At least during my lifetime it seems all the state owned corporations were better when state owned and turned to absolute shit once privatized when you look at service quality.
Writing purely self-referential comments seems like it is a bit of an odd hobby, don't you think?
I witnessed more than five such privatizations in two different countries and they all ended up with the "investors" not even investing the minimum of what would have been necessary to keep the infrastructure operational. A decade later service quality is abysmal, infrastructure so bad that the state has to come in and help.
And these are only examples from postal services and public transport from the european regions I lived in, but I heard/read similar stories from nearly every of the 27 EU countries. The nations that still have exceptional services are the ones that didn't privatize them.
So if what I said is complete nonsense you surely have no problem pointing me to the wonderland where privatization lead to better services, lower prices and better service coverage — but we both know that never was the true interest behind privatizing anyways, don't we ; )
I wouldn't want to live in a while where BT was the only telephone company, BBC was the only TV channel, There was only one nationalised newspaper, where Royal Mail was the only company allowed to deliver parcels.
If you look at the worse services in your country they are usually the worse: from applying for a passport, to filling in pointless forms to high prices. Almost everything is better off in competition than making the natural market illegal.
The means of production is under democratic control. Just try seizing the means to produce something outside of the controlled boundaries as defined by the democracy, like, say, moonshine, and see how far you get.
But democracy is really hard work. The vast majority of people would rather let someone else do it so that they can play with the kids, hang out with friends at the bar, hit the gym, etc. instead. They don't even want to get involved with other democratic concerns, let alone try to watch over capital. And, frankly, who can blame them?
As such, that means that you are still going to need an individual or small group of people to take over the day-to-day control of the means. Congratulations, you just invented "private ownership".
you misunderstand representative democracy. an executive committee can still be recalled by the relevant democratic body and is responsible to them. this is a very very different relationship than simple profit motive and employment.
There is no alien overlord. The democratic body controls all that which involves human activity. Any executive committees, profiteers, or employees are merely an extension allowed by the democracy, that can be reshaped by the whims of the democracy at any point. There is a difference between those things, but only because the democracy does not find a need to have the same level of scrutiny over all things. It turns out democracy is really hard work and there is only so much time in the day. The democratic people by and large would rather do other things with their life than spend it practicing democracy. They don't want direct control over much of anything, hence the extensions that have been offered, to varying degrees of oversight depending on importance to the standing democracy.
Of course it is possible. What would stop it? An alien is not going to fly down from space to put a stop to it. Nothing can stop it other than people, and those people are the democracy. They are not going to stop themselves.
But, it would require putting in the work to make happen. Which they don't want to do. People, and therefore democracies, don't like to put in work unless they absolutely have to. And in this case, why would they have to? There is really no good reason to put in the work. The people that could be recalled are there because the democracy wants them to be. Recalling them for no reason would be kind of silly.
This is a very pessimistic view of human nature and in my view simply wrong. Much of the time people don't want to put in work, but when there is a significant wrong and people are impacted, they will do the work if the avenue is there. If you don't even believe that, then you are throwing out the entire liberal idea of state elections.
> but when there is a significant wrong and people are impacted, they will do the work
Of course. I even said as much in the previous comment. But I also said there is no reason to put in the work. The work needing to be done was given away to other people for good reason and the democracy wants to keep it that way.
If that changes, things will change, but until then...
or force transparency on ownership of everything. If something is owned by a nest of shell companies, ownership is transferred to the appropriate sovereign fund and managed for the public good. Combine transparency with the increasing difficulty of holding on to marginal dollars as a de facto way of capping income and wealth.
we could also learn from ideas associated with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_economics. I'm not saying they are all good ideas, but they are worth testing out and looking for historical examples of where they worked or failed.
transparency doesn't mean anything if the information is not actionable. liberals love transparency, but at the end of the day, it just means someone can spit in your face openly and have impunity
> you need to place the means of production under democratic control
That's a really good way to starve a couple million people. It's quite good to limit the wealth accumulation as well when people are only receiving rations for working from dawn to dusk.
give them a single crypto account with a max limit of 500 million. No way to utilize another account, it's tied to verified identity using verifiers. Have a tax rate that's calculated daily based on usage and holdings... people with less money have essentially no tax because they probably spend more faster and keep less savings... you'd need separate business account system for payrolls and expenses for large corps.... there's a lot more to this idea, this is just simple overview.
nothing should be allowed patented without a sensible license clause so anyone could use the tech, and then only for 5 to 10 years. Life saving and planet saving tech should not be allowed patents at all, to have a more open source community around solving the biggest problems and keeping healthcare costs down...
