Problem of unjust societies. My kid will be a multimillionaire in his twenties without a single day of work while his equally capable peers will enface a life of limited opportunity because the best they can do is to work their ass off to pay rent. It is structural and it needs to change.
A truly liberal idea could be to reset the "score" when the game is over. Try to be the best you can and earn as much as you can - when you die, most of your wealth flows back into a large pond to the benefit of all.
Personally, I think inheritance is the ultimate expression of success = luck and should be capped hard with the remainder flowing back into support funds for things that help re-balance opportunities. However, most people I've brought this up with find the idea completely repulsive - the idea of "I want my kids to get the fruits of my labor" seems pretty ingrained.
if you do this , rich people will just blow their wealth since they know their kids cant get it or they will stop working hard to create more wealth and that may inhibit new inventions etc. I know rent seeking exists but communism is not the solution my friend.
1. You're heavily disincentivizing people from doing their most to earn more money. Assuming you buy into capitalism in the first place (which I do), the result of this is generally worse for society. Less new inventions, less new medicines, less new technologies, etc.
2. The second problem is more philosophical, but... what right does society have to take away someone's property, which they presumably worked hard for? People often work hard to give to their children (hence point 1 above), what makes you think it's a legitimate use of the force of government to take everything from them? Most people think it's fairly unfair.
Capitalism does a lot to kill motivation on the right things. No matter how hard I work, I will never make as much money as some guy who sells cosmetics on Instagram. In Malaysia, we have architects quitting their jobs to become bakers, lawyers quitting to sell noodles.
There's also the question on whether inventions, medicine, technology are what we should be optimizing for? Depression and mental health are high despite all this, probably worse in wealthier countries than poorer ones.
The real cost to inequality is that it correlates with political polarization. Countries that are more equal tend to have politics that agree on more things. Political instability is one problem, but it also leads to distrust of the government, leading to the anti-police and anti-vaccine movements we've been seeing lately.
How do you know what the "right things" are without markets? If architects are quitting their jobs to become bakers, it's because society values the baker more than the architect and therefore the person can make more as a baker. If enough architects quit, you will see the incentives switch and more and more people will begin training to become architects.
>There's also the question on whether inventions, medicine, technology are what we should be optimizing for?
Only the whole economy can accurately decide what we should optimize for. If you try to centrally plan an economy, it will fail because you remove pricing from the equation which is a signal to where resources should be allocated. For things that may not have a current market, this is what privately funded research and charities should be used for.
>The real cost to inequality is that it correlates with political polarization
This is only an issue because for some reason we have decided we need these huge government bureaucracies to run our day to day lives. Without this, peoples politics wouldn't matter. As for the anti-police movement's, this is manly due to people starting to realize the only thing the police protect is the State. The anti-vaccine movement hasn't grown. The government and the media have changed the definition of anti-vaccine. If you don't believe the government should or has the right to implement vaccine mandates on the populace you are anti-vaccine. If you aren't sure there is evidence the vaccine slows the spread of COVID, you are anti-vaccine. So basically the government and the media have labeled anyone who is unsure about this specific vaccine to be the same as the person who believes essential oils will heal everything and that vaccines in general cause autism.
The biggest obstacle IMO is that inheritance taxes are unpopular. We already tax very large inheritances (above $5M), but I don't think there is an appetite for stepping that top bracket up to 100%.
Wealth tax still seems highly unpopular in the general public, not to mention on HN. I think the average user here is more interested in bringing home FAANG salaries than solving the wealth gap.
> Wealth tax still seems highly unpopular in the general public, not to mention on HN. I think the average user here is more interested in bringing home FAANG salaries than solving the wealth gap.
I’m more interested in making the existing set of taxes more equitable and less favorable to capital (extending equal taxation to capital income as labor income) than adding additional layers of complexity to the tax system.
When people say 'wealth tax' they usually are thinking add up all your assets and pay some percentage of that each year. There are quite a lot of practical problems with that.
Yet most Americans have almost all of their wealth inside of their home and they pay a tax on it every year. Hmmm, interesting. It's almost like we made a system for this and made it easy for people to pay this tax... It's almost like there's ways to tax things easily and effectively... Hmm!!! Even for assets which can change dramatically in price every year like houses do! How does it work?!
The practical problems are all very solvable. Again - this is just propaganda the rich sell into the minds of the masses to avoid taxation further. Don't buy into it. And stop spreading it.
A truly liberal idea could be to reset the "score" when the game is over. Try to be the best you can and earn as much as you can - when you die, most of your wealth flows back into a large pond to the benefit of all.