Do the rich taste best when baked, or when cooked over an open flame?

August 2, 2018 9:50 AM

It's Basically Just Immoral to be Rich. "Because every dollar you have is a dollar you’re not giving to somebody else, the decision to retain wealth is a decision to deprive others."
posted by AFABulous (206 comments total)

I loved this article when it debuted. It's so deeply refreshing to hear someone saying this out loud.

Excellent use of the "omnomnomjeffbezos" tag.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 9:52 AM on August 2, 2018 [29 favorites]

Good to hear that I'm immoral because... I live in Seattle, have a small-ish ten year old house, drive a ten year old car, and happen to exceed the proposed maximum income.
posted by saeculorum at 9:59 AM on August 2, 2018 [17 favorites]

You know what you wouldn't be able to buy with only $100,000 a year? The future!
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:00 AM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Related: Summer Camp for the Ultra-Wealthy Teaches Kids How to Stay Rich -- Attendees at Next Gen functions hosted by the likes of UBS, Citi Private Bank, and Credit Suisse will one day rank among the world’s most sought-after clients. (Suzanne Woolley for Bloomberg, July 30, 2018)

They sip designer lattes and speak the language of wealth. The talk is of money, noblesse oblige, technology, Formula One. At lunchtime, out comes chilled rosé, with a tasting led by Jon Bon Jovi’s son Jesse.

Welcome to Camp Rich.

Here, not far from Wall Street, Swiss banking giant UBS Group AG has convened its annual Young Successors Program (YSP), a three-day workshop for people who were born loaded. Part tutorial and part self-actualization exercise, the event is designed to stamp the UBS brand on the minds of the next generation of the ultra-wealthy—in essence, to hook them while they’re young.

I sign on to Eyebrows McGee's plan:

I am now in favor of a statutory maximum income above which all wealth and income is taxed at 100%, unless child poverty nationwide is under 5%. When child poverty falls below that mark, the cap is lifted, until it rises above 5% again.

Align your incentives, motherfuckers.

(Quoted from the recent politics mega-thread).
posted by filthy light thief at 10:03 AM on August 2, 2018 [61 favorites]

Isn't this just what that 'Jesus' bloke apparently said?

I mean, there's that thing about seeing people without clothes, and giving them your own, so I suppose you could hide in a gated community... but I think he was working on a theme...
posted by pompomtom at 10:03 AM on August 2, 2018 [9 favorites]

Sorry, I don't mean to encourage Jesusists... they've fucked up some shit quite seriously....
posted by pompomtom at 10:05 AM on August 2, 2018 [8 favorites]

Good to hear that I'm immoral because... I live in Seattle, have a small-ish ten year old house, drive a ten year old car, and happen to exceed the proposed maximum income.

Do you work for a living or own for a living?
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:06 AM on August 2, 2018 [46 favorites]

But if you earn $250,000 or 1 million, it’s quite clear that the bulk of your income should be given away. You can live very comfortably on $100,000 or so and have luxury and indulgence, so anything beyond is almost indisputably indefensible.

A.Q. Smith clearly does not live in a place like New York or Seattle or San Francisco, where high cost of living means $100,000 doesn't = "luxury and indulgence".
posted by eustacescrubb at 10:09 AM on August 2, 2018 [17 favorites]

Good to hear that I'm immoral because... I live in Seattle, have a small-ish ten year old house, drive a ten year old car, and happen to exceed the proposed maximum income.

There is always 'this guy'. Always. Anytime you discuss poverty 'this guy' will show up.
posted by srboisvert at 10:14 AM on August 2, 2018 [172 favorites]

The only thing more frustrating than worshiping the acquisition of wealth itself is the accompanying approval of people who are quietly rich. "Oh yes, he's a good billionaire, he flies economy class commercial so that he can accumulate even more money in a bank account." Rich people should give more of their money away, but they also should spend a greater percentage of it. I bet the Jean-Ralphios of the world are ultimately better "job-creators" than tech titans, because they're cycling their money outside of banks*and beyond the 400 middle-class employees saving for their children's private school education.

*I mean, like, probably strip clubs and third tier sports franchises. STILL.
posted by grandiloquiet at 10:14 AM on August 2, 2018 [8 favorites]

This is all a little too Swiftian for me. If we could just get the richies to feel that not paying lots of taxes was immoral, I'd be happy. I was raised, went to school, etc., with the wealthy. they are all pretty much crap as people, and I don't think they are capable of feeling immoral. Being out in the world has taught me that people who aren't wealthy, but want to be, are even worse.
posted by Chitownfats at 10:16 AM on August 2, 2018 [8 favorites]

I fully agree that, as a society, we should view extreme wealth -- and especially displays of extreme wealth -- with disgust. I don't think there's a simple calculus or dollar amount that delineates simply well-off and stable from obscenely wealthy -- but I feel like we know it when we see it. IMO, progressive taxation is the mechanism that's supposed to redistribute wealth but LOL good luck with that in this day and age. Maybe if there's a cultural shift toward "the person who has that opulent mansion/palace disgusts me" rather than "I aspire to that" . . . that could help (which is kind of what I think the point of the article is). But, again, at least in the US, we're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Sigh.
posted by treepour at 10:17 AM on August 2, 2018 [7 favorites]

small-ish ten year old house

I don't think the message you're sending is the message you meant to send with this.
posted by Horkus at 10:18 AM on August 2, 2018 [89 favorites]

$100,000 in Seattle means luxury and indulgence compared to the people who make $20,000 and spend 3-4 hours a day commuting in and out of the city to serve those that make $100,000.

I don't disagree that the way we do capitalism is terribly unfair, nor that we should tax people who make above a certain amount a lot more than we do; I'm just saying $100,000 gets you a fairly middle class standard of living in larger cities, so it seems like a strange spot to locate "luxury and indulgence." If we want to agree that "luxury and indulgence" means "having more income than people who make less than you", sure, but I was thinking it meant something more like "has a lot of money to spend on nonessentials after the bills are paid." Maybe a savings account would qualify as a luxury under that deifnition, but given the way college is getting more and more expensive, as is income-earning for senior citizens, I'd have to wonder about savings accounts too. If I'm preparing for the future of myself or my kids (and in so doing removing that burden from society), is that a "luxury or indulgence." Only if the plan to tax people who make more at higher rates includes stuff like a UBI and making eduction free (which I'd be for, but that's not the world we live in right now.)
posted by eustacescrubb at 10:18 AM on August 2, 2018 [6 favorites]

Is a ten-year-old house supposed to be, like, very old? I have never lived in a building built after the 1960s—as an adult, the 1920s—so I don't really understand the signifier here. In any case, I'm not sure owning your own single-family house in one of the most expensive cities in the country is quite so modest a lifestyle as it may seem from the inside.
posted by enn at 10:18 AM on August 2, 2018 [58 favorites]

There is always 'this guy'. Always. Anytime you discuss poverty 'this guy' will show up.

I like to call him the guy that can't read, because even in the article, the author is fine with 2 people plus a kid netting $250k in income per year. And if you are a single person earning $250k in Seattle where the median household income is a relatively high $95k and strugging with your 'ten year old house' (LOL) then you are just bad with money.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:19 AM on August 2, 2018 [26 favorites]

I pay my ex wife 85 thousand dollars a year on an income of 130k per year. That’s because fuck money I don’t want it.
posted by nikaspark at 10:22 AM on August 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

I do not accept the premise that there is some magical line above which earning money becomes immoral, that is to say, if 1000 people give Wilt Chamberlain 25 cents, what makes the 1001st person the dealbreaker?

I am more inclined to say that hoarding wealth at the expense of society is immoral.
So, Sam Walton gets to be the richest person in the country because he came up with an idea, executed it well, and got lots of people to give him quarters.
Rob, Alice, and the rest though. They're on their own.
posted by madajb at 10:24 AM on August 2, 2018 [4 favorites]

Quibbling about the exact metrics for when retention of wealth is immoral is ridiculous, and I think the author could have done a better job simply by saying "look: this [I] is the average family income to live reasonably in location L. making and keeping 2.5 I puts you in the range, above which, there is immorality. Adjust figures for L and I where you are and carry on".
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:25 AM on August 2, 2018 [17 favorites]

I am more inclined to say that hoarding wealth at the expense of society is immoral.

Yes, this.
posted by eustacescrubb at 10:25 AM on August 2, 2018 [7 favorites]

As a moral/religious socialist (ala the Diggers), of course I agree with the article. It's not moral to be rich. For most of us who may be above the "minimally moral income", the way we pay is through our taxes. Bring them on! Lovely, highly progressive income taxes to fund housing and schools and hospitals and generous basic income programs. You want to be moral and make an above average income for your area? Vote for progressive taxation and high social welfare spending.

But I do think we also need to interrogate this "deserves" wealth thing too. Aside from inherited wealth, there is no one, NO ONE on this planet who has created wealth through their own effort. Even the most brilliant inventor has just an idea without all the people who supported them, helped produce the thing, keep the thing running. Google can't happen without the people who scrub the bathrooms at Google, because otherwise all the engineers would come down with dysentery. Capitalists aren't 'wealth creators' - all of the people engaged in the enterprise are collectively creating something of value.

In other words, Workers are the Real Makers(TM) - including the highly paid knowledge workers, but also including the low paid manual and support workers. No one does anything alone.
posted by jb at 10:26 AM on August 2, 2018 [77 favorites]

This means two parents with a child can still earn $250,000! That’s so much money.

Honestly, this is such a reasonable, almost indulgent, threshold, that's it's hard to argue with it. I think of our family as earning (and spending) a fair bit, but even in a high cost of living area (DC) with a mortgage and a kid in daycare, I'm not sure what we'd be spending $250,000 a year on. We'd have a decent middle class income extra at that point.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:27 AM on August 2, 2018 [10 favorites]

like seriously I have immense earnings power so why not support my ex who basically sacrificed 14 years of income potential to raise our children. I really do not understand how people get so fucked up over having money. It’s just not worth it beyond 100k per year. Hell I’d say beyond 60-70k per year the stress to income ratio makes the money not worth it. Why do people get so hoinky about this. Just give it the fuck away to someone who needs it more than you do and feel good about doing good. And ride the fucking bus like the rest of us.
posted by nikaspark at 10:27 AM on August 2, 2018 [24 favorites]

Sorry - didn't meant that inherited wealth was created by one person, just that it's so obviously NOT created by the current owner and no one argues that it is.
posted by jb at 10:28 AM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

but the *morality* message should be clear, though

If only the article had been written and edited instead of being spontaneously generated, the author could have made it clear.
posted by eustacescrubb at 10:28 AM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

The nitpicking isn't really necessary - I think most of us can agree the author is blind or naive to regional variations in costs of living. But I think the thesis is solid. One look at GoFundMe's medical category should be enough to say that redistribution is necessary and moral.
posted by AFABulous at 10:29 AM on August 2, 2018 [22 favorites]

Yes, well, lots of rich people also enjoy the immoral Power involved in giving the money away. So I disagree with the statement that you can ignore the basic immorality of a political system that ensures certain people are in a different caste than others.

Most of the economy is gifted. Gifts reproduce social relationships. Reciprocal or otherwise.

There s a reason why, historically, no one was allowed to give a bigger gift than the king.
posted by eustatic at 10:31 AM on August 2, 2018 [8 favorites]

But I do think we also need to interrogate this "deserves" wealth thing too. Aside from inherited wealth, there is no one, NO ONE on this planet who has created wealth through their own effort.

A bajillion times this.
posted by fnerg at 10:31 AM on August 2, 2018 [19 favorites]

Cost of living thing is true (believe me, I live in a place where this is super obvious) but seems mostly beside the point. Plus the presence of people who make way more than the "cap" is one of the factors that causes the cost of living to be so high in SF/NYC/Seattle/etc. - at least as far as things like real estate go.
posted by atoxyl at 10:33 AM on August 2, 2018 [19 favorites]

Just *this year alone* I've personally paid for more random strangers' health care than most people *make* in a year.

What does this mean, exactly? That you've donated over the median income to strangers' go-fund-me campaigns?
posted by amelioration at 10:34 AM on August 2, 2018

Something that's very important to understand is that it's not necessary for the cost of living in cities like New York, Seattle, San Francisco, London, etc, to be as high as it is. A LOT of those costs are the results of rich people buying up land and using excess wealth to drive up housing costs, and that's a direct result of the ever-increasing concentration of wealth which has been a priority of our politicians for the past 35-40 years. Expropriate that wealth, prevent the 1% from attaining that wealth again, and those prices will drop sharply. High-paid workers are still workers. They're not the ones driving these prices.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:35 AM on August 2, 2018 [101 favorites]

What does this mean, exactly? That you've donated over the median income to strangers' go-fund-me campaigns?

I would wager it means their Medicare/Medicaid/other health insurance related taxes are above the median income
posted by JauntyFedora at 10:36 AM on August 2, 2018

Speaking of Jesus, of the Tap-Dancing Christ variety, how about we start with whatever minuscule <1% of people that own half the world’s wealth?
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:36 AM on August 2, 2018 [24 favorites]

Money is like blood. It needs to circulate, or you get rot and gangrene. Money sitting in bank accounts doing nothing leads to societal rot, and if there's too much for the owner to spend, it needs to be taxed and forced back into circulation in that way.

Poor people are excellent at creating economic health, because as soon as you give them money, they spend it, and the wealth is distributed and the economy improves.

