Life During Class Wartime

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/05/03/Life-During-Class-Wartime

by AndrewDucker • 3 months ago

232 204 3 months ago

cfst• 3 months ago

Regarding the IMF report, is it actually harder to hide wealth than income, or is it that there are so few global taxes on wealth that nobody's currently bothering to hide it? It seems like income, being a continuous series of transactions, would be the more difficult of the two.

tardedmeme2• 3 months ago

I bet that both are fairly easy to hide, but some forms aren't. It's hard to hide when money arrives in your bank account and it's hard to hide that you own 51% of Tesla shares. You can do either one of those through a proxy however, which makes it harder to track down, not impossible (why does 51% of Tesla shareholding always agree with this guy? Why's he shilling Offshore Panama Corp LLC products so hard?)

nerdsniper2• 3 months ago

I think it varies - each are easier/harder to hide in different ways at different scales. It's the "convicting Al Capone for tax evasion" thing. They didn't need to prove where his income came from, they could just show that his wealth was clearly higher than his declared income could have possibly yielded.

Muromec2• 3 months ago

Fun fact: when there was meaningful data on Ukraine, it was number 1 in the world by wealth inequality and at the same time had the best score at income equality.

Likelt has to do with not having any property or wealth taxes, but having modest incone taxes that were rigorosly collected

floatrock• 3 months ago

Revenue transactions and taxable income are two very different topics.

Your accountant can clarify the difference.

zug_zug• 3 months ago

Yeah I'm glad somebody's talking about it. Wealth inequality seems like it will be THE defining issue of our lives (accelerated drastically by AI).

I think there are many practical ways to solve it, and would love to see more proposals out there. Instead I tend to see nihilism or division.

tardedmeme2• 3 months ago

Extreme power inequality seems to be the default state of human society. Power concentrates until it's maximally concentrated, then stays there. Power shakeups seem to usually replace one group of elites with another group of smaller or the same size.

Exceptions to this rule come about for specific reasons. Before the industrial revolution, there just wasn't that much power to go around. Everyone was working their land for sustenance, and the rent-seeking nobility extracted some percent of production because that's what there was to extract. When the industrial revolution came, those who figured out how to exploit it became the new nobility and worked their employees to the bone. It was only after actual, bloody, war between the factory owners and the employees that we got labor rights, which were a truce agreement. And that agreement's been steadily declining since Reagan. It took a while because the beneficiaries of the labor rights era were able to hold onto their wealth and pass it down to their children, but now we're back in the same factory feudalism situation again, but with different technological status.

readthenotes1• 3 months ago

I don't know why you're down voted. Perhaps the observation that inequality is often and the noble savage utopian dream of "all pigs are equal" is not the norm is too a bitter pill to swallow

harimau7773• 3 months ago

That sounds like the same observation that Thomas Jefferson made:

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

joe_mamba• 3 months ago

Everyone was working their land for sustenance, and the rent-seeking nobility extracted some percent of production because that's what there was to extract

Until the black death came in the 1300's and killed an estimated 30–60% of Europe's population, and now the nobility had nobody to rent seek or even to work their land.

So then, for the first time ever, the surviving workers gained bargaining power as landowners (lords) competed for labor, leading to high cash wages, better working conditions, and more freedom for peasants, because the feudal lords hadn't yet figured out how to replace the peasants with slaves, H1-Bs and illegals from across the planet.

So according to history, including your post-WW1 example, the only times peasants gained bargaining power was when millions of them died through world wars and global pestilence.

Looking at recent unfolding history, "There's something very familiar about all this" -Biff Tannen

thrance• 3 months ago

I think you'll find that any specific change in political directions come about from specific reasons (what would even be the alternative?).

6AA4FD4• 3 months ago

Great works on this subject, to my mind refuting your nebulous thesis, include Debt by Graeber, Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, and Mutual Aid by Kropotkin.

bryanrasmussen• 3 months ago

generally the power shakeup that replaces an elite with another elite is one that replaces an old elite with a rising elite better able to take advantage of some economic conditions the old elite is ill-equipped to take advantage of

https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-new-exploiters-9d8a0684...

_ink_• 3 months ago

What are these practical ways to solve it? And who do you think will implement them? Especially when Billionaires control the opinions of a big chunk of the population.

roxolotl• 3 months ago

You can read about the transition from the Gilded Age to The Progressive Era in US history for potential solutions. Anti-trust and political reform is a bit part. Political opinions were controlled undemocratically during that period as well through political machines. Direct election of senators, direct primaries, women’s suffrage were enacted to help with that.

pitaj3• 3 months ago

My hot take is that wealth inequality is the least bad problem we could have, if it is even a problem at all.

What people are actually experiencing is not wealth inequality, but cost disease. Vital things (housing, healthcare, education) are more expensive - and that's mostly the fault of state action.

gazebo22• 3 months ago

But that state action is the direct result of wealth's influence over the state and how it operates

lovich4• 3 months ago

if it is even a problem at all.

One of the pillars of capitalism is that the entire economy is more efficient when decision making power is dispersed as close as possible to the people making economic decisions aka what they buy.

When we have ended up in a situation where a handful of people are making all the economic decisions because they have all the money, there is no functional difference between that situation and a command economy.

