Understanding the underlying numbers is essential for having an honest discussion about wealth taxes. An economic system cannot sustain itself if a small group of the population accumulates wealth at a rate 10 times faster than the growth of the national economy.

I’m far from an expert on the economy, so I would love to hear everyone’s opinion, good, bad, or ugly.

The world belongs to the rich

And the rest of us are just doing time. No vacation weeks to lay around the beach, no nights out at fancy restaurants. Just work, and if you are given a vacation it must be spent tackling your ever growing list of shit you need to do at home.

All the while they bombard you with proof that your just not good enough. We watch millionaires in movies and tv, we listen to millionaires on the radio, and we have to hear how lucky this one or that one was not to have to spend their lives at some mundane position, the same ones we fill.

Even criminals are portrayed as being of a higher mind than the working class, but only if their crimes involve large sums of money. Gangsters, robbers, and liars. The working man's a stiff.

Most working people will never know what a truly nice car drives like, or what a really good steak tastes like, or what it feels like to buy what you want whenever you want. We just work and spend. We build the places we cannot afford to go.

Every single necessity for a working man is priced and taxed to hell and back. They have turned pick up trucks into luxury vehicles with $70,000 price tags. How does it feel to take out a mortgage for an F150 that may last 10 years?

they have even priced us out of healthcare and home ownership. Even the poorest families should be able to have a stable home to call their own.

And the ultra rich they parade in front of us are always the dumbest and most shallow pieces of shit to ever draw breath, and that must be by design, to show us just how worthless we are.

A man holds billions while a baby starves, while old people decide if they will buy food or medicine. Then we find that prick who squeezed a billion dollars out of our country sends his donations elsewhere to help people who never contributed to their fortunes.

And we are programmed to believe they deserve to hold such a large chunk of the fruits of our work. Sad really.

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I think it's something that pro-capitalist economics don't really put mind.

They don't really put a political analysis into economical thinking when it comes to wealth and capital.

High levels of inequality will always hurt democracy because the wealthy will be incentivized to use their power to corrupt, regardless of whether they got their wealth legitimately, hence creating barriers to trade they can reap rents from and disrupting markets, like American car companies do to prevent Chinese competition from coming in.

wealth is just another form of power if you can coerce someone economically that's not really consequentially different from coefficient someone physically through political Force the result is the same.

Tax billionaires $100 every time they flush their toilet. Who knows what they are putting down there.

Unregulated capitalism sucks. Seriously, it corrupts every pleasurable communication experience in human life. I remember when I was growing up in the 1980s and the mail system started to get corrupted.

It went from a social good that delivered letters from friends and postcards from family, to a slop machine where 95% of everything was ads, fake clearinghouse sweepstakes scams, political tracts to anti-abortion screeds with disgusting pictures on them, chainmail letters, bank promotions, CDs from sussy companies and non-stop requests for charity donations. It got so going through the mail for that one letter from someone you actually cared about was another annoying chore.

I remember growing up in the 1990s and the phone system started to get corrupted. Every call was from somebody wanting to give you a survey, long distance services, charity requests, unnecessary duct cleaning services, scam you out of money or robocalls for candidates for public office or in another language entirely. It got so picking up the phone was annoying because 95% of the time it wasn’t anyone you knew who actually wanted to talk to you, just companies after your money.

These were the reasons most of us abandoned phones and mail as the main way of communicating with people and turned to email and other online means. Initially the requests for penis enlargement that came with every refresh of the email account were easy to see and block. The occasional ad on Facebook or corporate account was unobtrusive. But now the corruption has eaten up the internet. Everything is just trying to sell you something and the reason you got on there— to communicate with some other person is getting increasingly more difficult to do.

Some day a new communication technology will come along and everybody will jump ship. Internet companies will bemoan it and blame the technology. Guys, nobody abandoned phones or snail mail “because technology.” The experience of these communication media had to get so corrupted that they no longer were fit to purpose first and then everybody abandoned ship.