Rich people who hoard their money are the lumps of cholesterol in the arteries of our economy.
posted by emjaybee at 10:36 AM on August 2, 2018 [154 favorites]

Hey odinsdream:

Thank you!
posted by pompomtom at 10:39 AM on August 2, 2018 [6 favorites]

If money is like blood, then current financial laws are like Viagra - they make it possible for money to concentrate in unhealthy amounts.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:39 AM on August 2, 2018 [12 favorites]

I have guilt issues about the money I make now, too, but I don't think it's anybody else's fault for bringing it up. My behavior is better than many people, and also worse than some. I don't budget well or I'd have more money to use for better purposes. It's a failing and something I'm trying to do better at. If you're making enough money to fall into one of these categories, or even if you're middle class, you can survive hearing that you're not helping others as much as you should be, because you're not. If you don't want anybody to ever say you could do better, then you need to be holding yourself to a higher standard to start with.

For most of us, the world would be better if we just tried to do more than we're doing now. It's good to remember that, to be trying all the time to be better than we were yesterday.
posted by Sequence at 10:39 AM on August 2, 2018 [32 favorites]

High-paid workers are still workers. They're not the ones driving these prices.

Well, probably not entirely true.
posted by atoxyl at 10:44 AM on August 2, 2018

emjaybee, flagged as fantastic

Goddamn
posted by schadenfrau at 10:45 AM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

A lot of times I wish I were rich that way I could throw more money at my favorite charities/causes--animal rights, initiatives and programs that benefit women in need, etc--but never fear, I don't have the skill set nor the capital nor the network to make this happen. I mean, I'm solidly middle class and I still can't believe I don't have income to do this without being rich. It's irritating and frustrating.
posted by Kitteh at 10:50 AM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

One criticism of the article: it uses the words "rich" and "wealthy" mostly to describe a high level of income rather than, as "wealthy" in particularly is more commonly used, a high level of assets.

Is it more immoral to have a huge income, or to be sitting on a huge pile of wealth? Or are both obscene?
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:52 AM on August 2, 2018 [10 favorites]

Wealth hoarding is a disease and I've proposed a solution
posted by The Whelk at 10:54 AM on August 2, 2018 [8 favorites]

Money sitting in bank accounts doing nothing leads to societal rot, and if there's too much for the owner to spend, it needs to be taxed and forced back into circulation in that way.

Standard capitalist responses to this line of argument are that (a) the rich don't "hoard" their wealth in bank accounts, they invest it for capital gains and (b) even if they do hold wealth in bank accounts, doing so allows the banks to circulate huge multiples of that wealth around the economy via the miracle of fractional reserve lending.

And indeed there is some merit in both these arguments, but what they miss is that money tends to stratify: investment money mostly shuttles back and forth between the already rich in the form of share purchases and dividends and only a relatively small amount of it ends up trickling down to the non-investing classes. Same with bank loans, since banks will typically not lend to people who don't already have fairly substantial wealth.

Seems to me that anybody with enough wealth that all their material needs can be met from the passive income stream that investing that wealth in other businesses can generate has completely lost any credibility to argue that a UBI that gives out money "for nothing" is in any way morally unsound.

If, as the rich so often argue, a UBI creates a moral hazard by handing out money that the recipients do nothing to earn, then so does the process of investing wealth, even if that investment is as minimal as dumping it in a bank account and letting it accumulate interest. Which means that every argument for the idea that the rich provide a valuable service to society by investing their accumulated wealth is also an argument for allowing the less-rich to extend a similar service by spending their UBI.
posted by flabdablet at 10:55 AM on August 2, 2018 [25 favorites]

Is it more immoral to have a huge income, or to be sitting on a huge pile of wealth? Or are both obscene?

I think the article is pretty clear on this point--it says it is immoral to retain the wealth. After all, the ultra-rich have mostly unearned income to report -- why do we even call it an income when it comes out of trusts? And there is no difference, in this moral argument, between a trust that pays out on a schedule and owning an island.

As for capital gains, they are only gains for the super-rich. Nobody else is really helped, in any substantive way, by the fact that someone owns an island.
posted by epanalepsis at 10:57 AM on August 2, 2018 [6 favorites]

Picking a fucking dollar amount here is a fool's errand because circumstances vary wildly, but the *morality* message should be clear, though.

QFT.

This is why I thought the idea of "The 1%" was so effective (at least for awhile...) It was 99% vs 1% vs 99% squabbling over what the line between "rich" "middle class" and "poor" was.
posted by gwint at 10:57 AM on August 2, 2018 [9 favorites]

Good to hear that I'm immoral because... I live in Seattle, have a small-ish ten year old house, drive a ten year old car, and happen to exceed the proposed maximum income.

Not to be a psychoanalyst, but none of those examples were referenced in the article. My guess is if you read the basic premise and thought defensively, "is this me?", then maybe there is an opportunity for charity of some sort in your budget.

Generosity feels terrific, pays back two-fold, they say.

You can set lots of things to be automatically deducted so you never even notice the money.
posted by Peter H at 10:58 AM on August 2, 2018 [18 favorites]

This topic hits me squarely between the eyes. After growing up in a broke-ass family, doing blue collar work for several years and then finally debt'ing my way through college, I got lucky and found a nice niche in tech where I could make a decent living. The past few years I've actually done pretty well, and now I'm confronting the question of just how much I should be putting towards good causes versus how much I can justify saving for a rainy day or retirement.

I'm approaching 50 rather more rapidly than I'd like and I know that if there's a serious downturn my industry could be deeply affected. So part of me wants to hold on to every dime/pay off all debt before that happens. Or the next decade could be smooth sailing and I'd wish I'd given more to people who needed it, when they needed it. (Not that I imagine in a decade that people won't need it then, too.)

The idea that $250K a year is indefensible, it seems to me, assumes that the $250K a year is going to come year after year. And after growing up broke... I don't think that's a safe assumption. I've already seen a number of folks in tech wash out and go from six figure jobs to hourly wage jobs where they're just barely scraping by.
posted by jzb at 10:59 AM on August 2, 2018 [34 favorites]

I will consider whether six-figure incomes in big cities are "not rich" when there are no people in those cities living on four-figure incomes.

I've also occasionally heard defensive arguments of, "I'm not rich - I barely have the recommended 3 months' cushion in case of emergency!" ... Since I know a lot of people who don't have three weeks' cushion - for whom three weeks without income would mean eviction and living homeless, and have friends-of-friends who survive by couch-crashing - I am not sympathetic to that, either.

On the other side, people who grew up in poverty and are now making enough that their bills are paid and they have enough leisure money to buy holiday gifts for everyone in their immediate household and maybe even a few more, need to stop guilt-tripping themselves for not spending all that money to alleviate the plight of strangers.

We have a bizarre culture where people making $150k-$250k try to claim they're "not really rich," and people who've managed to shift from $15k to $30k feel guilty for not fixing poverty on their own.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 11:09 AM on August 2, 2018 [64 favorites]

Pitting people making $150K against people making $30K is not the kind of class warfare we need.
posted by gwint at 11:11 AM on August 2, 2018 [116 favorites]

I think there's a pretty simple refutation of this:

1. Individual gets rich.
2. Individual donates nothing to charity, and uses their wealth to accumulate more total money than they would if they had donated to charity throughout their lives.
3. Individual donates most of their money to charity upon death.

This is a scenario which is playing out with a few rich people, and it should play out with more of them, and it doesn't indicate that living life as a wealthy person is inherently immoral. In some cases it could be more beneficial to humanity than donating generously while still alive.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 11:11 AM on August 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

Yes exactly, I feel like it's ridic to argue over whether 100k or 200k is "too much" in expensive cities like NY or SF when there are dudes buying fucking islands and hoarding hundreds of millions to themselves.
posted by windbox at 11:12 AM on August 2, 2018 [23 favorites]

East Manitoba etc: I'll believe that theory when they stop buying jets and gold toilets.
posted by AFABulous at 11:13 AM on August 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

I've also occasionally heard defensive arguments of, "I'm not rich - I barely have the recommended 3 months' cushion in case of emergency!" ... Since I know a lot of people who don't have three weeks' cushion - for whom three weeks without income would mean eviction and living homeless, and have friends-of-friends who survive by couch-crashing - I am not sympathetic to that, either.

If you're considering more than three months' cushion "rich" I think you're erasing any concept of middle or simply comfortable.
posted by jzb at 11:15 AM on August 2, 2018 [15 favorites]

Good to hear that I'm immoral because... I live in Seattle, have a small-ish ten year old house, drive a ten year old car, and happen to exceed the proposed maximum income.

There is always 'this guy'. Always. Anytime you discuss poverty 'this guy' will show up.

Can we skip the anarcho-socialist orthodoxy in favor of an actually useful conversation? Hair-shirt pageants don't move the needle and if wasn't for the existence of a bourgoisie most of us would still be experiencing actual rather than metaphorical serfdom.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:17 AM on August 2, 2018 [18 favorites]

This is a scenario which is playing out with a few rich people, and it should play out with more of them, and it doesn't indicate that living life as a wealthy person is inherently immoral. In some cases it could be more beneficial to humanity than donating generously while still alive.

Nobody makes Andrew Carnegie money except by stealing it from working people, and society would be far better off with a working class that can afford to live than with monuments to the generosity of thieves.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:17 AM on August 2, 2018 [44 favorites]

$100,000 in Seattle means luxury and indulgence compared to the people who make $20,000 and spend 3-4 hours a day commuting in and out of the city to serve those that make $100,000.

I live an hour outside of Toronto. A friend and neighbour of mine commutes to Toronto daily for her job (at which she makes between six and seven times my income), and complains of the commute: she cannot do anything she wants to because there are not enough hours in the day. I mentioned to her once that she has the same 24 hours per day that Einstein did, and Marie Curie, and Gandhi. Her response was "Gandhi didn't have to commute into Toronto every day!"

True enough.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:18 AM on August 2, 2018 [13 favorites]

Just as a reminder:

* The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Owns 40 Percent Of The Nation’s Wealth

* The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Take Home 24 Percent Of National Income

* The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Own Half Of The Country’s Stocks, Bonds, And Mutual Funds

* The Top 1 Percent Are Taking In More Of The Nation’s Income Than At Any Other Time Since The 1920s

(source)
posted by gwint at 11:18 AM on August 2, 2018 [27 favorites]

Eh... I'm pretty sure one reason why very rich people donate so much money in their wills is to avoid the estate tax. They can't take it with them and they'd rather get a building named after them than give it to the government.
posted by grandiloquiet at 11:18 AM on August 2, 2018 [4 favorites]

I'm a diehard empathizer and try to be as generous as possible in life.

My wife offsets this well with more pragmatic survival realities regarding saving for retirement.

The only real drag about this is our current world is it's suggested you need a million dollars saved before retirement, which amounts to about $40k/year to live off from 4% deducted annually.

So we try and live yearly saving towards this insane one million dollar goal, and help others through good tasks and money when possible. It's an exceptionally broken world in this respect.
posted by Peter H at 11:19 AM on August 2, 2018 [9 favorites]

This threat is an excellent illustration of why reducing political problems to personal moral challenges is pretty counterproductive. Maybe it is immoral to be rich, maybe it isn't. Who gives a fuck?

The reason to redistribute wealth isn't the moral improvement of the donor, it's the practical gain to the recipient and the indirect benefits to society. We don't need to agree that being rich is immoral, we just need to recognise the urgent practical need for redistribution via taxation.
posted by howfar at 11:20 AM on August 2, 2018 [46 favorites]

Stop
Arguing about if you are good or bad. No one cares about your income unless you’re Bezos or Buffett or Zuck or what ever other hoarding dragons are wanking gently oer their piles of gold. The 1% or 0.1% should be financially rendered like pork bellies until crispy like the best bacon.

Taxes are the absolute best way of doing this and we used to know how but the pigs are running the kitchen now and without some serious pain it’s not going to change. Like 1929 pain.

No idea which way forward but one sure thing is stop hassling each other, that what THEY want.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:20 AM on August 2, 2018 [44 favorites]

NO ONE on this planet who has created wealth through their own effort.

Huh?

I consider myself pretty far to the left; I basically agree with the gist of the article about what a moral person should do. And I think the bulk of people's income is determined by factors outside their control, as does Warren Buffett. And if I were in charge, we'd have a vastly more economically progressive system.

But certainly effort is necessary and plays a significant role. Any discussion that doesn't acknowledge that basic fact is an immediate political loser - and an economic system that doesn't reward effort to some extent just won't work for anyone, including the poor.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:21 AM on August 2, 2018 [8 favorites]

Eh... I'm pretty sure one reason why very rich people donate so much money in their wills is to avoid the estate tax. They can't take it with them and they'd rather get a building named after them than give it to the government.

I agree that being a mean, narcissistic asshole is inherently immoral, but being rich and donating to charity in your will is not inherently immoral.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 11:22 AM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Huh?

Even Buffett drived to his wealth on public roads, used toilets, purchased food, used hospitals, drinks water that's cleaned by infrastructure. He also hired people educated on public schooling that made him money.

The socialist world gave survival and safety to Buffett.
posted by Peter H at 11:24 AM on August 2, 2018 [16 favorites]

The 1% can maybe be called to account through political and social processes and shifts, because things are bad enough that the 1% can't expect to transmit status or wealth to their kids anymore.

The 0.1% are going to need some "structural assistance" divesting themselves as they are basically part of the financial industry at this point.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:24 AM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

None of us are capitalists because none of us own a significant amount of capital in a world were inequality is reaching feudal levels worldwide.

The main political thought of the last 40 Years of American life is that if you give rich people money they will use it responsibly and share some - well we tried that and they didn't
posted by The Whelk at 11:24 AM on August 2, 2018 [42 favorites]

Pitting people making $150K against people making $30K is not the kind of class warfare we need.