If you’re a believer in capitalism as a tool to eliminate scarcity you should view the existence of billionaires(adjust for inflation) over the longer term as policy failures that are eroding capitalisms ability to create more and more.

BobbyJo2• 3 months ago

Two things:

1) You have to get it out of your head that it is enough when everyone has X standard of living. It isn't. It's enough when less than a critical threshold of the population is dissatisfied, and that dissatisfaction can come no matter what the median/lowest standard of living is. This is just how societies work, uniformly.

2) Money is a ledger supported by a social contract. Spending wealth in ways that erode the social contract is bad. I think we can all agree 500M dollar yachts, empty luxury apartment buildings, and buying up shorelines in populated areas are all bad looks, and therefore, erode the social contract. The wealthy really need to step in and police each other socially here, if they want to continue being wealthy.

rconti• 3 months ago

I'm not well-versed in "cost disease", but yes, standards go up. Cars have to have airbags and backup cameras and infernal electronic nannies. So an (alleged) increase in safety has been mandated, and the costs are obligatory. IOW, your risk of dying in a car goes down, but it doesn't come for free.

Medical care is getting better, insurance is required to pay for more and more things, but that drives up insurance costs.

In my county, fire sprinklers are required in all new houses.

Costs go up, but at least, in theory, you're getting something in return.

You're welcome to blame the state. Without those actions, things would be somewhat more affordable. But it seems pretty clear from the data on inequality that inequality is a much bigger factor in bidding up living costs than the fact that I need to install sprinklers in my house, even if sprinklers are a very large cost relative to my income.

goatlover4• 3 months ago

Politically wealth inequality is a problem as the wealthy have more means available to them to influence votes, candidates and appointments. So you have a society that's partly democratic but with a lot of unequal influence at the top.

UncleMeat• 3 months ago

More than one million people die of TB annually, a disease that has an inexpensive treatment.

That’s not cost disease. That is wealth inequality killing people.

georgeecollins• 3 months ago

A great practical suggestion comes in the recent book: "The Second Estate" by Ray Madoff. It is an excellent analysis of the changes to tax policy in the US that have gotten us here. (Yes, I know this isn't just a US problem, but the US is the most important part.) One key suggestion is just to make transferring money into any trust (any!) a taxable event so that capital gains must be realized.

It sounds trivial but the effect to various tax evasion strategies is very important. It's also something that really ought to be uncontroversial. Read the book!

aidenn02• 3 months ago

Using an asset as debt-collateral triggering gains being realized would be good too. As would unifying the income and capital gains tax.

I disagree with TFA's idea that a wealth tax is the best solution. IMO wealth is easier to hide than income, it's just that nobody bothers right now with there being no wealth tax.

slibhb2• 3 months ago

Inequality isn't a big problem. Those who claim it is seem to think that the existence of really rich people causes the existence of really poor people. That is not the case.

It's natural that things are less equal now that we're not farmers or hunter-gatherers. Economies of scale will massively enrich those who take build them.

Sometimes it is claimed that inequality is a problem because the rich will control politics. But populism is surging and the rich seem to have a harder time controlling politics than ever, largely due to the disintegration of the print/tv media.

stavros4• 3 months ago

I don't think anyone says that really poor people are caused by the existence of really rich people. The argument, as I understand it, is that spreading the wealth of billionaires around would mean fewer really poor people.

tim333• 3 months ago

The UK went through getting rid of that with the landed gentry at the start of the twentieth century. Mostly tax - income and inheritance. It requires the political will to vote in people who will do it though.

Atlas6673• 3 months ago

Do you really understand class war? Your suggestion is having the state legislate this away as if the state isn't fully compromised by the capitalist class?

This is the main lesson of the 20th century that liberals refuse to accept; that the state is controlled by capitalist class interests. Capitalist democracy is a curated racket.

And even if we were to force legislation exactly as described above it can't and hasn't lasted long due to the incentives ($billions) to undo it. They will go as far as to kill people for this, and they have.

Legislation does NOT fundamentally change existing power relations. They have this shit in their pockets and you're just saying that we should have them take it out of their pockets.

The western allergy towards Marxism is one of the most detrimental cultural positions the working class has EVER faced.

hootz3• 3 months ago

In the west, the prevalent idea is that socialism/communism lost and that there is nothing beyond capitalism. This is it, we will forever live in a social-democracy state. I wonder who promotes this idea.

AlexandrB4• 3 months ago

In the west, the prevalent idea is that socialism/communism lost and that there is nothing beyond capitalism.

It didn't just "lose", it killed millions of its own people in the process. Having been born in a communist state, I'd rather clean toilets in American than do anything else in the USSR.

Edit: It's basically impossible to communicate the day-to-day misery and deprivation of late stage Communism without sounding like a crazy person. My parents were both university-educated professionals but we lived in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment with occasional hot running water and only newspaper for wiping after the bathroom. This was considered a rather affluent existence.

To find something similar in today's America you'd have to go to the worst, most impoverished parts of town and even then...