"And it's that government and its citizens on which any fortune depends. "Take any multimillionaire or billionaire, and put them on a desert island," Robeyns writes. "They still have all the same talents and personal traits as before. How rich could they become? Not very rich, obviously.""
"Because there are lots of people to pay you for your services in society, you owe it to them to share the wealth you generated in giving them something they wanted to pay you for of their own volition. Nobody is an island." That's what I hear when I read that sentence.
You want to go after people for amassing wealth in unscrupulous ways, I'm 100% on board. You want to go after wealth because they have it and you don't? You're probably my mortal foe.
Can't access the whole article, but I think it would be more uplifting if extreme poverty was impossible.
With the next priority to level up so less-extreme lack of wealth can also be addressed, ideally by increasing opportunities to move ahead in real terms through consistent productive work, much more than there are any more now.
I don't have any issue with ultra rich. I have many issues with some non-essential things that surround them:
- mostly, the ability to not pay their fair share of tax. I don't want to see them taxed 300% or whatever, I want them to pay the same marginal tax rate as normal people
- their outsized ability to finance politics. Political parties should have a fixed, transparent source of financing, from the state ideally, current system is basically legalized bribery.
- their outsizes ability to be politicians. Smart middle-class (or below, income-wise) people simply cannot afford to run for parlament and leave their career behind for N years. But this means politicians are overwhelmingly rich and skew the representation in supposed democracy
It sounds like you have issues with the ultra rich. This is because you can't have ultra rich without the points you mention.
Assume you were to set up solutions to the problems pointed out. The ultra rich would be immediately using their wealth and influence to better their position by working against the guard rails keeping those solutions in place. Why would they not?
It's like saying it is inevitable that armed forces will stage coups because they have guns, and civilian administrations don't. And yet in highly developed countries, it doesn't happen.
So how do you think these folks got ultra rich in the first place? You need to move the chess pieces in your favor. They didn’t just get that way through pure meritocracy. Your analogy doesn’t hold.
It's a different argument. Are you now saying ultra rich are definitely crooks?
Zuckerberg and other techno-royals are definitely ultra rich, and some aren't very nice people, but fundamentally they made their money in entirely legal and reasonable ways (through I'd argue in many cases tax appears to be underpaid).
I'd argue they were mostly lucky, and probably also competent. But I don't feel that their wealth is somehow wrongly acquired.
You don't have to insist all ultra rich are crooks. It's enough that even one of them wants to influence politics. How much influence can you buy with a net worth of 10 billion? With a few politicians in your pocket it turns into 20 billion in no time.
I'd add a hard limit to the amount of pollution the ultra wealthy are allowed to get away with. You don't need a chopper/plane all the time and for sure that 120m boat is leaving some footprint.
- their outsizes ability to be politicians. Smart middle-class
(or below, income-wise) people simply cannot afford to run for
parlament and leave their career behind for N years. But this
means politicians are overwhelmingly rich and skew the
representation in supposed democracy
Thank you for recognizing this.
It astounds me how people don't want to financially reward our politicians in honest, transparent ways.
In an ideal world, I believe we should pay our politicians like stars while simultaneously having iron-clad controls on their outside financial influences. Wildly impractical for sure, but why not e.g.:
- Pay a US Senator $500,000 a year
- Assign two full time agents to him with full access to their finances down to counting the fucking loose change in the senator's pockets whenever they feel like it.
- Agent A and Agent B get a hefty bonus for spotting violations. Double the bonus for a thing the other missed.
- The iron-clad financial influence rules extend to 10 years after they leave office and include extended family members and friends.