And exactly the kind that the actually rich fuckers adore.
posted by Celsius1414 at 11:25 AM on August 2, 2018 [47 favorites]

This threat is an excellent illustration of why reducing political problems to personal moral challenges is pretty counterproductive. Maybe it is immoral to be rich, maybe it isn't. Who gives a fuck?

Maybe if people broadly perceive retaining immense wealth to be immoral, then they'll vote for politicians who will promise to raise taxes on immense wealth.
posted by gurple at 11:25 AM on August 2, 2018 [11 favorites]

I will consider whether six-figure incomes in big cities are "not rich" when there are no people in those cities living on four-figure incomes.

Even in the case of someone who is diverting a good portion of that income towards a retirement savings plan, so they can support themselves when the day comes when they reach the age of 70 and their income drops from six figures to zero figures?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:25 AM on August 2, 2018 [6 favorites]

Well, if any rich people are reading this and want to get rid of any money that's making them feel guilty, I'd sure like to be able to afford a bunch of rather expensive medical treatments.
posted by loquacious at 11:31 AM on August 2, 2018 [14 favorites]

oh, for the record the money=blood circulation idea is not mine, I'm pretty sure I picked it up from a liberal economist that I used to read (possibly Echidne? possibly another one) I honestly can't remember but I definitely don't want to pretend it's all me. Carry on.
posted by emjaybee at 11:32 AM on August 2, 2018

I'd be happy with a limit of $1m or even $10m—these are still paltry sums compared against the rich. Surely we can all agree to make being a billionaire illegal?
posted by reductiondesign at 11:36 AM on August 2, 2018 [6 favorites]

... an economic system that doesn't reward effort to some extent just won't work for anyone, including the poor.

This is ablelist nonsense. Bezos and his ilk don't work a billion times harder than other people, and people who can't work are not worthless.

True. With a progressive tax system, he'd get a lot less than a billion times more. (And with a tighter anti-trust and regulatory system, he wouldn't earn as much pretax either.

...and people who can't work are not worthless.

True. There should be a more robust disability insurance system.

Both of those are consistent with a recognition that effort matters and that tax rates approaching 100 percent are economically infeasible.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:38 AM on August 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

"I don't have to sell my labor to live" is a goid starting point. Everyone under that should be in solidarity as well as everyone who can't sell their labor.
posted by The Whelk at 11:39 AM on August 2, 2018 [28 favorites]

Sell or contribute, until Fully Automated Luxury Communism arrives there has to be productivity. If you're not going to reward people.....then what? The gulag for free-riders?

This isn't exactly a new problem. But I could be on board with it being a much better problem than the current "solution."
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:43 AM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

So I'm traveling right now. The kind of trip that would be a once in a lifetime thing for a lot of people, but that I'm fortunate enough to make happen once or even twice a year. Yes - I've got a lot of feelings about that. My carbon footprint is plainly immoral, full stop.

Just today I took my kid to Spain's National Archaeology Museum, in Madrid (aka "MAN" - Spanish adjectives, etc.). MAN doesn't mess around. The notion of communicating via something other than the oral tradition - we have evidence for when we didn't do that, and evidence for when we started to. Same thing with fire - here's where we didn't have it. Here's where we did.

Same thing with inequality. There simply wasn't a notion of unequal burial rights up until a certain point. And after that point, there's hardly an example where inequality isn't expressed in that way. Which is pretty damn mind blowing. This isn't baked into our bones. It came with technology (specifically, the dawn of the bronze age). Progress, technology, all the stuff we love to celebrate as fundamental human achievements also birthed the other side.

So, yeah. As someone who works in tech, it's kind of a lot to think about. I'm not sure how you get the benefits without the flip side. Would appreciate pointers if you've got them to thinkers/writers who make this explicit connection - and more importantly - suggest a better, more equitable way forward.
posted by NoRelationToLea at 11:47 AM on August 2, 2018 [11 favorites]

I think the problem is assuming that the system currently rewards labor. It doesn't. Most minimum wage people work harder than I do by orders of magnitude. I would be entirely in favor of rewarding labor, if that was actually on the table as an option. Rewarding having a job is not the same thing as rewarding effort.
posted by Sequence at 11:48 AM on August 2, 2018 [40 favorites]

Dean Spade's "It's So Queer to Give Away Money" is an article on this topic that influenced my thinking on this a lot, because he comes specifically from a queer/trans/activist perspective:

"We are also talking about practice related to risk and vulnerability. In a culture with a decreasing safety net, there is enormous fear-based pressure to save for retirement, unemployment, disability, children, and other life changes. A system that individualizes risk encourages people to look out for themselves alone and steel themselves against harm, knowing that they may face vulnerability alone. What kinds of structures would our communities need to put in place together so that we could trust that we would be cared for and that hoarding does not make the world safer for us? How can our queer and trans histories with caring for loved ones with AIDS, supporting youth abandoned by their families, and supporting queer and trans elders offer models?"

Roan Boucher's "Privilege and Solidarity" zines ("Writing about class, privilege, giving away money, the nonprofit industrial complex, anti-capitalism, and revolutionary organizing") are also a really good look into this.
posted by ITheCosmos at 11:50 AM on August 2, 2018 [26 favorites]

This is interesting. I am, exactly as he suggests, much more interested in raising taxes on the rich and capping CEO pay and other ways of structurally ensuring that it's much, much harder to hoard such wealth. My pet rant about Americans in general is that our focus on individual conduct only serves to distract us from entire systems of oppression, and I think the fight breaking out in the comments here about who exactly is an immoral asshole is a prime example of that. I do think that as individuals, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are able to make choices that have VASTLY more impact than the rest of us could ever dream of, and therefore it does make sense to scrutinize them as individuals. But I think that again, everything in American culture prevents us from being able to distinguish between a Bezos level of wealth and someone making $100k a year (again, as we see here), and it just ends in us scrutinizing all individuals, which again becomes a distraction. Plus he even points out at the end of the article that when rich people are allowed to give away their money however they want they end up giving it to fucking stupid things, so I don't understand why we would want more of that. I mean Brad Pitt's stupid houses in New Orleans are better than buying an island, so fine, whatever, but we can aspire to so much better than that.

On the other hand, I think that cultivating a visceral disgust toward those who hoard billions will help us actually GET those structural safeguards in place, so in that sense I'm all for it. We just need to teach people to distinguish between, like, a couple with a nice house in Menlo Park making $250k and Jeff Bezos.
posted by sunset in snow country at 11:50 AM on August 2, 2018 [17 favorites]

I think of our family as earning (and spending) a fair bit, but even in a high cost of living area (DC) with a mortgage and a kid in daycare, I'm not sure what we'd be spending $250,000 a year on. We'd have a decent middle class income extra at that point.

Yes you'd use some of that to have a nice, comfortable life. As for the rest, you don't spend it , you save it. You're theoretically going to need it for (1) college for that kid, (2) retirement for you both, and (3) unexpected events. That's normal and wise, it's not hoarding money that you could (should) otherwise be giving away.
posted by schoolgirl report at 11:52 AM on August 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

tax rates approaching 100 percent are economically infeasible.

For a decent while, the UK had a highest tier tax rate of 90%. In fact, according to wikipedia (I know I know) " the highest rate of income tax peaked in the Second World War at 99.25%".

The real issue is how easy it is now to just move and hide from taxes, I think we should bring it back but rich people would just make sure their money is elsewhere. Or move to the US.
posted by stillnocturnal at 11:54 AM on August 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

I think the problem is assuming that the system currently rewards labor. It doesn't....Rewarding having a job is not the same thing as rewarding effort.

This is a powerfully clarifying observation. Thanks for putting it that way.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:55 AM on August 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

but being rich and donating to charity in your will is not inherently immoral.

Define donating to charity? Because rich people being able to pick and choose who is worthy of charity and who isn't, and getting buildings named after themselves for the privilege, doesn't seem like a great state of affairs. Bill Gates burned hundreds of millions of dollars to "fix" education using charter schools and standardized tests. Shockingly, it didn't work!

Rich people quite legally use their charitable initiatives to push their own agendas, and it's all tax-free.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:55 AM on August 2, 2018 [19 favorites]

We just need to teach people to distinguish between, like, a couple with a nice house in Menlo Park making $250k and Jeff Bezos.

I think this is a good sum-up. I mean, I think of my partner and I being pretty middle-class--we don't save as much as we really want to for retirement and that's a goal we are working on--but to anyone not making or having what we have, we would look rich. And to me, anyone making over $120K solo or combined, looks rich. For everyone not the 1%, it's a bizarre matter of perspective.
posted by Kitteh at 11:56 AM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Sell or contribute, until Fully Automated Luxury Communism arrives there has to be productivity. If you're not going to reward people.....then what? The gulag for free-riders?

We over-produce by a lot already. There is plenty for everyone. Even if you guarantee a basic standard of living for everyone - adequate food, housing, healthcare - the vast majority of people will want more. They want iPhones, they want Netflix, they want a car. Way too many aren't even getting the basics.
posted by AFABulous at 11:57 AM on August 2, 2018 [11 favorites]

We may be overproducing, but that's a different conversation than 'no one should be obliged to labor.' Although I'm sure Whelk didn't mean it quite that simplistically.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:01 PM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

When I think about it, I'm more opposed to needless poverty than I am wealth per se. Jeff Bezos and his ilk can have his Lear jets and gold toilets when everyone is fed, clothed, housed, educated and has healthcare. When our infrastructure isn't crumbling, when cities have viable mass transit, etc.
posted by AFABulous at 12:03 PM on August 2, 2018 [28 favorites]

We may be overproducing, but that's a different conversation than 'no one should be obliged to labor.' Although I'm sure Whelk didn't mean it quite that simplistically.

That's not what he said. He said "to live." No one should have to work in order to ... not die. We have enough food and other things to make that happen.
posted by AFABulous at 12:05 PM on August 2, 2018 [13 favorites]

Rich people in the US donate a lot of money to universities and churches (which is pretty blatantly self-serving), but much of the rest goes to help poor people in other countries. Bill Gates is much more interested in ending malaria in West Africa than ending generational poverty in Mississippi.

I think it's also instructive that rich people almost universally support free trade, on the grounds that it will raise incomes. The fact that it will raise incomes of factory workers in China, and lower incomes of factory workers in the US, rarely comes up.

To some extent I understand this. Ending malaria in Africa is expensive, but relatively straightforward. Ending poverty in the US would be very complex and involve offending a lot of other rich people who make their money from the status quo.

I also think there's a general lack of understanding of the nature of American poverty. Yes, we have free public schools, some government safety net, and opportunities for decent paying jobs almost everywhere. But there are still people in terribly dire straits, thanks to low-paying jobs and skyrocketing prices for child care, higher education and medical care.

That international bias is how Gates and Buffett can donates tens of billions of dollars and have very little effect on the US at all though. If we forced them to give away all of their money, I'm not sure we'd even notice.
posted by miyabo at 12:09 PM on August 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

The Chaimberlain/consent canard is kinda stupid, as befits a libertarian argument. I mean, yes, we can all give some rando 25 cents and he'll be rich. If he chooses to sit on that money, as rich people do, it causes distortions in the economy (stimulus/investment not necessarily among them) which the government (i.e. taxpayers) or inflation (and whatever else) have to correct. We're not just out the 25 cents, we're out the cost of all the work that those millions would have done had we spent them into the economy as usual. We did not consent to that.

I'm clearly not an economist, but my understanding is that that's what taxes on the rich are ultimately for and why their absence leads to such a fucked-up society.

(And obviously, trusting rich basketball players (or engineers, or people just born into wealth) to spend their money wisely to the social good is a fucking pipe dream.)

On preview:

But there are still people in terribly dire straits, thanks to low-paying jobs and skyrocketing prices for child care, higher education and medical care.

Which, incidentally, is how a lot of these people got rich in the first place.
posted by klanawa at 12:12 PM on August 2, 2018 [6 favorites]

That's not what he said. He said "to live." No one should have to work in order to ... not die. We have enough food and other things to make that happen.

Ah. I read the "no one" wrong, then. Certainly, with all the inequality we're living with and the resources we waste that's true.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:13 PM on August 2, 2018

NO ONE on this planet who has created wealth through their own effort.
and
assuming that the system currently rewards labor. It doesn't....Rewarding having a job is not the same thing as rewarding effort.
The above quotes get at a fundamental truth that was far more obvious in feudal times, but bears thinking about:
Tremendous wealth is 'created' on the backs of Labor - labor by people making far less money, and working far harder. Our labor is ours, and the Industrial Revolution seemed to promise we could have more control over how we sell it and for how much. Naturally, that didn't happen.
Hard work happens at all levels, but hard labor is at the root of nearly all wealth. This is why unions are anathema to the rich and those who 'own' the means of creation - be it a factory, a farm, or a software company.
posted by dbmcd at 12:15 PM on August 2, 2018 [14 favorites]

Having worked in a donor-facing role at a small charity, I can say that, at least where I worked, a goodly amount of donations were just a tax dodge for the wealthy, many of whom viewed the existence of such charities as a reason for defunding government, since "it's being dealt with by the private sector, which is more efficient because it runs it like a business."

And I agree that we should go after the fabulously super-rich first, but if your first impulse is to get defensive about having more money than other people, that ought to prompt a little reflection.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:22 PM on August 2, 2018 [28 favorites]

We just need to teach people to distinguish between, like, a couple with a nice house in Menlo Park making $250k and Jeff Bezos.

True, but this is going to be difficult when current levels of inequality mean that Mrs. & Mr. $250K lead lives that are structurally isolated from Mrs. & Mr. 25K. So, yes, M. $250K is nowhere near Bezos level, but to M. $25K the distance between where they are and $250K is as astronomical as the distance to Bezoshood.