OKRainbowKid• 3 months ago

And it seems like the winners capitalism brought about don't actually care all that much about both "social" and "democratic" aspects of "social democracy", if they stand in the way of ever increasing wealth and power.

pitaj3• 3 months ago

History shows that the "fundamental change to power relations" is just a shift from moneyed interests to political/bureaucratic interests. Which is worse because while moneyed interests have power money can buy, political/bureaucratic interests have the power of state coercion.

"They will go as far as to kill people for this" is rich coming from someone preaching Marxism, for which millions have been murdered.

lovich4• 3 months ago

How is the government worse than the corporation or billionaire for coercion?

Libertarians always try to convince us that the corporate boot tastes so much better than the governmental one, but they both taste like leather to me and I at least have a say, however small, on the government.

chungusamongus3• 3 months ago

This is a ridiculous oversimplification of complex historical processes. The biggest change to power relations by far were the bourgeois revolutions, which ostensibly shifted "political/bureaucratic" interests to "moneyed interests," which is quite literally the opposite of what you're saying. At any rate, the dichotomy is completely misleading since "moneyed" interests and "political/bureaucratic" interests are not at all mutually exclusive; in reality, they are virtually synonymous within the capitalist system. Also the notion that "moneyed" interests do not possess the power of state coercion must be some kind of perverse joke. Do you not even have a cursory knowledge of history? There are so many instances of money equating to state coercion that it's mind boggling anyone would say this with a straight face. Do you not know what a pinkerton is? Are you not paying attention to what the current president is doing both domestically and overseas? The idea that any advocate of capitalism would get on their high horse and moralize about Marxism is pathetic.

swed420• 3 months ago

The western allergy towards Marxism is one of the most detrimental cultural positions the working class has EVER faced.

And it's no surprise they took these positions, considering the FBI originally deemed the likes of "It's a Wonderful Life" as communist propaganda and claimed it "made bankers look bad."

https://www.newswise.com/articles/ruining-your-holidaywhy-th...

"What's interesting in the FBI critique is that the Baileys were also bankers," said Noakes. " and what is really going on is a struggle between the big-city banker (Potter) and the small banker (the Baileys). Capra was clearly on the side of small capitalism and the FBI was on the side of big capitalism. The FBI misinterpreted this classic struggle as communist propaganda. I would argue that 'It's a Wonderfil Life' is a poignant movie about the transition in the U.S. between small and big capitalism, with Jimmy Stewart personifying the last hope for a small town. It's a lot like the battle between Home Depot and the mom and pop hardware store."

snapdragonzoro• 3 months ago

Every state that has implemented marxist ideals has had their economy made up almost entirely of the state, that level of state oversight over the economy is just an extreme version of our current model of highly bureaucratic, bloated states where the owners/controllers over the means of production are syncronized with the state and its interests.

It was an ideology that at its height ruled a third of the world including some of the most populous and resource rich territories on earth yet still fell within decades.

The increased income inequality within much of the developed world has happened at the same time as ever increasing state influence over the economy.

pocksuppet11• 3 months ago

My understanding of Marx was that he mostly just wrote books describing how capitalism works. Then guys like Lenin came afterwards and killed lots of people. What are Marxist ideals?

masfuerte• 3 months ago

I'm very surprised that Tim Bray isn't part of the richest 0.1%.

empthought• 3 months ago

He absolutely is.

6AA4FD4• 3 months ago

We are playing with two sets of dice, I realize mine are weighted and rolling higher than yours. Do I A- offer to switch dice B- not say anything C- offer to share D- decide not to play?

AlexandrB4• 3 months ago

The elephant in the room is why governments need more money: old age benefits like social security. I fear that taxing wealth will just be a tax on future investment while funnelling that wealth to the elderly. Already, folks are pushing to make the key asset owned by the old - housing - free from property taxes (if you're over 60, naturally)[1] which will only push housing prices up and drive more budget deficits that needs fresh tax revenue.

I don't expect Social Security (or my country's equivalent) to exist in anything like its current form when I'm old enough to retire. This is the last hurrah and it's shocking how we're pulling out all the stops to make it happen.

[1] https://www.sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-advi...

harimau7773• 3 months ago

Even if the government took the money and burnt it that would be a net good for society since it would lower inequality and thereby decrease power imbalances.

pitaj3• 3 months ago

Wow this is nuts.

timbray3• 3 months ago

Well, healthcare is an increasing piece of government spending all over the world, and the population is aging, so politics and policy aside, that number is going to go up.

Muromec2• 3 months ago

The cure to that, unfortunately is more corruption and here America is leading proudly

strongpigeon• 3 months ago

Wow, exempting people over 60 from property tax is such a fiscal self-own... The way to do it is to provide a deferral with interest which becomes a lien on your property. This way you can still live in your house, take advantage of your asset appreciating and the county still gets its taxes in the end (and can better handle the delayed cash flows). King County in WA does this for example.

pocksuppet11• 3 months ago

I am okay with a certain percentage of society's production being collected and funneled to the elderly, the poor, the sick, the young, the disabled. We can argue on what that percentage is, but it's clear that no matter how we slice it, we either give them a percentage of our production, or they die. We can slice it by taxes, we can slice it by investments (where everything costs more because a percentage of it is getting funneled to retiree shareholders), we can slice it by interest on treasury bonds (where we pay for it in taxes with extra steps). At the end of the day it's still taking a percentage of real production. I think the less complicated a system we use for that, the better, so I'm in favour of just agreeing that we can afford to give, say, 20% of everything society produces to those kinds of people.

