It is pure luck to get the ability and will to pay attention at school.
Some part is DNA, some part your environment, some part how much stress your mother was exposed during pregnancy. There are many more influences, none are under your control. It is all 100% luck.
If you had the same DNA and exact same upbringing and all other factors that made Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos, you would be as rich as he. If you had the DNA and exact same upbringing and all other factors that made a homeless person a homeless person, you would be as poor as that person.
It’s no obligation (in my Canton, since it is in some), nor a moral duty to insure my home against natural hazards. I’d still say it’s a pretty good idea to do it. One can view wealth redistribution as insurance against social unrest. If I can afford it, I find it a small price to pay to avoid getting shot in the streets or caught in a riot.
Note: I still consider it an important part of giving back to the society that allowed me to accrue that wealth (or inherit it if that was the case) to pay the taxes that I can afford to pay and be politically active to ensure they’re used as efficiently as they can be (in my view) but that doesn’t change the pure selfish part of the argument which is that by funding social programs, I am actually protecting myself and my loved ones.
100k is only 4% of 2.5M which is a FIRE number I’ve seen a few folks mention. So I believe quite a few members of this forum will fall into the intended scope of this initiative within their lifetimes
However by excluding capital gains many folks will be excluded. People investing in real estate might have to think again, also some indexes have yielded 4% dividends in the past (FTSE 100 quite often)
If they have the ability to change or not is pure luck.
Sure there are always things you have perceived control over. But everything will boil down to luck at some point. Having the ability and will to change is not something you can will into existence by “choosing”. You either have it or not. What it is is purely luck.
You are free to launch your own counter-initiative to abandon taxation altogether.
Let’s wait and see what the people (or at least voters) will decide. We have seen a no vote multiple times on initiatives that would have taxed the rich more. It seems the majority is quite happy with the current approach.
That’s not the same thing. In one case, you insure a good against a hazard and you get compensated in case the insured risk materializes. You suffer individual consequences for your choice and can be free to decide whether you want to cover it or not. It has no consequence on your neighbors (except maybe a very small adjustment in their policy premium).
In the case of social insurances/welfare, you don’t insure the good (you or your family won’t get any money if you get lynched), but you take measures to mitigate or suppress the hazard itself. In the former analogy, if your house was in the middle of other insured houses, you could not pay for the insurance and benefit from the same protection.
Society tries to avoid this kind of freeloading because it makes the game uneven and encourages risky behaviors by rewarding those who don’t fight bad events under the assumption that others will fight them for them.
So, yes, it’s coercion but that’s the price we pay for living in society.
You will. Everything goes fine until you drop below a certain point. Past a point, you’ll never be able to get out of your poor financial situation ever again and you’ll be checked upon. If you develop worrisome behavior living with that less freedom, you can end up druged (by society, through psychiatric measures) with even less hope of getting out of it. I don’t know of your experience, you can probably teach me a lot about getting out of poverty/bad life circumstances. I know people who went the other way and it’s not something I’m looking at with envy. Wasn’t that an incentive for the efforts you’ve deployed to be where you are now?
Small parties allow for a lot of maleability by motivated people (I personnaly prefer smaller structures, even though they have less impact on society), but getting involved in politics (that is, having an impact on the life of the City) can also be done through associations or simply a meaningful life involved in society. I’m sure you’re doing some of it.
Is taking money for wellfare worse than having people, including children, starving in the streets? Whereas I agree there should be a strict limit to the amount and form of wellfare, I feel it is wrong to a abandon them and assume that because they made not so smart decisions and didn’t work harder their missery is deserved.
I almost completely agree with you on a abstract/philosophical view.
But let’s be honest, we make all our decisions as if this were not (completely) true.
The voters decide on an incentive system and the population reacts to it. For any of this to make sense we have to pretend as if you can alter the “course of history” (even though most likely nobody can in a meaningful way).
So, not trying to incentivise hard-working behaviour because “Income and wealth are 100% luck.” strikes me as a mistake. Not judging people because they aren’t hard-working seems correct, in as far as this doesn’t affect their behaviour negatively.