I personally tend to think that there should be solidarity between anyone who labors (or, as Whelk said, is unable to do so) to get by, but the Mrs. & Mr. $250Ks need to understand their privilege and align themselves with the $25k-ers, not take up the political/economic policies of the Capital Dragons.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 12:25 PM on August 2, 2018 [34 favorites]

if your first impulse is to get defensive about having more money than other people, that ought to prompt a little reflection.

It's a fairly common reaction, at least in my observation, of people who grew up poor/blue collar and are first-generation white collar workers making more than just enough to get by. If you've spent any part of your life having services turned off because you can't afford them, or dodging calls from creditors, or just generally broke - and then you have enough money to, say, take a vacation - it's guilt-inducing for many people.
posted by jzb at 12:27 PM on August 2, 2018 [9 favorites]

I think there's a pretty simple refutation of this:

1. Individual gets rich.

How? Did this individual create more inequality in the process of making themselves rich?

2. Individual donates nothing to charity, and uses their wealth to accumulate more total money than they would if they had donated to charity throughout their lives.

Again, How? In getting all this extra wealth, did they create more inequality? Also, how did this person know that they were going to generate SO much more wealth? Were they planning from the get-go to donate everything to charity? Was their goal always "make as much money as possible so I can donate all of it in one big lump sum"?


3. Individual donates most of their money to charity upon death.

That's nice and all... but what about the 80 years that they held on to that money? What effect did that have? Why would it be better to wait to donate a lot of money to help people in the future rather than use a much smaller amount of money to help people right now? Does this act erase whatever negative effects their hoarding of wealth caused?

This is a scenario which is playing out with a few rich people, and it should play out with more of them, and it doesn't indicate that living life as a wealthy person is inherently immoral. In some cases it could be more beneficial to humanity than donating generously while still alive.

That's holding out a lot of hope that things will get better someday, while doing nothing to actually try to make them better today.
posted by Saxon Kane at 12:28 PM on August 2, 2018 [13 favorites]

when i consume the plump tender flesh of the 1% i must cover my head with a napkin to hide myself from god, in case he wants a bite. get your own oligarch tendys, god.
posted by poffin boffin at 12:30 PM on August 2, 2018 [46 favorites]

tax rates approaching 100 percent are economically infeasible.

In the U.S., the top tax rate was never below 81% from 1940 to 1963--over 90% from 1944-45 and again from 1951-1963--and didn't drop below 70% until 1981. Did you genuinely not know this?
posted by praemunire at 12:30 PM on August 2, 2018 [35 favorites]

Mrs. & Mr. $250Ks need to understand their privilege and align themselves with the $25k-ers

Literally the entire Rightwing establishment has spent years (successfully!) stoking anger and fear in order for this alignment not to take place! "They" are taking your money. "They" are getting a "free ride". "People who work hard have health care, why should some people get it for free?" Anything "they" have is taking away from what you got, etc. etc. etc.
posted by gwint at 12:34 PM on August 2, 2018 [7 favorites]

I've heard everything tastes better while baked.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:38 PM on August 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

A lot of people don't understand how tax brackets work, or at least they seem to forget it when talking about taxes. They'll see a number like "70%" and think it applies to the ENTIRE income, not just what's above a certain threshold.
posted by Saxon Kane at 12:39 PM on August 2, 2018 [29 favorites]

when i consume the plump tender flesh of the 1% i must cover my head with a napkin to hide myself from god, in case he wants a bite. get your own oligarch tendys, god.

I ded.

tax rates approaching 100 percent are economically infeasible.
Bezos made $107 Million A DAY for EVERY DAY of 2017. Taking 99% of his $112 Billion fortune still leaves him with $1,120,000,000. That's actually totally sustainable.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 12:39 PM on August 2, 2018 [26 favorites]

Did you genuinely not know this?

The marginal tax rate was higher... but no one actually paid them.

(whether taxes are "enough" is a different question; they are, however, not particularly historically low)
posted by saeculorum at 12:39 PM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Pitting people making $150K against people making $30K is not the kind of class warfare we need.

And exactly the kind that the actually rich fuckers adore.

Yes they literally want us fighting over their table scraps. They want their VP and SVP underlings to frown at the prospect of a plebian in middle management or in an associate position making 20k or 30k more than they "deserve". They want white collar folks balking at the prospect of a fast-food employee making 15 an hour.
Meanwhile people buying fucking islands.
posted by windbox at 12:46 PM on August 2, 2018 [22 favorites]

Capital gains need to be taxed and collected, that’s free money you get for having money (money hoarding is the ever expanding basketball hoop). Economic crime must be persecuted as seriously and strongly as personal crime, the amount of wage theft in this country outstripps the amount of burglary or property theft.

The best trick the 1%ers pilled was setting up entire belief systems, insitutues, schools, endowments, journals, etc to make the 250k set think they’re junior Aristocrats and not another form of servant to their goals.
posted by The Whelk at 12:46 PM on August 2, 2018 [23 favorites]

I'm a little baffled by this, because unless you have your money in cash or gold in a mattress, it's out there doing stuff all by its little self no matter what your "expenses" are. Yes, some people have a whole lotta money and privilege, and that's wrong, but it's not like they're actually sitting on it. It's clearly unjust that some people have way more resources than others, and I'd love to see them taxed heavily, but the money they have is generally not money but a number that is a proxy for power to call money out of the system when they want it.
posted by Peach at 12:50 PM on August 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

In the U.S., the top tax rate was never below 81% from 1940 to 1963--over 90% from 1944-45 and again from 1951-1963--and didn't drop below 70% until 1981. Did you genuinely not know this?

Yes, I did; as saeculorum notes, those are the top marginal rates; marginal rates aren't average rates.

And economists have been debating optimal top tax rates for many decades; that's just the quantitative debate, which ignores the whole moral debate. (The link describes research that indicates the revenue-maximizing top marginal rate should be 83 percent, which is higher than some other models suggest. And revenue maximizing does not mean best.)

A little perspective: In OECD countries, typical average total tax rates (all types of taxes, all levels of government, not just federal personal income taxes) are about 1/3 of GDP. USA is about 27 percent, and it tops out at 50 percent in Denmark.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:52 PM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

You can live very comfortably on $100,000 or so and have luxury and indulgence, so anything beyond is almost indisputably indefensible.

This is where it gets tricky - nobody thinks they are privileged, or comfortable, because that treadmill of production keeps churning and there's always some Jones's to keep up with.

Just as plenty of folks have chimed in the comments to say that "I make $100,000, BUT..." most of the uber rich feel the same way. They need what they have, and they would happily take more.

Strip most of this away though and it's consumerism, the belief that comfort comes from goods, and that need a place to keep all this stuff.

I guess I'm saying, forget your $100,000. Give people a well to draw water and healthcare, and we'll call it good. They can watch the stars at night and tell stories. Sorry, but Netflix is also a luxury.
posted by iamck at 12:55 PM on August 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

I'm a little baffled by this, because unless you have your money in cash or gold in a mattress, it's out there doing stuff all by its little self no matter what your "expenses" are. Yes, some people have a whole lotta money and privilege, and that's wrong, but it's not like they're actually sitting on it.

Inside the Uber-High-Tech Art Warehouse That Doubles as New York’s First-Ever Freeport

One of the World’s Greatest Art Collections Hides Behind This Fence

7 charts that show how the rich hide their cash
posted by ActingTheGoat at 12:57 PM on August 2, 2018 [6 favorites]

odinsdream, I'm sure of that too, but it tends to get conflated in discourse. And an art collection is also not cash unless you can sell it.
posted by Peach at 12:59 PM on August 2, 2018

stillnocturnal: "The real issue is how easy it is now to just move and hide from taxes, I think we should bring it back but rich people would just make sure their money is elsewhere. Or move to the US."

While that is true to an extent all the work put in to kneecapping the tax base by the GOP in the US means that there is some utility in taxing the crap out of the 1%.

praemunire: "In the U.S., the top tax rate was never below 81% from 1940 to 1963--over 90% from 1944-45 and again from 1951-1963--and didn't drop below 70% until 1981."

Also known as the US middle class economic boom time. The time the MAGA jack offs are trying to get back. Hey MAGA booster, want to get back to the good times? Radically increase the top marginal tax rate.
posted by Mitheral at 1:03 PM on August 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

if wasn't for the existence of a bourgoisie most of us would still be experiencing actual rather than metaphorical serfdom.

you know that's also part of Marxist orthodoxy, right?
posted by atoxyl at 1:18 PM on August 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

The really old-school sort of determinist kind, even. Which I wouldn't say I'm exactly an adherent to - I'm just saying that's a bit of an odd thing to bring up as a gotcha for socialists.
posted by atoxyl at 1:21 PM on August 2, 2018

I've read my Piketty and vote social-democratic and think hording wealth is a mental disorder similar to hording cats and I still think this article is dumb.

Someone's wealth should depend upon the value they create to society. However, a blanket declaration that wealth above a certain level is immoral is unjustified. The morality of wealth depends upon what someone does with it. If they're just using it to further gain rents, then that's a social disaster. If Larry Ellison buys an asset like land, there's only a fixed amount of land to use, so the rest of us either pay him or are pushed onto what's left. In economics terms, that's a rival asset from which he's extracting a rent. Fuck that guy. Alternatively, if someone wants to invest their wealth in creating new wealth, then that's a win for society overall. Elon Musk (might be problematic for a bunch of reasons but) can pour capital into developing the world's best electric cars and helping humanity break our addiction to fossil fuels because and only because he made a fuck-tonne out of Paypal.

The rich should be contributing more to the society that helped them get rich but the answer isn't an arbitrary cut-off, it's progressive income taxes with high top rates, capital gains taxes on all rival assets including land, inheritance taxes, financial transaction taxes, no tax shelters, and Norwegian-style mandatory and public reporting of earnings.
posted by happyinmotion at 1:22 PM on August 2, 2018 [8 favorites]

Someone's wealth should depend upon the value they create to society.

As has already been pointed out, this is an ableist argument. People who will never be able to work still deserve to be able to afford to live fulfilling lives.
posted by Emmy Rae at 1:29 PM on August 2, 2018 [48 favorites]

Applying to this theory to time, energy and opportunity, everybody who has more than the minimum of these three things should spend their all their free time and energy helping anybody who is less fortunate then they are unless for some reason they do not have the opportunity.

In other words, you better be multitasking or exhausted if you're sitting there watching Netflix or looking at this thread.
posted by serena15221 at 1:33 PM on August 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Applying to this theory to time, energy and opportunity

And where did you encounter this Strawman? Because no one is saying that.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 1:38 PM on August 2, 2018 [4 favorites]

As has already been pointed out, this is an ableist argument.

Fair point. I was trying to make a meritocratic argument in a context where huge disparities of wealth are inherited, so how about: "someone's earned wealth, over and above the value they have as a person and a citizen, should depend upon the value they create to society".

(I could add something along the lines of "and the value they create to society should be judged in terms of the additionality over the value we could expect from someone with the privileges that they are born into" but that's getting both Rawlsian and long-winded.)
posted by happyinmotion at 1:43 PM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

serena15221, did you read the article? It's addressed directly.
posted by AFABulous at 1:44 PM on August 2, 2018

With regards to charity, is the goal to feel good when you give money away, or is the goal to do good?

Those are different things. And as much good as Bill Gates does with his fortune (and he does do measurable good), it is swimming up the tide of people like Steve Green, whose “charity” is a bible museum he tried to fill with stolen antiquities or those who use charity as another shell corporation to maintain control of assets, like Manoj Bhargava, founder of 5 Hour Energy.

If the goal is to do good, then redistribution through progressive taxation and welfare is the obvious, demonstrably efficacious, solution.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 1:45 PM on August 2, 2018 [4 favorites]

How do you define value to society anyway? Raising children and creating art and being kind to your neighbours and planting flowers in the neighbourhood and having a beehive are all valuable things but I don't know how you'd put monetary compensation to it.

Plus, I'd rather the government was funding amazing rockets to space and crazy science projects because they have shitloads of tax money than it relies on the whim of some billionaire. The morality of wealth does not depend on what they do with it, because it's immoral that one person can affect the world so heavily regardless of whether it's good or bad, just because they have the most money. That is bad for society.
posted by stillnocturnal at 1:45 PM on August 2, 2018 [13 favorites]

I love hearing it's immoral to be rich from someone else, whenever I say it I am met with incredible incredulity and immediately dismissed. It seems obvious to me so I'm glad someone smarter, wiser, and more patient is out there saying it too.
posted by GoblinHoney at 1:47 PM on August 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

Aside from the ableism, "value to society" is never going to be able to be defined. The people who work in water treatment plants are more valuable than the vast majority of occupations because they prevent us all from dying. But we don't want to get into arguments over whether artists are more valuable than accountants and whether they're more valuable than astronauts. As a society we can't even agree on whether it's okay to put babies in jail.
posted by AFABulous at 1:48 PM on August 2, 2018 [24 favorites]

you know that's also part of Marxist orthodoxy, right?

no kidding? you know that was kinda my point, right?

Also Marx was not an "anarcho-socialist" but thanks for the condescension.
posted by snuffleupagus at 1:59 PM on August 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

All too often this is the charity of the rich.
A lot of effort is being expended pushing back against the supposed generosity of this right-wing billionaire, ludicrously listed as a philanthropist as he attempts from beyond the grave to use his immense wealth to corrupt and subvert university education here.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 2:02 PM on August 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

To judge the morality of money is pointless. What should be judged is the morality of the methods used to obtain it, what is done to retain it, and what is done with it.