Again, we can argue the exact numbers, 20% is just an example. Some percentage is also needed for public infrastructure works and stuff like healthcare, and we don't want the total to be too high, nor the component parts to be too low.

tantaman• 3 months ago

Increased taxation would be defensible if it was paired with spending reform. Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody. Increasing the tax and then directly paying people, with no PMC in the middle, seems win-win-win.

idle_zealot2• 3 months ago

Ideally you'd spend the taxes on things that help people, but I would argue that even simply destroying the taxed wealth would be an improvement over what we have now, if only in that it would counter wealth/power disparity and enable democracy to work better. Allowing a subset of the population to accumulate power divorces their interests from the majority and represents the biggest threat to modern society.

It would be a huge waste though. We should probably spend it on food, education, and healthcare instead.

jandrewrogers• 3 months ago

destroying the taxed wealth

Wealth is farms, factories, skills, etc. How would destroying all that improve anyone's life?

Wealth isn't money. It exists independent of any currency you can use to give it notional value.

webdood903• 3 months ago

Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody

Bureaucracy = jobs, at least. I'd rather that than having it concentrated at the top.

wrqvrwvq3• 3 months ago

I don't think just paying people will make any difference at all. Most of the chronically poor in US at least have underlying problems such as addiction, schizophrenia or other affective disorders. Most chronically homeless people have turned down multiple state subsidized living options or have been booted from them for anti-social behavior. Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on the dollar to pay for drugs or other unnecessary things.

The other major issue with "free money" is that it is purely inflationary, unlike wages which offset most of their price pressure by providing a commensurate amount of goods/services. When you hand everyone a million dollars the price of everything just goes up, both because there's a flood of money and because there's even less incentive to produce something to buy with it.

I think there's any compassionate argument to be made for helping the indigent, but easy ideas like "taking money from job creators and value producers to pay for needles and degeneracy" are never going to work at all.

It's a bit of a trope to say that billionaires are hoarding wealth via financial shenanigans when all of their wealth is tied up in job and value creation.

The us govt wastes by some estimates 30% of its budget. Trillions annually. Have to start with the waste and fraud. Empty daycares are not a good use of hard-earned tax dollars and have a massively pernicious effect on the society. They're not taking care of kids or paying teachers. Just pure inflationary greed.

timbray3• 3 months ago

I'd like to see a few links to support your assertions in the first paragraph because, with respect, I have not seen evidence which supports them.

On the other hand, multiple jurisdictions have run trials of UBI (universal basic income) and unless I misread the reportage, the results have been good.

webdood903• 3 months ago

Why do people stan for billionaires? I don't get it - what motivates you to say this stuff?

Most of what you said is greatly exaggerated or simply not true. It's like you cherry picked Fox News talking points.

youngtaff• 3 months ago

The other major issue with "free money" is that it is purely inflationary,

Free money as in quantitative easing that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy?

NickC252• 3 months ago

It's a bit of a trope to say that billionaires are hoarding wealth via financial shenanigans when all of their wealth is tied up in job and value creation.

Value for whom?

denkmoon• 3 months ago

Most of the chronically poor in US at least have underlying problems such as addiction, schizophrenia or other affective disorders. Most chronically homeless people have turned down multiple state subsidized living options or have been booted from them for anti-social behavior. Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on the dollar to pay for drugs or other unnecessary things.

Completely unsubstantiated FUD. The underlying problem is the structure of the economic system they reside in.

metabagel3• 3 months ago

Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on the dollar to pay for drugs or other unnecessary things.

There are zero studies which show this.

tyg133• 3 months ago

The us govt wastes by some estimates 30% of its budget. Trillions annually. Have to start with the waste and fraud. Empty daycares are not a good use of hard-earned tax dollars and have a massively pernicious effect on the society. They're not taking care of kids or paying teachers. Just pure inflationary greed.

Much can be said about the problem of government waste, and it certainly is a problem, but there's an underlying assumption in this kind of talk, which I'd like to attack. That assumption is: "people are poor because the government taxes them too much, and wastes their money". Republicans in the US run and win on this platform again and again.

The problem is that it's simply not true. Government wealth has been falling for decades[0] -- nations are increasingly rich, but governments are increasingly poor. I don't even need to include a source that shows effective tax rates have been falling for the same period (no surprise -- that's _why_ governments are so relatively poor). As nations have continued to get richer, most of that wealth has been concentrated in the hands of an increasingly small group of private individuals.

Governments are not sequestering your wealth -- rich people are.

[0] https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-3/

BrenBarn4• 3 months ago

We don't need to use the tax on government bureaucracy. We can just give it right back out as direct payments to the non-wealthy.

jacquesm3• 3 months ago

[flagged]

tptacek• 3 months ago

Can we not?

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Teever• 3 months ago

So right off the bat I'd like to say that jacquesm's one word comment is pretty blah and in my books that along is sufficient reason to flag but I didn't this time.

With that said HN is an international community, and it is important to respect the perspectives of people from around the world.

