namely middle-class retirees. The core premise of Boomercon thought is that an amount of wealth that could be accumulated relatively painlessly over 40 years of median-income work (30 for blue-collar union workers in legacy manufacturing or the public sector) should endow 20 years of comfortable, active retirement (including the massive healthcare expenditure needed to support it) through some combination of asset ownership, earned workplace benefits, and earned government benefits. The extreme and malignant form of Boomerconnery (and the dominant one in the UK) is that it should do this without touching the capital value of the family home you continue to occupy as empty nesters. In Continental Europe this is seen as an entitlement that should be guaranteed by the State, in the Anglosphere it is only seen as a default expectation that should be facilitated by the State. But in either case it is a huge constituency of people who are objectively rentiers and do, in fact, vote like rentiers.

The underlying confusion is conflating "class" as in inherited SES with "class" as in ones relationship to the means of production. In 1900 this didn't matter much - almost all rentiers and most entrepreneurs had higher inherited SES than almost all wage-workers. But in the modern day almost everyone is a wage-worker in their youth (it isn't socially acceptable for upper-middle class families to subsidise failsons to live a playboy lifestyle - notice that a huge part of Joe Biden's legal-but-sleazy scheming is trying to create opportunities for James and Hunter Biden to pretend they are earning the money) and everyone hopes to be a rentier in retirement, but in a way which means they can say that their ability to eat while others work is a right and not a privilege. So the generational divide in British (and, to a lesser extent, American) politics is exactly what orthodox Marxism would predict - wage-workers vote left, asset owners vote right.

That’s a cogent point, and we do have to worry about the dependency ratio mostly because of retirees.

Elon has 10 kids.

Total wealth tax at a high threshold, and no loopholes. This would possibly be anti-constitutional though. it would also mean that the govt. would assume equity ownership of companies. If Bill Gates was to die, who would get his shares under a wealth tax?

A wealth tax is just a tax on deferred consumption. Why should equally well-off people pay different tax rates based on when they choose to consume their earnings?

Force sale of X% of shares he held by his estate on the open public market at whatever the price was at his death (or some randomized time before it to prevent gaming) and the government collects its cut as those sell. Seems like a simple enough solution but I'm probably missing something.

Your missing the part where you just created a huge incentive for the government to kill its wealthiest citizens for a bump in tax revenue.

It is a scary thought, but man that would be a hilarious sci-fi dystopian scenario. Become part of a black alphabet agency where your one and only job is to assassinate high net-worth billionaires to help fund the back breaking amount of debt the USA has taken on.

If you're a billionaire, you have to have a 24/7 bodyguard and gain practical, tactical skills yourself or risk being taken out by the government. I wonder if this has already been done...?

It has happened, just not in the US. China and Russia have had their periodic purges and confiscations from rich individuals.

Hmm, well I'll take this as my daily reminder that we have it better in the U.S. than I'd thought.

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