Yes, but it changes a moralizing topic(they EARNED their wealth, You are JEALOUS if you want to redistribute it, poor people are to be BLAMED for being poor) into an optimization problem.
I think we still have a long way to go until we have an optimized tax system.
If we talk abut taxes we are talking about the symptom, but not the cause.
Why is it that there is so much malcontent in society? Why is society so divided? Has it always been like this or is it getting worse? I have the impression it’s the latter.
As an example, it seems that a guy here in my street might have FIREd. He certainly doesn’t leave home on a regular schedule, and also didn’t do so before the pandemic. You might see him working in his garden at any time during the day, or leave with his mountain bike in the middle of the afternoon. Inevitably, someone else in the street once told me about “that lazy lowlife, you know, he doesn’t even have a job.”
A work colleague of mine once told me that “investing money is like standing there with the whip.”
A friend said that “putting money to work is immoral, money doesn’t work, people do” (and then proceeded to buy TSLA stock).
Say that I retire in 10 or 15 years. Will I face a backlash from neighbors and friends? Will I loose friends? Since I’ll be living from invested savings, will I be taxed to the point where it won’t be possible in the first place? More than fiscal issues, these are social ones.
Yes, I guess this is called the Overton window. First it’s unthinkable, then it’s just for the rich, then you get inflation and suddenly the thresholds apply to middle class.
I am also worried about the increasingly socialist mindset that young people share in Europe and USA. Prosperity comes from work and not from redistribution.
I’m not sure if that’s true. If you look at US billionaires (Bezos, Zuck, Page, Brin, Buffett, Cook), they are overwhelmingly pro-democrat. They don’t care if taxes are raised for the middle class, they actually benefit from entry barriers created for their potential competitors.
Amen to that! I would say it would also be fair to tax capital/wealth. You pay e.g. 1% per year for being able to hold capital (and have it protected by the law & police from inside and military from outside). This would put pressure on capital owners to make their capital work and not just sit there. Taxing income is just stupid, it penalizes people who have the will to work.
Here’s an idea: why don’t we eliminate/reduce tax on work, and tax consumption & wealth instead?
Fighting inequality is this socialist mantra. If we all earn $1000 per month, we’re equal, I guess that’s the socialist dream? And then if one guy suddenly earns $10’000, we need to take it away from him, nobody can have it better than others. Because economy is not a zero-sum game, those who create added value, create their income, they don’t steal it from the poor. Nobody forces you to work for Bezos for $10 per hour. Really, just stay home and get your food stamps. I can’t handle it that intelligent people don’t get it. I guess envy blinds them.
In order to have a peaceful society, you need to provide people a healthy incentive to live. They need to be able to get a job. They need to feel that it’s not all for free. If instead you provide endless unemployment benefits, food stamps, single mom benefits, etc, you get a society like in US or France. Sitting at home, bored, obese, crime-ridden. You have endless examples of where socialism leads: Venezuela, Cuba, the Eastern Block.
Is there something wrong with the approach in the 2 minutes papers video?
Well being of a rich person is not worth more than well being of a poor person. Of course you don’t want to take away all to disincentivize wealth creation of the rich person. As long as marginal taxes are not 100%, then there is some incentives to create wealth. How much we can take away from a more productive person is just an optimizing problem.
Unless you still believe in the false notion that people have free will and can “decide” to be productive, optimizing taxes for productivity and reduction in inequality is the rational approach.
It is true that in many countries investment income (capital gains, dividends, interests) are taxed at a different (lower) rate that work income.
One could argue that in Swizerland investment income is charged much more because it is added to work income and therefore the marginal rate can be very high in some cases. There are some safeguards like in Vaud where this is capped to 30%. On the other hand, capital gains are exempt, but we are one of the last countries in Europe to have a wealth tax, so one for the other.
I don’t know many activities more useless than political debates online, but considering my respect to community of this forum, I would like to address few points. Sorry if I won’t follow up later.
In general, I find it is a shame that there are people in the world who have no shelter and not enough food. The humankind as a whole have enough resources and enough food to avoid it, but we prefer to further destroy our planet to build new smartphones. If we as humankind would consume less and fight less, it would be better for everyone. I know it is contradictory to write in the forum devoted to capitalism, but life is full of contradictions.