Is it inappropriate for people to call for the kidnapping and arrest of Maduro from Venezuala? Doesn't appear to be from recent conversations here.

Is it inappropriate for people to call for the overthrow of the Iranian government and the assassination of the Ayatollah? Doesn't appear to be from recent conversations here.

Is it inappropriate for people in Canada or Greenland to discuss the prospect of American civil war and how it could potentially benefit them personally by minimizing the threat of American aggression that results in the invasion and annexation of their countries? Certainly appears to me from your response and previous conversations on here.

As a non American it's conspicuous and frustrating to see how this discussion around what is and isn't acceptable speech about violence often lines up with whatever the current foreign policy of the American government happens to be. And that isn't to say that this site and others censor discussions that are critical of these policies, just that they seem to clamp down on discussions about violence when it's about domestic American violence even when it's being discussed by non-Americans like jacquesm?

Why is that? Why is it okay Americans to call for the assassination of the Ayatollah but people from outside of America can't talk about the prospect of civil war and political assassinations in America?

I'm a Canadian. The leader of your country has made many comments about annexing my country. It is quite likely that right-wing American interests are funding a separatist movement in my province. I consider this an overt threat to the well being of everyone in my community and my personal well being.[0][1]

While America is nominally a democracy I don't hold the American people responsible for this threat. Instead I hold the American oligarchs and the skilled professionals who enable the creation of their authoritarian machinations (Including the employees of Oracle and IBM as you helpfully pointed out in a recent comment) responsible for this bullshit that now threatens me.

So from that perspective why isn't it acceptable to acknowledge the necessity for the arrest of American oligarchs like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Larry Ellison? Why isn't it acceptable to call for the smuggling of weapons into America to facilitate revolutionary activities akin to what people were calling for the CIA to do in Iran?

Ideally I don't want anyone to come to harm. But I have to be real about this, the more fractured America is the better off I am in the short term. Our incentives have become misaligned through no fault of my own. So something has to give.

If you were in my shoes you'd feel the same way.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43485649#43487443

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/russia-and-u-s-amplif...

tomhow• 3 months ago

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48041608 and marked it off topic.

Not cool. Other users were perfectly able to respond to the parent with curious conversation. I'm not going to respond any further publicly. You can email us if you want to discuss further.

teyc• 3 months ago

A fairer way would be requiring all excess profits be invested in hard assets like factories, infrastructure etc. capital should be forced into competition and create excess capacity.

metabagel3• 3 months ago

This was one of the effects of the 90% rate for the highest tax bracket. It incentivized reinvesting money into the economy, rather than taking profits.

yabones• 3 months ago

For the vast majority of human civilization, all taxes were based on wealth. Your emperor, pharaoh, czar, or whoever was in charge sent a dude around to take a bit of everybody's stuff. Not how much income they made but how much stuff they actually had. It's only been the last 120-ish years that the idea that wealth and income were totally different things as far as taxation is concerned emerged.

I think almost everybody would be better off if taxes were something like 1% of total assets rather than off the top of your income.

nerdsniper2• 3 months ago

I think that could generally work domestically, as in, "I don't have anything to give you, I gave/lost it all to Bob...go get it from him". But it would need to be modified with a tax on any wealth leaving the country/jurisdiction, so I can't just make $1B and then send it all to my aunt in $COUNTRY / $STATE / $CITY with low/no wealth taxes and then claim that I don't have any wealth (unless there were sensible reciprocity agreements for tax revenue reapportionment).

-----

But I'm not sure if your historical claims are accurate. I believe a lot of taxes were a fraction of the expected yield of land, which is more complicated than just "taxing wealth vs. income". Yes, the taxes would go up if you owned more land, which sounds like a tax on wealth. But the imputed tax base would be based on historical yields (income) because the quality of the soil would vary (which also could be construed as a tax on wealth because higher quality soil meant land might be worth more per acre). It was also based on the weather during that growing season, if yields were down in that area then taxes would be lower that year, which sounds more like an income tax than a wealth tax.

You also said "its only been about 120 years since wealth and income were different":

The Christian tithe that became de jury under Charlemagne in 779 A.D. was a strict 10% tax on land yield each year (~income tax) but other empires and lords used fixed quotas (~wealth tax), and records exist that these could have brutal effects during years where weather resulted in lower yields.

There was the 600-year long sales tax on salt in France, which definitely wasn't a wealth tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabelle

In 1899 the UK instituted a 10% levy on annual incomes over £200, with a graduated rate for incomes between £60 and £200. Income taxes had a hiatus from 1816-1842 but has been permanent since the "Income Tax Act of 1842".

The Mit'a (Inca Empire, Pre-1532) taxed individuals "time". Which I think most people would consider kind of an income tax - it's literally paid in labor. Adult men had to spend a certain number of days each year working on state projects - like building roads, farming state lands, or fighting in the army. They didn't have currency. Their economy was based on centralized planning, labor taxation (mit'a), and state redistribution of goods.

The Saladin Tithe taxed revenues at 10% in 1188.

arzig2• 3 months ago

For the vast majority of human history, only the ultra wealthy had any money. And then, just as now, taxing only those people would not yield sufficient resources to fund the state.

