Benevolent Olygarch to be Replaced with a Benevolent Automaton.

[evildevil]

Police State to Keep us Safe from Terrorist Jihadist Communist Law Breakers.

How Billionaires Use Non-Profits to Bypass Governments and Force Their Agendas on Humanity
As wealth becomes concentrated in fewer hands, so does political and social power via foundations and non-profits.As wealth becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the

Comments

[amw]

These are three really great articles this time around. I don't know which one I want to comment on. They are all discussing big issues that come up in my industry, which is tech. Let's take the first one.

I have been getting more and more uncomfortable about how tech workers are being paid too much (see my personal journal). What drives me nuts is that these guys wait until they're bazillionaires, and then go, oh yeah, I AM earning too much, guess I better give some of it away. And despite the doom and gloom of the article, they do save a lot of lives. Probably hundreds of thousands of lives. A handful of bazillionaires trying to get mosquito nets and vaccinations to the poorest parts of the world is better than no-one trying do it.

But you gotta ask yourself why they are bazillionaires in the first place. Because the fucking government didn't tax these guys enough! When it's possible for individuals to have several orders of magnitude more money than they could ever hope to spend in their lifetime, that's when you realize the system the broken.

First of all it's broken at the inheritance level. Bill Gates was born into a wealthy family, but he earned his billions through cut-throat business tactics and savvy investing. Many of today's billionaires (like the current president) did not even do that. In my opinion inheritance needs to face significantly more tax. It should be 90% or more. If you were born into a rich family, you already have unimaginable privilege. You do not get to inherit millions when your parents die on top of the privilege you already enjoyed all your life.

Second of all it's broken at the investment level. If a company can rocket up the stock market so wildly that a few individuals holding shares can earn more money than they know what to do with, this is a problem. Capital gains need to be taxed progressively and far more significantly. Your $10 share turns into $100 over a year and you want to cash out instead of leaving it in the company? Slice off $80 in tax. You still doubled your money, which is far better than the rate of inflation.

Third of all it's broken at the corporate level. Even if all the money never goes to individual shareholders and is held ostensibly to reinvest in the corporation and its workers (I'll give them the benefit of the doubt), there should still be a sensible limit. If the corporation has $10 revenue this year and it costs $3 in operating expenses, and it has $6 already in its emergency fund, then it gets a buck for R&D and the rest can go to the government, who can make sure less-fortunate people in the community also share in success of their friends and neighbors. And, if the company isn't profitable at all, well that's a problem dealt with by point number two - investors should not be so rich that they can afford to invest in loser companies.

I mean, I am not a macro-economist and I have done precisely zero academic study on this stuff, but just throwing some ideas out there. What terrifies me about America right now is that a party is in power who believes all three of the above taxation points should be scrapped. And lots and lots of middle class Americans agree that they shouldn't be taxed on their inheritance or their investments or their company profits. Because many Americans have this hopeless delusion that one day they, too, will strike it rich. That that's how the system should work. I cannot eyeroll enough.

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[amw]

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But, let's put the issue of fixing the American economic system to the side for a second. How do we help the bazillionaires of today to redistribute their wealth to the world's neediest?

The utilitarian would say that the best way to get money to the poor is to literally give money to the poor - see https://www.givedirectly.org/ But GiveDirectly only works because they already have an infrastructure developed. In one small part of one African country. If you want to help the poor in other countries, the infrastructure has to be there first. So what infrastructure should philanthropists focus on? Making sure there is a banking system so that money can travel from a Western businessman directly to a subsistence farmer? Making sure all subsistence farmers have access to a communications network where they can find out about the fact that there is money waiting for them? Creating a delivery or bus service that can reach the remotest parts of the world so raw goods and/or money can get into the hands of subsistence farmers? Do these things even make sense in some cultures?

I think tackling extreme poverty is a much, much more difficult problem than tackling extreme wealth. They are both noble goals, but I think the latter is something far more difficult because you cannot just make one fix for everyone - each culture is different and each region has different challenges. Even if we agree that in a perfect world each country's government should be lifting up its own poor and not relying on international aid agencies to do so, how do we avoid the problem that many governments in poor countries are insanely corrupt? Do you really think that we should go in and try clean house in foreign governments?

So yeah... extreme poverty in the third world... major problem, no easy answers. I can't fault these bazillionaires too much for giving it a shot. And especially not in America, whose government allocates less than 1% of the budget to foreign aid, and one party wants to slash that even further. We should definitely keep an eye on them, though.

Extreme wealth in the first world? Major problem, much easier answers. It's shameful that we haven't solved this yet. It's shameful that so many conservatives don't feel the slightest shred of guilt at supporting policies that exacerbate the problem. And it's appalling to me that the middle class is too selfish to make any real movement on these issues.