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Great interview. IMO you are hitting on a very important topic. Is it a huge issue, Yes. We need to be very careful here not to create a new enemy “Evil Rich People”. Is the increasing wealth divide the root cause. I don’t think so. We need to think deeper. I believe it is our monetary system and human nature that is causing this. Th…
Great interview. IMO you are hitting on a very important topic. Is it a huge issue, Yes. We need to be very careful here not to create a new enemy “Evil Rich People”. Is the increasing wealth divide the root cause. I don’t think so. We need to think deeper. I believe it is our monetary system and human nature that is causing this. This problem has manifested over many decades. We are at a critical state in our history and a significant change is required. Taxing the wealthy I don’t think will work. Making the economic system fair for everyone and immutable to change? Now there’s an interesting idea. I don’t have the answer, but if we keep working together we can find it.
Oh, the poor billionaires.
Through the last four decades, we have UN-taxed the wealthy, we have UN-taxed the corporations. This UN-taxation has widened the divide between rich and poor and destroyed the middle class.
So rather the narrative should be, re-establish proper just taxation, and eliminate fiscal hideaways.
Yes I agree, but will you fix the root problem causing the inequality? I got the idea from Jeff Booth’s book. “The Price of Tomorrow”. In my opinion he is getting closer to the issue than anyone else I have read. Did this not all begin in Breton Woods? Would love to here what I am missing in my thinking. Thanks.
copying from another thread, but I think it's important to clarify - the goal isn't to end inequality, just to cap it.
There's basically a Goldilocks zone of "just the right amount of inequality" that we need to stay within.
Too little inequality is stifling - the cream can't rise to the top, so to speak.
Too much inequality is destabilizing - the "have-nots" will only tolerate falling so far behind the "haves" before they start warming up to the prospect of redistribution by force.
Yes. And that cap is somewhere between 10x and 100x, within each industry. No one is worth 1000x 10,000x 100,000x 1,000,000x 1,000,000,000x more than their staff.
Me, I rather lean to 10x richer being sufficient incentive to excellence.
Meh, I can see 100x just to run the company. It's insanely difficult to manage an organization of 40,000 people.
Then when you add in being the founder, like an Elon Musk or a Jeff Bezos, they also took the risk of putting up the money to start the company, hire employees, etc.
In addition to incentivizing excellence, it's also important to incentivize risk-taking. So between risk + excellence, I can see a good argument for 1000x
Well, somewhere between 10 and 1000 ;) That would still be a shitload more reasonable than the ridiculous situation we have now.
ALL monopolies must be broken up
ALL tax havens eliminated
END multinationals
RE-establish pre-Reagan/Thatcher taxation levels
You lost me on ending multinationals - there's nothing intrinsically wrong with a business operating in more than one country.
Multinationals escape all environmental and worker regulations. In fact, the only functional capitalism would be a capitalism without share holders, and without multi-national bank accounts. A company can SELL abroad, but a company should be bank and be taxed and hire all within a set geography, otherwise it's not capitalism but tycoonerism.
I don't think it makes sense to say a company can sell overseas, but not hire any employees overseas. Who is McDonalds supposed to get to flip the burgers in India, if all their employees have to reside in North America? Will Big Macs sold in India be cooked here, and then put on a ship to cross the ocean? Do the customers have to line up at the dock to pick up their orders in 5-7 weeks after ordering?
A softer touch can work on environmental & worker regulations; just tarriff any goods that are produced in exploitative regions. Eliminate the financial incentive, and the tycoonerism will die down.
As for multi-national bank accounts, just implement a GAAR tax based on revenue location. That way, a company that sells its product to Canadian customers can't claim to be a Swiss/Cayman corporation for tax purposes, because it won't do them any good.
As for shareholders, it's a necessary evil in order to promote investments/risk taking. Medieval societies tried to ban lending for similar reasons (Islamic countries still do), and it massively constrained innovation and job creation. That said, judges and legislators need to be more willing to pierce the corporate veil. The precedent exists; it's just not used widely enough.
There is nothing socialist about "woke", that's the entire left critique of woke politics. This is utter Alex Jones nonsense where you just connect a bunch of bad words together on corkboard with yarn without knowing the meanings of any of the words.
Exactly. The Liberal Party has never been truly "left", they are just woke capitalists. As for the NDP, they abandoned criticism of capitalism under right-winger Mulcair. Why the NDP ever hired him I'll never understand.
The uber rich and the megacorporations, on a per dollar basis, create MUCH LESS employment and public good than small businesses.
define "on a per dollar basis". Per dollar of what?
I'd have less problem with "big" business if the concepts of "corporation" and "LLC" existed. Shareholding is the worst ever invention with capitalism.
Sure, ... as long as you don't tout big business as contributing anything of value to society.
You should learn what those words mean. You have this our side good-their side bad Manichean child's picture of the world. That's how you can throw a bunch of random left-coded labels in the same basket and think of it has an undifferentiated evil. Pick up a book once in a while and stop embarassing yourself.
and that's your right. But it makes you irrelevant to the discussion to how to fix the left.
Same way leftists are irrelevant to fixing the right.