The problem is, and always will be, what happens to me is I am out of work. No one wants to force people to liquidate assets they might need to work, live, etc in order to pay an asset tax.

Then you get to the dividing line of, but what about the ultra wealthy? Well, sure, but then you write an insanely obtuse tax code to try and capture that wealth while leaving everyone else alone and the targets are highly motivated to find loopholes.

Progressives intuitively understand that it’s not worth the hassle to try and means test entitlements yet seem to miss the fact that trying to manage a confiscatory bureaucracy would have the same issues.

shigawire2• 3 months ago

trying to manage a confiscatory bureaucracy would have the same issues

It would be a cat and mouse game but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Like how funding the IRS appropriately increases government revenue.

thunky6• 3 months ago

I think almost everybody would be better off if taxes were something like 1% of total assets rather than off the top of your income

No thanks. Any discussion about tax reform has to start with government spending otherwise it's not serious. Nobody wants to give away a slice of their net worth to pay for bullshit wars and ballrooms.

tyg133• 3 months ago

Nobody wants to give away a slice of their net worth to pay for bullshit wars and ballrooms.

The vast majority of people in America are already doing this, because their wealth is entirely derived from their income. Your complaint isn't relevant to the discussion of wealth vs income taxes.

BrenBarn4• 3 months ago

Any discussion about tax reform has to start with government spending otherwise it's not serious.

I'd say almost the reverse. What we need most in terms of "tax reform" is to move away from thinking about taxes as solely a means of funding government operations, and towards thinking about taxes as a way of directly redistributing wealth. That is, the revenues of a wealth tax could simply be given to the non-wealthy as direct payments (possibly in the form of refundable tax credits). Unavoidably there will be some overhead, but there doesn't need to be anything for the money to be "spent on"; it can just be straight-up given to different people than those who paid it.

themafia2• 3 months ago

We have property tax, sales tax and inheritance tax.

We also have mountains of loopholes through all of these.

If you can afford a tax attourney your outcomes will be far better than those who cannot.

adabyron• 3 months ago

A lot of the loopholes are really simple. You don't need a sophisticated tax scheme, just enough money to do the simple ones.

pie_flavor• 3 months ago

This sounds completely made up. The medieval taxman has no idea how much gold you have squirreled away, and even finding everyone to tax them was hard enough. Most peasant taxes were based on productive land and observable yields thereof, and the rest were import/export duties. IE income and not wealth, because nobody was stupid enough to implement a negative growth rate until the 21st century (unless they were actively trying to loot holdings for redistribution, e.g. varlık vergisi)

anon848736282• 3 months ago

Window tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax

tekne• 3 months ago

Obligatory land value tax mention

christkv• 3 months ago

In Europe governments make up such a big part of GDP now in some cases nearly half of it that it becomes silly to talk about the evil capitalist. We should be talking about the graft and poor spending of that money.

lovich4• 3 months ago

Well the article wasn’t speaking about Europe but Canada and America.

And if you read the article you will see his mention of the wealthy that are advocating for higher taxes/better wealth distribution and explicitly says that not all wealthy are The Enemy.

TacticalCoder• 3 months ago

In Europe governments make up such a big part of GDP now in some cases nearly half of it ...

Oh more than half. In France it's 59% officially. And then there are the fake "private" companies that are actually owned by french-state apparatchiks and operating like the various state monopolies (like utility companies): so the real number is higher than 59%. France has probably more than 2/3rd of its GDP that is public spending. It's basically a planned economy.

A planned economy with the only expected result of a planned economy: the public debt of France is 115% of the GDP growing. Inflation is through the roof (you think gas prices are high in the US?). And they have zero clue as to how they're going to pay their empty promises of pensions to the aging population.

But what's really amazing in a country like France where 2/3rd of the GDP is public spending is this: publications constantly hammer the exact same message as in TFA: "We should tax the rich!". The french Piketty (who's btw never worked for a second in the private sector in his life: a pure product from the socialist french education system who's exceptionally good at creating state-lovers ever begging for more taxes) is mentioned in TFA.

2/3rd of the GDP being public spendings but instead of trying to get out of that planned economy the message hammered by all the media (who are either owned by the media of by the french-state apparatchiks) is: "Tax the rich".

The delicious irony of the 3 first of the only 5 companies France has in the Top 100 by market cap (and none in the Top 50) being three companies selling luxury goods and bringing money into France by selling luxury products outside of France is of course not lost on people.

There's LVMH, L'Oreal and Hermes exporting like mad luxury products and bringing in money from overseas into France and, instead of giving the people owning these companies medals, France explains that you should "tax the rich".

Yeah. But no. I just don't buy it.

I'd rather be poor in a capitalistic society than live as a slave in a planned communist economy.

"Better dead than red" FWIW too.

pocksuppet11• 3 months ago

You'd rather be poor in the USA than a slave in... modern France?

unfitted2545• 2 months ago

Being poor in a capitalist country is still slavery - you don't work, you don't eat (as well as have access to accomodation, healthcare, public transport).

pocksuppet11• 3 months ago

Europe does suffer from American capitalism at a distance. But what you said is also true.

cdrnsf• 3 months ago

Reversing Citizens United, publicly funding elections, installing a functional regulatory regime and equitable taxation would go a long way.