Having said that, if you have a significant surplus of wealth and your response to tragedy and homelessness is "f'em I got mine, keep those people away so my property values don't go down" , that feels like an immoral way to retain it.
posted by davejay at 2:04 PM on August 2, 2018 [6 favorites]

basically, if you, a person with more money than 99% of people on earth, spend that money to promote and enact legislation that makes the lives of those less fortunate than you more difficult, deliberately, so that you can make more money, you should, in my exquisitely flawless opinion, die.
posted by poffin boffin at 2:07 PM on August 2, 2018 [47 favorites]

I don't intend to make this a derail because this article is very important in general and also to me, as it's a topic I've been stewing on a lot lately watching Elon Musk's fallout and general behavior, the breakdowns I've seen of just how vast his wealth is... and how he's choosing to use it.

But I think there's also something to be said (especially regarding Musk) for the idea of what having large sums of money might have on you...

Several studies have shown that wealth may be at odds with empathy and compassion. Research published in the journal Psychological Science also found that people of lower economic status were better at reading others’ facial expressions — an important marker of empathy — than wealthier people.

“A lot of what we see is a baseline orientation for the lower class to be more empathetic and the upper class to be less [so],” study co-author Michael Kraus told TIME. “Lower-class environments are much different from upper-class environments. Lower-class individuals have to respond chronically to a number of vulnerabilities and social threats. You really need to depend on others so they will tell you if a social threat or opportunity is coming and that makes you more perceptive of emotions.”

There's so many studies on this (a more critical article that I still don't think sells its own point).

Another study carried out in 2012 by Piff and fellow UC Berkeley researchers took it to a greater extent, arguing that wealthy people were more likely to “lie, cheat, steal, and break the law”, in the words of Business Insider.
[...]
Piff and the other researchers wrote in the report that “the increased want associated with greater wealth and status can promote wrongdoing” and that the “upper class”, to use his terminology, view greed as positive. He added that self-centred behaviour accompanies rising status, telling Bloomberg: “It’s not that the rich are innately bad, but as you rise in the ranks… you become more self-focused.”

(the TED talk)

There are likely better articles for these and I know additional studies (and hoping I didn't miss any comment like this upthread) but I'm headed out the door, apologies...

But anyway, I seem to go off on slight tangents and I'm sorry if this is too much of one. Thanks for the article. I wish statements like this were passed around more often and this gives me a handy way to send the ideas to people on the margins of my social group who might not necessarily be on the same page.
posted by nogoodverybad at 2:07 PM on August 2, 2018 [17 favorites]

long thread which I probably should read, but in case nobody's dropped these stats recently with regard to what constitutes being in the 1-percent worldwide (as opposed to just stateside). That would be:

Income: $32,400 a year
Net worth: $770,000

American dollars.
posted by philip-random at 2:08 PM on August 2, 2018 [12 favorites]

Money acts as a booster of self-determination. The more money you have, the more ability you have to direct the course of your own life. At a certain point, you acquire enough money to direct the course of others' lives too. The self-determination of Elon Musk is outsized enough that he can direct vast resources into shaping the technological development of the human race. I don't have enough money to have a say in that, I certainly didn't get a vote on whether to ship a car commercial into space. Jeff Bezos uses his outsized powers of self-determination every day to override the self-determination of everyone who's forced to work themselves to the bone in his warehouses for the ability to eat.

It's immoral that we as a society allow individuals to suck away the self-determination of everyone else and funnel it into their own private agendas.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 2:11 PM on August 2, 2018 [11 favorites]

This article seems like more of a symptom than a question that needs to be answered per se.

I am a conflict-averse person who tends to take the easier path, and yet lately the thought that's been bubbling up as I read the news is, "this can't go on, capitalism and associated extreme inequality will prevent us from addressing climate change and then we'll all die".

The kind of society that is organized by a few people who have lots of money and use that money to decide almost everything for everyone else - that society creates a death spiral, because the rich use their power to get richer, which means they have more power, which means they get richer, and in the end they have no interest in anyone but themselves. The people at issue are the people who make most of their money from investments, because they are the ones whose money is concentrated and organized enough to give them real power to sway events.

We're either going to achieve a non-capitalist society (whatever that looks like) that isn't run on the basis of investment returns for rich people or else the future is a feudal world of serfs ruled by the Trumps, Bezoses and Dutertes on the fringes of what was once a habitable planet.

If we'd dealt with climate change before the mid-eighties, this might be different, because inequality wouldn't have been so concentrated. At that time, the balance of power was different and it might have been possible to curb the rich enough to prevent climate change while still preserving a more heavily regulated and diminished capitalist system. Now the rich are too powerful to be curbed by ordinary measures, and they're not going to fix climate change. They're going to move to New Zealand or go to Mars or use their wealth to establish little climate-secure fiefdoms like in Octavia Butler's Parable of The Sower.

Be real - there are going to be millions and millions more climate refugees at the border of every livable place, and the worse warming gets, the more there will be. What's coming is genocide and war - leaving aside fire, floods and plague - unless we win through to a society that is outcomes-based, with the explicit goal of providing for every person and all political and economic decisions subordinate to that.

There's going to be massive social change that stops our current way of life, whether we think it's moral to be rich or not. People are starting to wonder about the morality of wealth because a critical mass of people are starting to understand what is happening.

It really is a case of socialism or barbarism - that's not ideology, it's fact, and it's fact because the very rich will not allow us to save ourselves.
posted by Frowner at 2:30 PM on August 2, 2018 [41 favorites]

There are basically four possible futures in dealing with climate change and only one of them doesn’t include global genocide.
posted by The Whelk at 2:34 PM on August 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

Poffin-boffin, if you need a foreign marriage to escape trump i am prepared to move to nz with you and eat peter thiel.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 3:14 PM on August 2, 2018 [12 favorites]

AQ Smith was the pen name that Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson used to use before he stopped with pen names.

I remember reading this when it came out, and it really spoke to me in a way that a lot of other leftist articles (I'm looking at you, Jacobin) never have, even as a very earnest leftist myself. I use the EpiPen metaphor fairly frequently in conversation with people. Robinson is one of the absolute best writers on the left right now, and I really value his voice.
posted by mostly vowels at 3:21 PM on August 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

It's immoral that we as a society allow individuals to suck away the self-determination of everyone else and funnel it into their own private agendas.

That nails it, I think, One Second Before Awakening. There's a definite separation between those who have almost zero self-determination, those who have reached it, and those who begin manipulating others' lives.
posted by jzb at 3:48 PM on August 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

Rich people quite legally use their charitable initiatives to push their own agendas, and it's all tax-free.

The best example of this is that Harvard, Yale and Stanford get tax deductible charitable donations. Like they are poor.

Their Endowments:

Harvard $35.7 billion.
Yale $25,413,149,000
Stanford $22,398,130,000
posted by srboisvert at 3:57 PM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

I don’t want to get too far off-topic, but I’m not sure that “tax-deductible”=“poor”...rather, I think it’s designed to mean some version of “a positive thing for society.” Obviously those institutions are bastions of the elite but also...education has major positive externalities and they do lots of cutting edge research and I just can’t get too mad about the government giving concessions to universities, which are potentially some of the last truly world-class parts of the United States.
posted by mosst at 4:12 PM on August 2, 2018

no kidding? you know that was kinda my point, right?

I didn't. I apologize for being snide about it, then, but I have to say I remain somewhat unclear about what you were getting at with that reference.
posted by atoxyl at 4:22 PM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

The idea that $250K a year is indefensible, it seems to me, assumes that the $250K a year is going to come year after year. And after growing up broke... I don't think that's a safe assumption. I've already seen a number of folks in tech wash out and go from six figure jobs to hourly wage jobs where they're just barely scraping by.

In a just world, an economic turndown would not mean being left without support.

I consider myself pretty far to the left; I basically agree with the gist of the article about what a moral person should do. And I think the bulk of people's income is determined by factors outside their control, as does Warren Buffett. And if I were in charge, we'd have a vastly more economically progressive system.

But certainly effort is necessary and plays a significant role. Any discussion that doesn't acknowledge that basic fact is an immediate political loser - and an economic system that doesn't reward effort to some extent just won't work for anyone, including the poor.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some

Of course - human psychology isn't rational.

I didn't say there was no difference in effort in wealth creation - though I would assert that effort and reward are almost never correlated in our economic system. (Also, interesting that you say effort - I could work much harder than Warren Buffet, but due to my lack of talent in finances, I would never make as much. People who lack talent often have to put in more effort to achieve results.)

My original point was that no one's value creation is ever done alone. I work for a brilliant scientist who comes up with great ideas. But her brilliant ideas are dependent on me producing data from surveying a lot of people, and then doing the data entry, and cleaning it up, and coding some open-ended stuff: in other words, a lot of effort. I don't produce any of the ideas that get her published or (if we were in another field) would make mega-moolah when monetized. But she can't produce those ideas if I don't do my bit, and I can't do my bit if the people I supervise don't do their bit, and none of us would get much done if the cleaners didn't come in and keep our office nice and clean and safe -- or get to work without roads and transportation, or have the skills to do our jobs without the public education we all had...

and so on, and so on. The point is: we're all connected. Short of digging up your own lump of gold, with map or geological survey or anything, all the value creation in the world is a product of people embedded in societies and almost always based on the efforts of hundreds if not thousands or millions of people.

And that's just for wealth created entirely by people - like software or an idea. What about wealth from mining or other natural resource industries? The planet is the inheritance of every human being, or maybe every living being? Wealth made from extractive industries is essentially made by not paying everyone else what they are owed.
posted by jb at 4:25 PM on August 2, 2018 [11 favorites]

A little perspective: In OECD countries, typical average total tax rates (all types of taxes, all levels of government, not just federal personal income taxes) are about 1/3 of GDP. USA is about 27 percent, and it tops out at 50 percent in Denmark.

Aside from the racism & xenophobia, Denmark is a much nicer place to live.
posted by jb at 4:36 PM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

philip-random: in case nobody's dropped these stats recently with regard to what constitutes being in the 1-percent worldwide (as opposed to just stateside). That would be:

Income: $32,400 a year
Net worth: $770,000

I've seen these numbers before and I don't know where they originated, but the first number (income) is demonstrably very inaccurate. One percent of the world population is 75,000,000 people. Within the US alone, this page shows roughly 75,000,000 people with individual income over $45,000.
posted by aws17576 at 4:47 PM on August 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

Income: $32,400 a year
Net worth: $770,000

Nobody with an income of $32,400 a year has a net worth of $770,000. We barely top that net worth and we are just outside the US top 5% by income. That alone should tell you how broken wealth distribution is and how disconnected it it from income.
posted by Definitely Not Sean Spicer at 5:14 PM on August 2, 2018 [11 favorites]

The problem with this is that annual production of goods and services already greatly exceeds the amount our planet can sustain, and as emjaybee points out, if you gave the money of the rich to poorer people, demand for goods and services would increase tremendously, fueling production, and the gap between what we're doing and what's sustainable would widen dramatically, and the ultimate carrying capacity of the Earth would plummet.
posted by jamjam at 5:22 PM on August 2, 2018

it's suggested you need a million dollars saved before retirement

The unstated premise here is that retirement savings must be splintered into individual accounts.

A large group pension would provide the same income, with substantially less than $1M per member in assets. It can do so because only a small minority of members will live long enough to draw the equivalent of $1M at retirement.

Since we don't pool our assets, each of us is instructed to hoard enough wealth to finance a centenarian's retirement. Of course, only a few succeed in accumulating that much. And then they usually end up perpetuating inequality by leaving large sums to their kids.
posted by ContinuousWave at 5:27 PM on August 2, 2018 [10 favorites]

Nobody with an income of $32,400 a year has a net worth of $770,000. We barely top that net worth and we are just outside the US top 5% by income. That alone should tell you how broken wealth distribution is and how disconnected it it from income.

Did you see my comment? These statistics are not accurate. They don't tell us anything.
posted by aws17576 at 5:28 PM on August 2, 2018

The central point, however, is this: it is not justifiable to retain vast wealth. This is because that wealth has the potential to help people who are suffering, and by not helping them you are letting them suffer. It does not make a difference whether you earned the vast wealth. The point is that you have it. And whether or not we should raise the tax rates, or cap CEO pay, or rearrange the economic system, we should all be able to acknowledge, before we discuss anything else, that it is immoral to be rich. That much is clear.

The premise is framed as a moral magnanimity with the expectation of voluntary charity, which discounts progressive taxes and refuses to blame the electorate. So we're begging here. Nor does it follow that wealth accumulating anywhere requires us to rearrange the economic system. The benefit of having a public money supply is to let the winners keep on winning while we tax their fortune at will. Letting reformers change the economy in order to get flat results instead of a normal bell-curve distribution is naive and out of sequence.
posted by Brian B. at 5:51 PM on August 2, 2018

I'm pretty damn sure literally every mefite knows rich people aren't literally hoarding physical cash.

Many rich people do keep stockpiles of cash. Those stockpiles aren't 'hoards' in that they fill entire rooms full of rotting paper, but it doesn't have to be that way. $1M fits in a grocery bag. They aren't keeping a large percentage of their wealth in cash, but even that small percentage of a very rich person's overall wealth is more money than a vast majority of humans will earn in a lifetime.
posted by Revvy at 8:03 PM on August 2, 2018

I have too many feelings about this. I am generally in agreement that absurdly wealthy individuals shouldn't be allowed to keep it all, that there should be some mechanism for benevolent redistribution beyond a certain point. I see what good this could do in the world. But it is also true that some innovations and mass coordinations of effort would never happen without an absurd amount of money, and I don't know that I can agree that even potential innovations should be precluded by artificially low limits on individuals' allowed income and net worth. Boy, how I'd love a machine that could magically regrow bones right about now, for instance. (Alas, healing broken bones is one of the few things in life that you truly cannot expedite as far as I know, not yet, not even for millions of dollars.)