It would look similar to the Soviet Union - a bunch of very powerful people pretending they don't own the stuff they control. Wealth is just one of the multiple leverages that can be used by powerful people, if it's not accessible then any other leverage will do. The issue is with power concentration, not wealth.
The Soviet system? Whether we like the ideas in the article or not, that's not even remotely similar to what's being discussed.
We can't have discussions around financial topics if we do things like describe any financial policy to the left of pure lasseiz-faire as "Soviet."
Robeyns proposes two upper limits on personal wealth.
Most countries with a solid social safety net should
bake a 10-million-euro (approximately $10.8 million)
cap into their social and fiscal systems, she argues.
As an ethical guide, individuals should limit themselves
to 1 million (perhaps $5 million in the less secure United
States, where one mistimed hospital bill could be enough
to thrust a household into bankruptcy). She also notes
ruefully that both proposed numbers are also less restrictive
than some philosophers’ ideal: In The Laws, for instance,
Plato argues that the wealthiest people shouldn’t be able
to have more property than four times what people with the
least have.
So, to be clear, you could be quite financially comfortable.
I understand perhaps, a little bit of what you seem to be grasping at. Whatever hard limits we set, people will game them. The first thing that comes to mind is that if we set a naively set a hard limit on personal wealth, people will hide their wealth in other ways.
Example: perhaps I am permitted to have "only" $10 million in personal wealth. However, my $100bn company "just happens" to let me use its $100 million yacht for 200 days per year and they also provide me personal chefs and so forth. So I have the lifestyle of a billionaire, thanks to the company I own, regardless of what my bank account says.
I do it because I was born in the Soviet Union, am dealing with its long-lasting cursed legacy, and this is the system I know very well.
There are all sorts of highly theoretical and noble wealth redistribution ideologies made of handwavium like the one presented in the article. Doesn't matter if they're left or right or up or down, they inevitably collide with reality immediately upon receiving any traction, because they are dealing with the secondary or even tertiary consequences, not with the power imbalance which is the root cause. Dealing with that and setting up checks and balances requires actual dirty work, not navel-gazing discussions on the web, and there a lot of actors that aren't that wealthy and aren't centralized but still have disproportionate power (say, certain public activists, or extrajudicial secret services - for instance, my entire country is de facto owned by one, think pre-Church committee three-letter agencies gone rogue).
Even if all US billionaires’ wealth is confiscated today it will not even pay for 6 months of the 2024 US federal budget. So no, the problem isn’t high individual wealth.
The problem is a pervasive culture of ignorance, idealism, inflation, and exploitation.
43 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 598 ms ] threadyou need to place the means of production under democratic control
I witnessed more than five such privatizations in two different countries and they all ended up with the "investors" not even investing the minimum of what would have been necessary to keep the infrastructure operational. A decade later service quality is abysmal, infrastructure so bad that the state has to come in and help.
And these are only examples from postal services and public transport from the european regions I lived in, but I heard/read similar stories from nearly every of the 27 EU countries. The nations that still have exceptional services are the ones that didn't privatize them.
So if what I said is complete nonsense you surely have no problem pointing me to the wonderland where privatization lead to better services, lower prices and better service coverage — but we both know that never was the true interest behind privatizing anyways, don't we ; )
If you look at the worse services in your country they are usually the worse: from applying for a passport, to filling in pointless forms to high prices. Almost everything is better off in competition than making the natural market illegal.
But democracy is really hard work. The vast majority of people would rather let someone else do it so that they can play with the kids, hang out with friends at the bar, hit the gym, etc. instead. They don't even want to get involved with other democratic concerns, let alone try to watch over capital. And, frankly, who can blame them?
As such, that means that you are still going to need an individual or small group of people to take over the day-to-day control of the means. Congratulations, you just invented "private ownership".
But, it would require putting in the work to make happen. Which they don't want to do. People, and therefore democracies, don't like to put in work unless they absolutely have to. And in this case, why would they have to? There is really no good reason to put in the work. The people that could be recalled are there because the democracy wants them to be. Recalling them for no reason would be kind of silly.