Perhaps we could also engage in less ill considered military adventurism as well? Causing a domestic affordability crisis as a distraction and a salve for one's ego seems like a bad idea.

jacquesm3• 3 months ago

You'll find half the voting population is aligned with the capital against that. So I don't think that will fly until the situation becomes quite dire.

pstuart4• 3 months ago

until the situation becomes quite dire.

Ironically, it's already incredibly dire. People are stupid -- it's crazy making to watch this play out.

demorro• 3 months ago

Y'all can say violence isn't the answer all you like, but not addressing this will cause violence. Mass, misguided, idiotic violence of the like few of us can imagine.

Either we make significant change whilst we still have some capacity to reason, or we consign ourselves to the fate of animals, following our impulse gradients to the places they invariably lead.

JuniperMesos5• 3 months ago

As a resident of a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, the effects of pathological inequality are in my face every day: Bentleys gleaming on the road, ragged people huddled in the rain cadging cash outside the drugstores, thousands homeless.

I also live in a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, and attributing these phenomena to pathological inequality badly misdiagnoses the problem. Most visibly homeless people in wealthy west coast cities are severely mentally ill in ways that prevent them from living a normal life or even living peacefully with other people without some kind of institutionalization, which local authorities are reluctant to do because there's no nice way to institutionalize people.

In some places, it's possible for people with a moderate amount of dsyfunction to be able to scrape together enough resources in order to rent cheap, low-quality housing; but in wealthy west coast cities there is a massive housing shortage that is downstream of decades of underbuilding, so all types of housing are very expensive. The underbuilding was and is mostly driven by large numbers of middle-class homeowners who primarily care about the negative externalities of construction and density affecting the place where they live and own their own homes.

Neither of these problems has much to do with extremely wealthy people, or wealth inequality in a general sense.

timbray3• 3 months ago

I'm highly unconvinced of the proposition that most homeless are severely mentally ill; the data I've seen doesn't support it. That's some of it, and also addiction. But a lot of them just can't make the rent.

Agree on the underbuilding.

xboxnolifes3• 3 months ago

As an anecdote, two people in my family have been or are homeless (don't know their current situation) entirely because they are incapable of continually making basic, smart financial decisions. At the level of "I decided to just not show up to work today" or "I spent my entire week's pay on a new toy". They both received enormous financial and social support from various people in the family, but always eventually just end up spending all their money somehow, or they get fired, or even just quit their job(!). Both eventually ran away from the responsibilities they built up into a different state.

I don't know if we should call this inability to make basic, smart financial decisions a mental illness or not, but it's something. And these 2 people aren't/weren't even what I would consider visibly homeless. At least as long as you didn't see them living in their car behind a convenience store.

Starting with the framing that housing is just too expensive makes the problem simple. You build more housing, or you subsidize housing for these people, or somehow just inject money into services for them so they can get back on their feet. But if that's not the core issue for some or many of these people, how do you actually help these people? How does a society help people who are incapable of handling their own finances? That's where the hard questions begin.

FireBeyond3• 3 months ago

One of the challenges here as an ex-paramedic in the PNW who has certainly seen their fair share of homeless is that several of the more prominent studies use HUD's definition of "severe mental illness" that is far more conservative than you or I would expect...

"Requiring hospitalization more than once a month, on multiple occasions in a year".

And that number, per HUD, is 22%.

If you want to look at "untreated mental illness" in the homeless, now you're above 50%.

slibhb2• 3 months ago

Most homeless people aren't mentally ill. But those "huddling in the rain" mostly are, or are at least addicts.

Non-mentally I'll homeless people are rarely "street people". They live in a car or with friends or in a shelter. Plenty of them have jobs.

aidenn02• 3 months ago

Good thing that GP didn't say that most homeless are severely mentally ill.

tbrownaw• 3 months ago

There is a difference between "most homeless" (your comment) and "most visibly homeless" (comment you're replying to).

IIRC, most people who obtain "homeless" status only keep it for a short time, and don't live on the streets during that time.

You'll get very different statistics if you count transitions into (or out of) homelessness over some window, vs systematic point-in-time counts of current homeless status, vs point-in-time counts of people camping on the street, vs trying to measure QALYs.

Uhhrrr• 3 months ago

This meta-analysis puts it at 67%: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

What data have you seen which doesn't support it?

1007212• 3 months ago

Most visibly homeless people in wealthy west coast cities are severely mentally ill in ways that prevent them from living a normal life or even living peacefully with other people without some kind of institutionalization

Sources? This just sounds like cope from a wealthy individual who wants to feel better about not helping the problem.

deschutes• 3 months ago

It's hard to find anyone that doesn't have some motivation in this problem. I won't claim any percentages because I do not know them and I would not trust them even if I did.

That said, my experience in a urban area on the west coast has given me many examples that support this notion that it's not just a housing problem. Indeed many of the local governments own attempts to house the unhoused fail in no small part because the unhoused create conditions incompatible with staying housed.

Furthermore there is a steady drip of examples in regional news that raise serious questions about the efficacy if not motivations of the judiciary, politicians, law enforcement and local beuracracies charged with addressing the problem.