In fact, one logical outcome of limiting both individual income and investments could be to significantly restrict what an individual might be able to do or invest in innovation, unless one were to create a corporate structure within which their work might reside. Inasmuch as incorporating can in many cases be a good idea, I don't think it should be essentially a requirement to create innovative work, and it seems like one potential logical outcome of this would be to give even more privilege to corporations than they already have. It doesn't seem like anyone thought about that. And how would one distinguish between corporations created as vehicles for exceedingly-high-net-worth individuals to avoid paying their fair share and corporations doing legitimate business? (I guess the question I'd get back to that is, "How does anyone do that now?" I know there are ways, and there are ways to slip past it, but still.) Inasmuch as arguments about various forms of taxation "stifling innovation" are too often bandied about in service of ridiculous excess, I can easily imagine problematic consequences of what is so lightly proposed and inadequately outlined here.

My overall thought: Why not both? Heavily tax individuals with astronomical amounts of wealth, while allowing individuals with lower levels of wealth to play through and invest for growth, innovation, and retirement needs. I believe I read that a universal basic income could be provided, at least in the U.S., by doing just this.

Regarding retirement, an online calculator suggests that I would likely need more than $2.8 million to be able to retire at age 67. Maybe that's just with my bourgeois Western ideas of what kind of lifestyle is appropriate in one's elder years, but even $1 million seems to really be undershooting what one might actually need, given increasing life expectancies and associated care needs. That said, it already feels like we've lost sight of something important when we're splitting hairs about whether it's OK or immoral for people to save money for retirement. It's perhaps immoral that in the U.S. we have to do this, because Social Security is but a poor shadow of a safety net and the notion of universal basic income is a pipe dream, however, currently we do indeed have to at least try to do this in order to avoid dire consequences in our elder years, such as living on the street and/or relying upon dwindling public assistance or charity for our care. Medicaid and its ilk may well not even be there when people currently in their thirties reach their nineties. (One might say that that's alarmist of me to say, but I wouldn't put anything past the subhuman slime people currently in office.)

Part of the point of this, of course, is that millions around the world already do live that way, without a safety net, and they should have one. But my saving for retirement in the U.S. and our being able to provide others around the world with a safety net and affordable care should not have to be mutually exclusive. Moreover, focusing on the immorality of individuals, and splitting hairs about which individuals should be allowed what level of income or investment, is missing the forest for the trees, just as we too often do with things like recycling or crime: Individuals are not the biggest contributors to inequality here, just as they aren't the biggest contributors to the world's various ecological disasters. Truly astronomical amounts of wealth and power are tied up in corporations, more than most could ever need or use, even for innovation. Recall that Apple just attained the mind-boggling valuation of $1 trillion today. On one hand, such corporations' achievements are an amazing testament to the power of collective human ingenuity, and things such as the smartphone have revolutionized human society. On the other hand, the corporate singularity is real, and the corporate landscape has become a vast panorama of nonhuman actors subjugating humans to their will and destroying our environment.

Regarding the idea of pensions, more would have to change than simply instituting pensions of some sort for the inequalities posed by unequal retirement provisions to be addressed. And how would such pensions even be set up? It's simplistic to say that pensions are the answer, when so many pension funds have been robbed, defrauded, mismanaged, or otherwise done a real disservice to those who should have been able to rely upon them. It's immoral to put the fates of so many in the hands of a few pension fund managers—just as immoral as it is to put the fates of so many in the hands of a few corporate CEOs.

Regarding one's twilight years, of course, one might also counter, the real immorality is that people do feel compelled to save for retirement themselves and just don't live with each other like they used to and take care of each other in their old age. One should indeed have to live directly with death at their side, to deal with aging and ailing loved ones in their own home, without the money to hire outside help, as the humans of yore did (and indeed many humans around the world still do), one might say. Perhaps one should totally do that while raising children of their own in the same house. Moreover, guess who still does the disproportionate majority of caregiving, for the young and old alike? Yes, women should definitely have to disproportionately bear the burden of our avoidance of seeming immorality. That's totally moral.

Regarding the chip on my shoulder about this, well. Perhaps this is a straw man and no one would take these ideas to their logical conclusion and suggest that we avoid this whole retirement-savings bugaboo altogether by living communally. Thing is, I've just concluded a 5-year tour of duty as a caregiver for a once-abusive parent. It was bad enough to have to deal with the abuse for much of my life. Then I was the only one, as so often happens in the case of the elder daughter who lives nearby, who could deal with the next steps. And so I stepped up, and lived with nightmares while I did. I steadfastly refused to countenance any solution in their final years that involved their living with me (though they did ask). Can any amount of money I might inherit make up for that upbringing, for the damage that did to my family? Can anything bring back what might have been? Do try to put a price tag on that, or a cap on what I might be entitled to as a result. It makes me think of this.

Regarding disability, God, yeah, so much of this discussion is so ableist. If someone is on disability for life, injured during compulsory military service, even, and unable to hold any sort of traditional job for a living, yet somehow manages to scrimp and save for years and years and invest that well and ultimately is able to support themselves, provide for children, and even provide for their own care at the end of life through a combination of their disability payments and their investment income, how dare anyone say that whatever small wealth they might have accumulated to ensure they were provided for is immoral? It's hard to say you believe in a safety net if you also believe that people aren't entitled to what they're able to make of whatever hardscrabble living the safety net might provide.

So those are a few thoughts.
posted by limeonaire at 8:27 PM on August 2, 2018 [9 favorites]

Since we don't pool our assets, each of us is instructed to hoard enough wealth to finance a centenarian's retirement.

I don’t know why this has never occurred to me. Gd it. Everything is a lie.
posted by greermahoney at 9:01 PM on August 2, 2018 [21 favorites]

This isn’t even a new concept. “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” We have written proof people were saying that an excess of money is immoral thousands of years ago.

But you know. The Christian Right likes to skip over that part and go straight to Sodom and Gomorrah. (Not like that says what they think it does, either, but whatevs.)
posted by greermahoney at 9:16 PM on August 2, 2018 [7 favorites]

The documentary "Born Rich" has some pretty great insights into the 0.1% world.
(I think as an 80s kid I understood the world perfectly, when asked what I wanted to be when I grow up I'd say "Rich". )
Walking through the UKs 2nd biggest financial nexus on a daily basis, to each homeless person or begging junkie you can spot a Ferrari, Lambo, etc.
posted by yoHighness at 3:55 AM on August 3, 2018

I hesitate to agree with this, even though I agree with it. Maligning entire groups always rubs me wrong and gives me pause.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:11 AM on August 3, 2018 [6 favorites]

There is extreme wealth and exreme poverty--both are inexcusable and can be forthrightly addressed with sufficient political will. Then there are extreme essays about wealth and this is one--it is as preposterous as the other extremes are inexcusable. I am trying to think where/when and if such a posture regarding wealth ever existed in any culture and how it worked over time. I can not think of any societies/cultures that survived through out time that embraced this. It is very rare that outstanding wealth/privilege and/or status does not accrue to a few/some and almost any culture/society. it may not be in the form of "cash" but rather awarded in housing, privilege, the services of others, preferential treatment. discretionary power/authority etc. The physical and biological worlds are largely analog and tend to fall in normal distributions of quantity/quality. i doubt if wealth is any different--which does not support a skewed distribution but neither does it support a flattened distribtion.
posted by rmhsinc at 5:08 AM on August 3, 2018

http://www.taxjustice.net/taxcast/

Tackle tax havens

https://www.participatoryeconomics.info

For more extensive discussion of the morality of rewarding effort over output.
posted by eustatic at 6:04 AM on August 3, 2018

re: wealth levels...
cf. The Spectrum of Financial Dependence and Independence

but ultimately i think it's a mistake primarily define wealth in monetary terms, viz. redefining prosperity and wealth: "prosperity in human societies can't be properly understood by just looking at monetary measures of income or wealth. Prosperity in a society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems. These solutions run from the prosaic, like a crunchier potato chip, to the profound, like cures for deadly diseases. Ultimately, the measure of a society's wealth is the range of human problems that it has found a way to solve and how available it has made those solutions to its citizens."
posted by kliuless at 6:33 AM on August 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Regarding disability, God, yeah, so much of this discussion is so ableist. If someone is on disability for life, injured during compulsory military service, even, and unable to hold any sort of traditional job for a living, yet somehow manages to scrimp and save for years and years and invest that well and ultimately is able to support themselves, provide for children, and even provide for their own care at the end of life through a combination of their disability payments and their investment income, how dare anyone say that whatever small wealth they might have accumulated to ensure they were provided for is immoral? It's hard to say you believe in a safety net if you also believe that people aren't entitled to what they're able to make of whatever hardscrabble living the safety net might provide.

Actually disabled people can be immoral and do immoral things. We are, in fact, people. and not imaginary virtuous beings pulled from thin air to win internet arguments. And how much extra income do you think someone on disability benefits can set aside to "invest"?
posted by Space Coyote at 7:05 AM on August 3, 2018 [9 favorites]

The premise is framed as a moral magnanimity with the expectation of voluntary charity, which discounts progressive taxes and refuses to blame the electorate. So we're begging here.

I think it was a simpler argument than this. Without making judgments about every little piece of policy and culture that made it possible to become Bezos-rich, we can make one very basic judgment: it is morally wrong to have that much money while so many others have so little.
posted by Emmy Rae at 8:54 AM on August 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

Space Coyote, it's not a hypothetical. My father was far from an imaginary virtuous being, and he did exactly what I describe. Sorry if that was unclear.
posted by limeonaire at 10:03 AM on August 3, 2018

limeonaire, a disabled person who manages to strike it rich's ethics can be judged by how they came about that money and how they choose to part with it just like everyone else. A disabled person who managed to do well in life and uses that as a reason why other disabled people shouldn't benefit from re-organizing society is caping for the status quo and is definitely unethical
posted by Space Coyote at 10:20 AM on August 3, 2018 [7 favorites]

I believe morality about certain questions are not in the best interests of a government to enforce, or a people to adopt.

Murder? Sure, we can all agree that's rarely justified.

But division of assets for labor? The best way for government (or a collective people) to incentivize certain behavior is through taxes and credits. Lean too heavily on the taxes lever (or "maximum allowed income" lever), and the rich simply will move to a country that is more friendly to their income. Rich people, more than anyone else, can establish a residency wherever is most conducive to their needs.

I get nervous when people start telling me what my morality should be on issues where the repercussions are not well thought-out (or, as in this case, even known).
posted by docjohn at 10:21 AM on August 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

The pacific garbage patch has a 0% tax rate, rich folks. Just saying.
posted by Space Coyote at 10:23 AM on August 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

Rich people, more than anyone else, can establish a residency wherever is most conducive to their needs.

In the US at least, residency isn't enough. They also have to get a citizenship and convince the US government that when they're trying to give up their US citizenship, they're not doing it to evade taxes. The US government has extraordinary resources to bully Americans who try to avoid paying taxes (whether it uses them well is another question). Just look at FATCA. If we want to we can sanction them and cut them off from American financial institutions entirely. We're quite capable of making bad actors' lives more complicated and that's why Putin and cronies have been so angry about the Magnitsky Act.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:50 AM on August 3, 2018 [6 favorites]

Like: move to another country, give up American citizenship, and evade our taxes? We can make it so you'll never get an American visa to visit your extended family ever again. Your real estate registered to a Delaware shell corp? That's ours now. Want to buy American stocks? Sorry, you can't. No deal. Wire money to your American aunt? Also no. Your American accounts are frozen, you can't send money into the US, you can't get money out of the US. Hope you know a lot about Bitcoin, which you can't buy on an American exchange either.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:54 AM on August 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

It's like not even true that rich people leave due to high taxes, NY and California could do with a lot fewer of them and they still stick around despite higher taxes than other states those folks could be living.
posted by Space Coyote at 10:56 AM on August 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Yeah but that’s also because of the loopholes. Rich people do not pay the tax rates that NY and CA are famous for.

give up American citizenship, and evade our taxes?

Lol the best part is they still go after your back taxes if you give up citizenship.

Apparently the IRS has been going after ex-pats because they tried it a couple of years ago and it was the easiest 100 million they ever brought in (according to an accountant person).

But not, like, oligarch expats. Those still get to use all the loopholes. They just go after the regular ones.

So...still shitty.
posted by schadenfrau at 11:01 AM on August 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

I know you might think one couldn't live without access to "America" in some form, but let me assure you, most of the world -- even the wealthiest -- do quite fine living elsewhere. And I have no doubt they have access to those things the gov't thinks they've taken away... just done through a multitude of other companies. For as many resources the gov't has (even the American gov't), I'm fairly certain the wealthiest of the wealthier have just as great (or even greater, in some respects).

I'll never be in that category. But when someone starts preaching morality at me, no matter what the underlying justification might be, it sends up a red flag about the simplicity of that person's thinking. Issues like this are rarely so black and white as they are laid out to be.
posted by docjohn at 11:03 AM on August 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

I believe morality about certain questions are not in the best interests of a government to enforce, or a people to adopt.

Murder? Sure, we can all agree that's rarely justified.

But division of assets for labor?

Are you under the impression that capitalism is some kind of natural force that exists outside of government intervention, or...?
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:26 AM on August 3, 2018 [14 favorites]

Uh...no.

American soft power — through control over international banking, finance, etc etc — is real. Or, you know, it was. And that kind of power will be necessary to rein in a truly globalized aristocracy.

In my admittedly layman’s opinion, we had the clout and the opportunity to start that process in 2008. We did not take it. And every day of the Trump administration bleeds that soft power, more and more, at a seemingly ever increasing rate.