Of course. I even said as much in the previous comment. But I also said there is no reason to put in the work. The work needing to be done was given away to other people for good reason and the democracy wants to keep it that way.
If that changes, things will change, but until then...
we could also learn from ideas associated with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_economics. I'm not saying they are all good ideas, but they are worth testing out and looking for historical examples of where they worked or failed.
That's a really good way to starve a couple million people. It's quite good to limit the wealth accumulation as well when people are only receiving rations for working from dawn to dusk.
There's a reason society's economic foundation resembles natural selection
Mr and Mrs Howell from Gilligan's Island.
You want to go after people for amassing wealth in unscrupulous ways, I'm 100% on board. You want to go after wealth because they have it and you don't? You're probably my mortal foe.
With the next priority to level up so less-extreme lack of wealth can also be addressed, ideally by increasing opportunities to move ahead in real terms through consistent productive work, much more than there are any more now.
- mostly, the ability to not pay their fair share of tax. I don't want to see them taxed 300% or whatever, I want them to pay the same marginal tax rate as normal people
- their outsized ability to finance politics. Political parties should have a fixed, transparent source of financing, from the state ideally, current system is basically legalized bribery.
- their outsizes ability to be politicians. Smart middle-class (or below, income-wise) people simply cannot afford to run for parlament and leave their career behind for N years. But this means politicians are overwhelmingly rich and skew the representation in supposed democracy
At least the first two are easy to fix.
Assume you were to set up solutions to the problems pointed out. The ultra rich would be immediately using their wealth and influence to better their position by working against the guard rails keeping those solutions in place. Why would they not?
Zuckerberg and other techno-royals are definitely ultra rich, and some aren't very nice people, but fundamentally they made their money in entirely legal and reasonable ways (through I'd argue in many cases tax appears to be underpaid).
I'd argue they were mostly lucky, and probably also competent. But I don't feel that their wealth is somehow wrongly acquired.
It astounds me how people don't want to financially reward our politicians in honest, transparent ways.
In an ideal world, I believe we should pay our politicians like stars while simultaneously having iron-clad controls on their outside financial influences. Wildly impractical for sure, but why not e.g.:
- Pay a US Senator $500,000 a year
- Assign two full time agents to him with full access to their finances down to counting the fucking loose change in the senator's pockets whenever they feel like it.
- Agent A and Agent B get a hefty bonus for spotting violations. Double the bonus for a thing the other missed.
- The iron-clad financial influence rules extend to 10 years after they leave office and include extended family members and friends.
We can't have discussions around financial topics if we do things like describe any financial policy to the left of pure lasseiz-faire as "Soviet."
So, to be clear, you could be quite financially comfortable.I understand perhaps, a little bit of what you seem to be grasping at. Whatever hard limits we set, people will game them. The first thing that comes to mind is that if we set a naively set a hard limit on personal wealth, people will hide their wealth in other ways.
Example: perhaps I am permitted to have "only" $10 million in personal wealth. However, my $100bn company "just happens" to let me use its $100 million yacht for 200 days per year and they also provide me personal chefs and so forth. So I have the lifestyle of a billionaire, thanks to the company I own, regardless of what my bank account says.
But... Soviet? Come on.
There are all sorts of highly theoretical and noble wealth redistribution ideologies made of handwavium like the one presented in the article. Doesn't matter if they're left or right or up or down, they inevitably collide with reality immediately upon receiving any traction, because they are dealing with the secondary or even tertiary consequences, not with the power imbalance which is the root cause. Dealing with that and setting up checks and balances requires actual dirty work, not navel-gazing discussions on the web, and there a lot of actors that aren't that wealthy and aren't centralized but still have disproportionate power (say, certain public activists, or extrajudicial secret services - for instance, my entire country is de facto owned by one, think pre-Church committee three-letter agencies gone rogue).
We also can’t have financial discussions if desiring an outcome is in anyway evidence it will happen.
Someone stating they prefer an arbitrary code of ethics and then decreeing that another set of actions will produce what they want isn’t useful.
The problem is a pervasive culture of ignorance, idealism, inflation, and exploitation.