I am also fed up of people here using “socialist” as an insult. If not “socialists”, you would still work for a factory owner doing menial inefficient manual labor 80 hours 6 days per week. And don’t confuse socialism and communism. The fact that majority of bloody dictators of 20th century called themselves “socialists” and “communists” does not make them one.
Same here. Go experience life in South Africa if you like.
Taxes is Switzerland are (1) low; (2) used efficiently. We have an ineffective bureaucracy? Well, are you 100% effective at your work? I prefer my taxes to be used for welfare for those who need it (objectively or subjectively, whatever) than for stationing an army in Afghanistan for 20 years. And how much taxes are paid by individuals and how much by companies?
We are trying to talk numbers here, this is already better than 99% of political online debates. However it does not seem to add up and I am not qualified (or interested) to look for numbers. I would be glad if somebody would present an analysis, though. But just my 3.14 cents: I was very surprised to learn from US-born colleagues that US spends huge amount of budget money on welfare. Why so? Because huge amount of people work lots of time and don’t earn enough for living. So the federal state has to support them, in effect subsidizing low unsustainable salaries paid by Walmart & Co and their higher profits. Hail to US! Hail to libertarian capitalism!
I absolutely agree with it. But we should not throw away those who didn’t succeed to get to the top, because everyone cannot be at the top!
Sure. It is great that you managed it. But look at the cartoon below. You are born in filthy rich country in the middle of Europe, that sucked out resource from the rest of the world for last 500 years. You didn’t have to go further than a few hours trip from your place of birth to study in a great university for free. You maybe even got some financial support during your studies and your were probably able to find some student jobs that paid your expenses.
You country is rich, because 100 years ago rich Europeans were looking for a safe storage for their money. These money had to be invested in a safe way through 2 world wars - in Switzerland. Swiss companies buying businesses all over the world last 80 years. Switzerland with 0.1% of world population contributes 2+% to the global stock market. You don’t feel wealth, but it surrounds you from your very birth. If we sort all people in the world by “priviligeness”, among your peers born around the same time, you are probably in top 50 or 100 millions. I was probably in the second half of the first billion, but still I consider that I received a lot.
I have to elaborate. Very little DNA (it helps if you are white, though). A new born child is a tabula rasa, its development 99% depends on the environment. A child that feels secure, loved and supported by adults around him/her will do better in school and later in life. A child whose parents are all stressed about how to survive next month has many more chances to develop problems later in life. Money helps in it, but it is not everything - an average worker family might provided a much safer environment for children than a CEO who is never around and his wife stressed by 1st world problems.
But this is a reason why I would like more support for families with children and more childcare. A parental leave of 6 month is a nonsense, it should be at least 1.5 - 2 years. If you don’t care about humanitarian aspects, think about the following: it is cheaper to provide support for a family for 10 years than to provide support to a troubled adult the rest of its life.
Sorry, but you are talking crap here. There is always a minority that decides, even if you don’t see it.
I see a personal tragedy here, I am sorry for you and your parents.
But look at it another way: how many friends your brother (or anyone in this position) has? Does he has a girlfriend? Isn’t he effectively eliminated from social (and biological) life?
And why don’t you do the same? Because you are proud of yourself by earning well?
No I don’t want charity. It is again US where people fell good doing charity instead of fixing real problems. We are society, even if we don’t want to be a part of it.
There are countless factors that influence human behavior and development. Genes are only one factor. What exact factors influenced a behavior is not really that relevant. A person doesn’t really have control over these factors. Even if there is some illusion of control, then the ability to control is influenced by other factors that are not under your control.
This is the reason I say that getting wealthy is 100% luck as the wealthy person doesn’t have control over the factors that made them wealthy.
In the US, financing mansion for pastors is counted as charitable giving. People are not that good at improving the world with their charitable giving. (There are ways to improve the world massively with charitable giving)
I rather disagree - if there is a desire, there is a will, and if you are in a real shit instead of in a safe space of western society, you might reconsider your situation. But my point is that it is easier to troubleshoot these problems from the birth by helping parents providing a better environment for children, than to throw away or trying to fix resulting adults.
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