So 2020 might be our last shot. We better take it.
posted by schadenfrau at 11:26 AM on August 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

Our "economic justice" proposals are already pre-compromised. So timid, so half-measures and yet they are recieved as unthinkable extremism. We are already conceeding and giving the rich the benefit of the doubt.

No one in this thread is proposing the rich have to switch places with the poor to even out the life-time scales of experience.

We are not saying because we believe in equality we should pay people based on how their productivity compares to the average, such that a days work for the average plumber pays the same as a days work for the average marketing exec or homemaker. We are not saying that everyones wealth and income should be the same.

We are saying that rich people can still live better than everybody else, work better jobs if any at all, and BUT they might have to accept *ANY* limit to their power over other people.

Because all money is, is power over people. Your money competes with mine in our struggle to have people give us things and do things for us. Some people being rich is what makes others poor. Poverty is not the default state of nature, it is the necessary product of taking the finite material of this world, its land, minerals, animals, fisheries, and peoples and giving the control and benefits of it to only some people, and using violence and indoctrination to accomplish this task.

And "redistribution"? all wealth is from redistribution or the worlds cashiers and clerks would be billionaires. We have laws, contracts, police and courts to create and enforce certain ways of redistributing wealth. We have a system of direct and indirect violence to create property, to take it from others and to hand it to the rich. That some rich people had to talk on phones and shake hands to get it, while others just get it from family is irrelevant.

TL;DR ownership of property and wealth is power over others, enfored by violence and indoctrination. Eating the rich is a reasonable starting point in our negotiation.

The hard work of workers and scientists and artist and artisans co-created the wealth of this world and continue to do so.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 11:43 AM on August 3, 2018 [13 favorites]

It is a wild experience to see people complain about making 6 figures, where here I am working 40+ hours a week, with increasing dental damage i can't take care of (even though i have insurance), and literally sleep on a fucking lawn chair.

Poor people are not some debate hypothetical. We're everywhere, including this website, which a lot of you seem to forget.
posted by FirstMateKate at 12:39 PM on August 3, 2018 [25 favorites]

I know you might think one couldn't live without access to "America" in some form, but let me assure you, most of the world -- even the wealthiest -- do quite fine living elsewhere

This is true, but they also have access to American banks and the American stock market. Sanctioned Russian oligarchs don't. Yeah, there are ways to get around it, but it's expensive and risky. It's enough of a pain that Putin and his allies have screamed bloody murder about Bill Browder and the Magnitsky acts- it has made their lives significantly harder. It's not just that you can't come to the US- you can't even send money to a US bank account, you can't buy anything from there, and you can't sell anything to there.

Jeff Bezos would not be able to just decamp to Singapore and run Amazon from there if we didn't want to let him.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:03 PM on August 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

docjohn: "Lean too heavily on the taxes lever (or "maximum allowed income" lever), and the rich simply will move to a country that is more friendly to their income. Rich people, more than anyone else, can establish a residency wherever is most conducive to their needs."

Even if they did that is still a net win. The distorting effects of their money isn't driving up the price of real estate. It isn't being used to distort elections and buy lobbyists.

docjohn: "I know you might think one couldn't live without access to "America" in some form, but let me assure you, most of the world -- even the wealthiest -- do quite fine living elsewhere."

And yet Russian and other oligarchs are so desperate to get their money to America they are laundering it thru Donald Trump; a man who couldn't keep a Casino afloat.
posted by Mitheral at 1:12 PM on August 3, 2018 [9 favorites]

If this were a post about women’s issues and a bunch of men showed up in here like “not all men/think of how this policy affects men” we would rightfully tell men to step back and listen.

Apparently it is unacceptable to hold aspirationally wealthy people to the same standard on posts about inequality on MetaFilter. I live in a household that makes 6 figures and I have weird feelings about it, and I am damn glad we’re finally having this discussion about the morality of wealth in our society.. It’s long overdue. If you don’t feel the same way you may want to consider why you feel so defensive about this article.
posted by mostly vowels at 2:29 PM on August 3, 2018 [20 favorites]

Moralizing is a mug's game, most of us here are old enough to remember the whole Moral Majority thing and what a joke it was and how it curdled into something vicious and self-serving. Why we'd want to replicate that mess by moralizing about wealth inequality when there are so many powerful arguments based on tangible benefits and measurable outcomes just eludes the fuck out of me, and the discussion around these issues is not improved by constantly entreating people to examine themselves for failings of character if they're not having the same reaction to this article as 90% of the other commenters here do.

If there's a case to be made for eating the rich and outlawing billionaires, then make it on practical or at least ethical grounds. Morals aren't sustainable or scalable.
posted by prize bull octorok at 2:49 PM on August 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

We know what happens when we try to use our free speech, right to assemble and petition grievances about this economic system: Banks target you for assassination.

banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS [Occupy Wall Street] protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and undisclosed [from FOIA documents]

So long as some wealthy perosn's temporary comfort is more important than someone elses entire life and survival, no approach to argument will be acceptable, be it "morality" or "ethics" or " practicality" or "empirical data" or" real politique" or "populism" or " values" or "centrism" or "originalism" or "social contracts" or "naturalism" will be acceptable or accepted.

We offer arguments, anecdotes and data; they reply with blacklists, evictions and bullets.

Again, our moderate starting point is to eat the rich; we're not going to torture them like in guantanamo, abu ghrab, or with rape like the US prison system, we are not going to make them spend years with untreated tooth pain, walk on broke bones, undergo surgery with insuffiecent anetherisa or any of the unnecessary horrors that the poor and POC are subjected to by a system of artificial scarcity and categorical criminalization of poverty and diversity. We won't make them watch their children be gunned down. Eating the rich is already the moderate compromise. If we ultimately let them off the hook with only heavy taxation... well, I hope our arguments don't offend them.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 3:48 PM on August 3, 2018 [12 favorites]

this is meaningless tough guy rhetoric unless you're actually planning armed revolution, in which case, you probably shouldn't be talking about it here! but if we're still working under the premise that the current system of elected government is a viable means of effecting change, then it's worth listening to people who are critical of various persuasive approaches and not doing the "well I guess NO way of talking about it is acceptable!" thing, because, come on. homogeneity of opinion is in no way lacking on MetaFilter and y'all need to chill when it doesn't manifest perfectly.
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:56 PM on August 3, 2018 [9 favorites]

St. Basil the Great, fourth-century bishop of Caesarea:

“When someone steals another's clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.”
posted by EarBucket at 4:57 PM on August 3, 2018 [12 favorites]

I work at a food pantry and a lot of our volunteers seem to think of themselves as benefactors, as if they’re reaching down from their lofty position to do a favor for the pathetic poor. I’m trying to encourage and model solidarity, and I start by thinking of my job as returning stolen property to its rightful owners.
posted by EarBucket at 5:25 PM on August 3, 2018 [11 favorites]

No matter what the rich/wealthy/1%/0.1% do with their money it would matter a whole lot less to me if there was something in the US like a standard baseline income and free social services - housing, medical, abortion, income, maternity leave, etc..

I'd care a lot less about the 1% if I hadn't spent time talking to my buddy Mike on Christmas Eve in his corrugated shelter on the sidewalk, too cold to sleep - all the cold weather shelters were full. I went to the Chevron and bought all the hand-warmers they had and a big coffee and a sad candy cane.

I don't have the wealth to help everyone I want to the extent that I want to help them. I firmly believe that those who do have the wealth to help the non-wealthy should collaborate to give whatever is needed.

I'm all for taxing a static percentage of individual income over a certain limit. Let's say (completely arbitrarily) $300K. Everyone who makes over $300K is taxed 2% of their income over $300K. There are restrictions in place that hopefully make it somewhat non-corruptible.

I'm not in a state to do math right now but I believe even 1% instead of 2% would make a huge difference.
posted by bendy at 8:06 PM on August 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

While I do agree it's a very much immoral to be wealthy, I think the most practical perspective is the Marxist take covered in the article (surprise surprise):
"After all, if the problem of inequality is systemic, and rich people do not really make choices but pursue their class interests, then asking whether it is moral for wealthy people to retain their wealth is both irrelevant (because individual decisions don’t affect the systemic problem) and incoherent (because the idea of a moral or immoral capitalist makes no sense in the Marxist framework)."
It's not generally worth our time to debate the morality of accumulation. As seen above, we can fight through the weeds and details endlessly, but it doesn't help us actually organise to end capitalism. That's done by examining the structural problems with our economic system, not the morality of individual actors.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 1:01 AM on August 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

As seen above, we can fight through the weeds and details endlessly, but it doesn't help us actually organise to end capitalism. That's done by examining the structural problems with our economic system, not the morality of individual actors.

I still don't understand what "ending capitalism" looks like. I've never seen a coherent plan specific to the U.S. I don't mean that one doesn't exist, but I would like to read it. We've been "examining the structural problems" for a couple of centuries.
posted by AFABulous at 7:05 AM on August 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

Upthread a piece, but this:
I've read my Piketty and vote social-democratic . . . .

Is in direct conflict with this:
Someone's wealth should depend upon the value they create to society.

Also every time someone brings up Musk in a thread about economic inequality as an example of how a billionaire is reinvesting in society, it needs to be pointed out that nothing Elon Musk has done* has any direct benefit to anything but Elon Musk's ego and black (or red) marks on the balance sheets of his companies' shareholders.

Society has no say in determining the social benefit of Tesla or Solar Cities or the Boring company do, except through the same mechanisms of late-stage capitalism that determine everything else about private companies. Many of us are arguing that those mechanisms are patently unfair and immoral.

If a shitload of public-private Defense Contractors owned by these same oligarchs hadn't successfully converted a big chunk of the public coffers into a direct artery for their already ridiculous hoard, the government would be the best way of apportioning these resources.

That's one of the things government's supposed to do. The public gets more bang for its buck out of NSF grants and investment in public health than anything any billionaire does, and most billionaires don't even bother with Musk's fig leaf of "making the world a better place with giant hot wheels cars for well-to-do douchebags."

*OK go ahead, tell me about how what they were doing in Puerto Rico was somehow better for society than spending that money actually repairing the island's previously-existing infrastructure. Seriously fuck Elon Musk.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:12 AM on August 4, 2018 [7 favorites]

Revolution. It's messy, but you can't actually do it any other way. You can have 'nice' capitalism without one but ending capitalism requires a revolution. An international, 'permanent' revolution. We can't vote the rich out of control. It's never worked that way and never will. Paris, 1968 and 1968 more generally are the examples I'm most familiar with. The fire last time. You could also to look to the subverted revolution of 1917. The experience of revolution and lead-up makes starkly obvious the dictates of class society. Workers seize the means of production, and it's not a meme, they're just in control and start producing according to the new needs of society.

I'm a revolutionary socialist. Democratic socialism requires none of this that I'm aware of. Work your electoral system, push hard left, and one day a vote or bill will appropriate the capital right out of the capitalist's pockets. It's a nice idea, and I hope they're right. Slow and steady may yet win the race.
It's the other runner, global environmental collapse, that has me worried in that regard.

Everything can change
posted by AnhydrousLove at 9:46 AM on August 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

meanwhile, in 1973
posted by philip-random at 9:55 AM on August 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

I still don't understand what "ending capitalism" looks like. I've never seen a coherent plan specific to the U.S.

I think part of the problem is that no one really agrees. There's a lot of different ideas about what the details look like, and how to get there. Here's a "how to get there" essay from the reformist wing of the DSA, which is one I have at hand at the moment, and specific to the US.

Once you have the mass party of people ready to fight for socialism you've got the base for either revolution or the ability to hold politicians feet to the fire and reform your way out, depending on how you feel about that transition. Either way, the critical mass of organized socialists is important because the capitalist class fights back hard against their loss of privilege, and numbers plus organization is the advantage we have (or can have) against them.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 10:10 AM on August 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

In terms of revolutions: Climate change is getting serious. That means there's going to be more and more war, more people starving, more people with nothing at all to lose. Those people are going to form and join mass movements. Some of those mass movements will be "machine gun the foreigners" movements, some of them will be peasant uprisings, some of them will be fundamentalist religious, etc. It seems likely to me that there will be other mass movements that derive from automation and the growing numbers of poor people. It's not possible for these things not to happen, because heavily populated places are going to become largely uninhabitable and the ensuing displacement is going to be massive. What happens when Bangladesh is underwater, for instance?

"Revolution" in the sense of "violent mass movements that upend the existing social order" is going to happen because the things that could forestall it would basically be immediate decarbonization and immediate acceptance and resettlement of economic and climate refugees. Those things will never happen because they involve taking from the rich (whether very- or merely relatively-) and giving to the poor.

Which means we're going down the violence-and-chaos route, and we're going to go on down that route as long as there are rich people with the ability to protect their interests. What's more, this is globally true because the wealthy are far more a global class than in, eg, Marx's time. It was always hard to make social change when you had America backing military coups, etc; it will be much harder now because you've got your Putins and your Trumps and your Thiels and your Mercers and all their interests are basically aligned.

So.

A society which is going to live cannot be based in private individual investment by very rich people with lots of money, and it can't be based on externalizing costs (eg, making everyone happy with cheap goods made in sweatshops somewhere else, dumping your pollution in some country with weak environmental laws, etc). I think there are lots of ways to do this, ranging from really strict social democratic organization to full communism, but the key thing is that there simply cannot be a class of wealthy people who run society through the use of their capital - the ones who put the "capital" in "capitalism". The accumulation of capital by private individuals has to be either very strictly controlled or totally eliminated.

I think that if we're super, super lucky, voting backed by the implicit force of mass movements will get us to some kind of post-capitalism.