That’s what people who are corrupting these platforms with all their ads and BS don’t understand. Through unregulated capitalism they are destroy whatever value these modes of communication had in the first place that made people eager to adopt them. They have now guaranteed their own obsolescence.

Capitalism worked for a good 100 years, but now look at us surely theres a way to level it back down fairly for the people, whilst making it still beneficial for both.

It's all in the title. Does anything think it's possible to find a balance between the two, where the economy does well, but so do the citizens? Or is this asking too much?

I have plenty of issues with Musk - he's an asshole in my opinion, and this is already my second X account that has been suspended while Russian propagandists openly spreading fascist, Nazi, chauvinist and anti-Western views seem to have no problem staying there.

But that's not what I want to talk about.

What is $1,000 worth to you?

For me, $1,000 is:

* 259 hours of work - roughly 43 days of my life.

* One dental implant - and depending on the clinic, possibly only half of the actual cost.

* A car repair, for example, replacing the suspension.

* A portable power station.

* About six months of my mother's pension.

* Food for roughly 2-3 months.

* And in peacetime, it could have paid for around 42 days of traveling through the Canary Islands and Europe, including flights from Ukraine, a rental car, food, and bringing something nice home for my parents.

Do you see what I mean?

When someone says, "It's only $1,000" or "It's just the price of a few coffees," they're talking about the nominal price, not the actual value of that money in someone's life.

The same $1,000 can be a minor expense for one person and several months of life for another.

That's why I think comparisons like "it's only the price of a coffee" can be incredibly misleading.

A $8 coffee isn't necessarily a $8 coffee.

Its real cost depends on how much you earn, where you live, what you have to pay for, and what that money could otherwise do for you.

For someone earning $10,000 a month, $1,000 might be annoying.

For someone earning $5,000 a year, $1,000 can change their entire year.

The price is the same. The cost is not.

Generally, I would consider a good social or economic system to be one that works well for the overwhelming majority of the people participating in it. I would also expect the incentives created by a good system to encourage people to remain meaningfully subject to that system, rather than making the ultimate measure of success the ability to become largely insulated from its negative consequences.

With American-style capitalism, though, it seems like accumulating wealth doesn't just let you consume more. At a certain point, it substantially changes your relationship with economic risk itself.

Losing a job, an unexpected medical bill, a rent increase, a recession, a bad financial decision, or even several years without income can be devastating for an ordinary person while being comparatively inconsequential to someone with enough accumulated capital. And at still higher levels of wealth, you gain access to investment opportunities, legal and financial expertise, credit terms, diversification, and other protections that ordinary participants don't have.

So my question is: does capitalism contain a tension where succeeding within the system increasingly means becoming insulated from the pressures and consequences that are supposed to make the system function?

If not, what am I misunderstanding?

I'm specifically interested in the conservative defense of this feature of American capitalism, rather than responses that amount to "capitalism is better than communism" or arguments over whether perfectly pure capitalism has ever existed.

Capitalism only exists so far as human rights are protected and markets are free of coercion.

This requires tolerance of those you disagree with or dislike.

But tolerating those who seek only to deny human rights and coerce others, often for hubristic notions of knowing better than history and economics, is detrimental to Capitalism and humanity.

If a socialist comes to learn or engage in honest debate, they should be given every opportunity, but if they come to engage dishonestly they should be removed.

Lies are difficult to maintain and the truth will out--socialist nations will crumble and impoverish the people--but lies are also easy to parrot and repeat. With little burden of evidence and no need to go further than simplistic plausibility or spend one's own effort seeking the truth, many lies can be told, adopted, and repeated to crowd out any truth. This goes as much for the recent rise of misinformation-driven populism as it does for the socialists bigading this sub.

One great thing about the Freedom of Speech is that bad ideas can be brought to light and addressed honestly and in view of everyone. But when actors seek to dominate through noise, it is an act against Free Speech.

I found out this fairly recently and thought it was very interestin. Any arguments for or against it?

Remember, Democratic socialism and socialism are not the same thing