If not, I guess we'll roll the dice as to whether some kind of fascist xenophobic mass movement wins or something left wins, and we'll roll the dice as to whether that left wing movement is smart, prepared and careful or whether we just get a bunch of people who are good at leading movements and absolute shit at organizing a society.
posted by Frowner at 10:26 AM on August 4, 2018 [12 favorites]

As seen above, we can fight through the weeds and details endlessly, but it doesn't help us actually organise to end capitalism. That's done by examining the structural problems with our economic system, not the morality of individual actors.

The problem is that when some people see capitalism succeeding at production, they are taught to see it as failing instead, blind to the fact that it yet requires subsidized distribution, as seen in European models. It is not a valid reason to scrap its incentivized production methods, which involve innovation, flexibility and timeliness. For a simple example, not everyone can grow corn and beans for society, so it must be distributed efficiently. It is not wrong that capitalism failed to provide corn and bean seed to everyone, along with a worthless plot of land, never mind the roads and trucks to collect their extra produce, leaving it to rot. Marx made the huge mistake of removing money from his theory in order to force his supply-side vision, which removed feedback to increase production when scarce and decrease when overstocked, leaving those decisions to remote drunk bureaucrats afraid of their political boss. And when they gave out scarce commodities, it was often bartered for something else. So corruption ruled as a rule, and nothing worked as planned, but they achieved total control with people eating out of their hand. Those who think communism can solve everything in one power grab are only trusting in Marx as a prophet, not as a scientist. This is more related to their religious faith traditions, perhaps substituting revolution for the ideological passions of salvation and second-coming.
posted by Brian B. at 11:21 AM on August 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

On a more granular level of "what it looks like", I've been thinking about the transition into an economy of nationalized sectors and democratic worker co-ops, which needs some kind of a story in a reformist regime. So here's my personal take on a boil-the-frog scenario, which may or may not be realistic:

First step is to establish standards for democratically operated worker co-ops, which is something currently lacking in the US. Once you have that you can start playing favorites. Favorable tax regime as compared to other companies is an easy one, and I'm sure there's more.

There's a lot of talk right now about a job guarantee, which would be great in itself but could also be used to promote co-ops. If you don't like the job you'll get through the job guarantee and you've got some friends, make a proposal for a new co-op that aligns with current needs / goals, and if it's not a terrible plan we'll pay your salary at the same level as the job guarantee job for a year while you try to make your co-op work.

The US government also has enormous power over the economy through contracts. Start favoring worker co-ops in awarding contracts at all levels of government. Then make it a requirement.

While that's going on, depending on the sector, large private companies are some mix of nationalized or broken up by aggressive anti-trust measures. They're required to establish some forms of internal democracy, e.g. elected worker's representatives on the board, heavy union promotion, etc. Eventually what private companies remain are required to convert into worker co-ops, with possible exemptions for extremely small companies.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:28 AM on August 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

Revolution. It's messy, but you can't actually do it any other way.

see also
posted by ragtag at 1:14 PM on August 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

And it's not like they don't already know what's coming.
posted by flabdablet at 1:19 PM on August 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

My favourite pithy quote from that article:

The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics isn’t believing that if the rich get richer, it’s good for the economy. It’s believing that if the poor get richer, it’s bad for the economy.

posted by flabdablet at 1:26 PM on August 4, 2018 [12 favorites]

I ran some math with a few assumptions (raising a few kids including college, living for 80 years, and living in a high-cost west coast city) and figure you can live a VERY comfortable life, even in that high-cost west coast city, for 80 years (birth to death) on 4-5 million.

So if you are reading this, and you have more than that, and you're in your 40s, and you're sitting on more than 2.5 million in wealth...did you know you could stop working today and you'll be fine living off that money, or you could keep working and use every dollar you make going forward to do good things for people in the world?
posted by davejay at 2:52 PM on August 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

How the American left is rediscovering morality
posted by mostly vowels at 6:39 PM on August 4, 2018

revolutions are bloody - and the weakest amongst us usually suffer the most.

and then you just end up with crazy dictatorships.

Where are some of the nicest places to live? Not revolutionaru regimes, but social democratic countries who worked on steady improvement of workers' rights and the social safety net.
posted by jb at 8:40 PM on August 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

Revolutions are nasty work, but they did get us out of Feudalism. Capitalism came about via revolution, and it's possible that we might transition to Socialism via revolution.

I'd rather see the transition occur nonviolently in a series of radical and democratic reforms, but we'll see if that can happen before climate change forces things into less amicable territory.

I believe at some point Marx himself speculated that the US might be the most likely state to nonviolently transition to Socialism, but now I'm having trouble finding that quote. It's something I try to remind myself of now and then.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 9:29 PM on August 4, 2018

As I mentioned in a previous thread, I don’t want a revolution so much as an erosion of the current order and a rising of a new one. You can have radical change that happens pretty fast with the right conditions that don’t involve violence at all. (A’lees’ strong social welfare state for one)

I also think about that quote as well! It was about the size of the American workforce and the democratic tradition being long lasting, at least in theory. (When talking to US nationalist a good line is: c’mon we’re the richest country in earth, don’t you think we could pull off what they said said was impossible? We went to the moon! All these rich assholes are trying to tell yiu you don’t have any power so you don’t try to get anything you are deserved.”

I now go back to my typical coping process of imagining footage from current events playing in a documentary in the future with a sonorous narrator saying “it seemed impossible, doomed even , commentators on both sides called it “a ludrious fantasy” and “a path to failure” yet by late 2019...
posted by The Whelk at 9:48 PM on August 4, 2018 [8 favorites]

Revolutions are nasty work, but they did get us out of Feudalism

That's not true at all. I know that's what Marx said, but historical studies of feudalism and the transition to capitalism have moved on in the last 150 years.

Feudalism ended in England between 1400 and 1600 - and the English Civil War (which I don't agree was really a permanent revolution) didn't happen until 1640. True feudalism ended in France in about the same time, long before the French Revolution (which only dealt with the remnants). Serfdom in western Europe - an essential bit of feudalism - all ended before the 'Age of Revolutions'. And I think Scandinavia may never have had true feudalism - but my expertise is on Britain. I can tell you that Scotland never has feudalism in the continental mode; that was imported to England under the Normans and never made it to Scotland. They had a different, non-capitalist system.

To be honest: very few people other than historians actually understand what feudalism was or how it worked - so and it was far more complicated and different than just 'there were kings and knights'. There still are monarchies and noble titles - but we don't have a feudal economic organization and the English speaking world hasn't had it since before 1500.

I'm not a French historian, but my lesser understanding of western Europe (France, Netherlands, Germany) is that they moved out of feudal production into more market-oriented production in about the same time. (there always were markets, but I'm thinking of agriculture and rents based on money, rather than labour and goods). There was a period which wasn't really capitalist, in that most producers owned the means of production (small farmers, craftspeople), but produced for markets. I call these ''market-oriented but non-capitalist economies" - and these are also characteristic of Asia and Africa in the premodern period.
posted by jb at 7:39 AM on August 5, 2018 [12 favorites]

The marginal tax rate was higher [more than 90%]... but no one actually paid them.

Geez, you come in here and drop a link to the Tax Foundation, a right wing propaganda shop dedicated for the last 80 years to lying to the public about taxes and with the never changing mission of cutting taxes for the ultra rich?

Of course rich people paid those rates, but you aren't going to see that in an average of the top 1% because those high rates applied only to the ultra rich -- the 0.1% and the 0.01%.

This idea that there's no point in raising taxes because nobody ever paid them is rank disinformation of the worst kind. Of course the ultra rich would like you to believe that.
posted by JackFlash at 8:47 AM on August 5, 2018 [4 favorites]

There’s also the fact that the United States had a hybrid feudal capitalist system under slavery that was immensely profitable for a select few even as it was becoming clear it wasn’t sustainable - and survived after it was “abolished” (sharecropping, domestic terrorism under the Reconstructioon, the prison and law enforcement system, the Tulsa Riots on black owned businesses and alternative production models, etc). And the not so unspoken desire by big business interests in the U.S to return to some form of it- debt slavery is seen as a feature, not s bug.

But as I said, you could make a lot of these things go away at the ballot box or legistlative chamber because I maintain an increasingly feverish belief that the answer for the problems of democracry is more democracy, so a big , big part of the fight has to be not only attracting the right kind of swing voter (from nonvoter to voter) but to attack gerrymandering and all forms of voter suppression, and expand democracy to all areas of life.
posted by The Whelk at 8:50 AM on August 5, 2018 [9 favorites]

Also, to add to our previous spdiscussion if whatbis a lot of money, millionaires Vs. Billionaires.

“People don't have a strong intuitive sense of how much bigger 1 billion is than 1 million. 1 million seconds is about 11 days. 1 billion seconds is about 31.5 years.”

A millionaire just isn’t a fancier millionaire and there in lies an argument in there just shouldn’t be billionaires.
posted by The Whelk at 11:59 AM on August 5, 2018 [7 favorites]

People don't have a strong intuitive sense of how much bigger 1 billion is than 1 million.

I like to think of it this way: if I had a billion dollars, and I made the laziest possible use of it by dumping it all in the meanest, nastiest kind of savings account that pays just 0.01% annual interest, the bank would still be paying me two thousand dollars a week for doing diddly squat.

If all I had was a million dollars, that savings account wouldn't even make enough of a return to buy me a takeaway coffee every other week without cutting into my capital.
posted by flabdablet at 12:14 PM on August 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

It's how you deal with capital flight that raises questions about the viability of higher tax rates and having one nation with strictly controlled capitalism. There are solutions, but it does need to be accounted for.

The other issue that concerns me is that you improve the conditions of the workers in your country, but if you're still a capitalist state you're still going to be involved in exploitation and off-shoring of production in places that lack your protections. Especially if you're still buying into the narrative of free trade internationally.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 11:47 PM on August 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

Oh, I forgot to include it in the above statement on America’s feudalist/capitalist hybrid, the resource extraction industries - company towns, company script, press gangs, bearings and murder without procescution - they weren’t called Barons for nothing.
posted by The Whelk at 3:50 PM on August 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

Boing Boing: Extreme poverty is on the decline, extreme inequality is on the rise:

Lifting billions of people out of poverty is a signal achievement of our species, and it's an achievement that is about to be annihilated by the undemocratic concentration of power into the hands of a tiny elite of unaccountable, fallible, foolish-as-anyone plutocrats.

It's actually even worse than that. Billionaires aren't merely as foolish as anyone. To have so much when others have so very little, you either have to admit that your wealth is undeserved and you are the unfair beneficiary of a rotten system and a lot of luck -- or you have to tell yourself that you are so incredibly brilliant, talented -- such a job-creating Galt among proles -- that you deserve it all, and anyone who tells you you're wrong about anything is an inferior mouse trying to bell you and your fatcat pals.

Also:

A recent OECD report examines how much of that wealth carries over to the next generation — it ranges from 20% in Denmark to 70% in Colombia — and calculates how long it would take someone born in the bottom 10% to reach the mean income in their country.

* 3 or fewer generations: Denmark (2), Finland (3), Norway (3), Sweden (3).

* 4 generations: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Spain, Greece, Japan, New Zealand, Netherlands.

* 5 generations: United States, Ireland, South Korea, Portugal, U.K., Italy, Austria, Switzerland.

* 6 generations: France, Chile, Germany, Argentina.

* 7 or more generations: China (7), India (7), Hungary (7), Brazil (9), South Africa (9), Colombia (11).

posted by Kitty Stardust at 11:22 AM on August 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

"People don't have a strong intuitive sense of how much bigger 1 billion is than 1 million."

This reminds me of the time (in the early 90s) that my (then) spouse mentioned to me that one of her good friends (in college, as we both were then) was the daughter of "a millionaire or something". Millionaires weren't notable even back then, but she implied that this person was very wealthy, so I was curious.

I went to the library and found the most recent Forbes list and, to my surprise, her friend's father was the second-wealthiest person in the US after Bill Gates. This was before billionaires became common and so this person's net worth was a "mere" $5.5B (Gates was $6.5B).

I found this a bit startling. I went home and said, hey, your friend isn't just wealthy, her dad is the second wealthiest person in the US. That's crazy! But she didn't think that was a big deal. So I said imagine a pile of $100 bills that totaled $1M (10,000 bills, of course). So now imagine five-and-a-half thousand of those piles of money.

1991 Bill Gates's $6.5B adjusted for inflation is $11.7B now. And yet 2017's Bill Gates was worth about $90B. (Second in the US after Bezos's $112B.) The super wealthy are ten times wealthier (not nominally, but truly) than they were 25 years ago. And they were obscenely wealthy then.

A billion a big number. Apple just the other day became the world's first trillion dollar company.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:35 PM on August 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

Marx (and other radical authors) are invaluable for analyzing the problems of capitalism and their causes.

As for solutions... eh, not so much.

And yes, Marx spends quite a bit of time on Money, what it is, where it (might) have come from, how it worked and works and what is wrong with other philosophers/economists treatment of money. Das Capital (you should read it as audiobook, much better than on paper).

Revolutions are violent, even if the revolutionaries don't at first want them to be, (a big " if") because the people whose power is threatened are violent, have organized systems of violence for the very purpose of supressing revolution and protecting and serving them at home and abroad.

I agree, climate change will end all this mess before humans get more intelligently organized

Unregulated capitalism and stalinism are not the only choices they are indeed not that different (see british vs russian forced famine deaths and %s)) , choose Scandinavia or some such democratic regulated market welfare state.

Organize, Educate and fight back: vote, donate and volunteer.

Then get ready for crop failures and civil convulsions.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 8:44 PM on August 8, 2018