I do believe that housing costs are a major part of the problem but I also believe that treating the population as if they have no obligations to society is a major and fatal mistake to the whole enterprise. For one the policy approach has invited contagion by not addressing the population of unhoused that cannot or will not uphold the most basic aspects of the social contract. For two, it turns away a large number of people that would otherwise be sympathetic to the cause.

BryantD• 3 months ago

Even if it’s true that most unhoused people are mentally ill — and I agree with Tim’s reply — you have must consider causation versus correlation. Is an unhoused person dysfunctional because they were always that way and thus doomed to lose shelter, or are they dysfunctional because living on the streets is extremely damaging?

You see this question a lot when discussing drug usage among homeless. The percentages of addicts is undeniably high; we know this from point in time counts, for example. Some people take that as proof that homelessness is the fault of the homeless: they made the bad decision to take drugs, and that’s why they lost their jobs. But there’s also a lot of data showing that people are more likely to become addicted as a way to cope with street life.

And if, in fact, losing your home is something that can happen relatively easily in part because of wealth inequality, we’re right back to the original assertion.

Underbuilding is for sure another factor. It’s just not the only one.

JuniperMesos5• 3 months ago

I hear a lot of accounts of relatively-normal people who talk about one member of their family who is homeless and living on the streets because they stopped letting that family member live with them because they did things like violently attack children in their home, or steal money in order to buy drugs. So this makes me think that a lot of visibly homeless people were in fact dysfunctional before they became homeless.

And this is relevant for any institution at all that tries to house such people, including the state. If the state provides some kind of basic housing with electricity, what happens when the people living there rip wires out of the wall so they can sell the scrap for drug money (a major reason why most landlords don't want to rent to really poor people)? Will someone prevent them from doing that (i.e. institutionalization), or will the state itself evict that person from their housing and allow them to live as a homeless street person?

jimbob45• 3 months ago

At some point, it’s not a shortage. Everyone naturally wants to live in the best city on earth but expecting one city to house 8 billion people is silly. It’s okay to admit that some cities are at their natural reasonable capacity.

amanaplanacanal2• 3 months ago

Aren't there cities bigger than that though? What causes the capacity limit you are taking about?

themafia2• 3 months ago

Most visibly homeless people in wealthy west coast cities are severely mentally ill

Is that _why_ they're homeless? And are you aware of "drug induced schizophrenia?"

which local authorities are reluctant to do because there's no nice way to institutionalize people.

There are no _cheap_ ways to do it. There are _tons_ of nice ways to do it.

so all types of housing are very expensive.

And you're speaking of an area that has weather patterns that are conducive to living outside.

Neither of these problems has much to do with extremely wealthy people, or wealth inequality in a general sense.

Immediately? No. Proximally? Yes. Obviously.

metabagel3• 3 months ago

I think you're seeing a segment of the homeless population and assuming that it represents the whole. It's likely that you encounter homeless people in your daily life and don't recognize them as being homeless.

xboxnolifes3• 3 months ago

They specifically said visibly homeless.

tmsh• 3 months ago

I agree with this. I think the point that's often missed about taxing the ultra-wealthy is it incentivizes them to work through people more instead of doing it all themselves. This is a good incentive.

E.g., if I have no noticeable tax on my wealth as I create impact for the world through my companies I'm going to keep being the one person in charge of that (to achieve my mission of reaching mars, etc.). But if I'm going to get nicked (to the tune of billions of dollars even at 2% etc), on average I'm going to redeploy my assets via people I trust in the company etc. I might even invest more in public welfare projects. It is fair arguably that there is this forcing function because one's value accrues from those projects originally. So there is an elegant symmetry at the end too.

It would be unfair to tax billionaires more if they truly worked in a vacuum and provided value to the economy through very few dependencies. But that's never the case. And right now too much excess is spent on things like these sport teams via inherited wealth etc.

w10-1• 3 months ago

OK, sure, tax wealth of the rich -- if you can somehow outdo their self-interested political action. Even the most extreme viable wealth taxes proposals target ~2%.

My question is really the economic efficiency of their other 98%, which is becoming about half of available resources.

I suspect the evidence would show their investment gains are less from productivity and more from coordinated extractions, and that there are severe limitations that come from consolidated decision-making (after all, the premise behind the market is that the collective is smarter than the king). Not to mention that buckets of money probably are also alienating and defeat healthy self-discipline, particularly for the next generation.

I would love instead to find that new money seeks and creates new opportunities, particularly those that are beyond what you can convince collectives to do.

It's pretty obvious that ants threatening elephants won't go far, but (to abuse the analogy) I suspect elephants would take helpful hints. Expanding wealth inequality should make it easier for great ideas to take off, so perhaps that's a better focus.

7e• 3 months ago

Inequality is rising, but is absolute wealth also rising? Median incomes inflation adjusted?

cestith3• 3 months ago

Inequality of some level is perfectly acceptable in the societies being discussed. It’s a real problem, though, when it becomes a crisis of affordability for the median earner. It’s a problem when the ultra wealthy can leverage their fortunes not just for private power but also for control of the public sector. In the US right now we’re looking at both.

Citizens United and public capture in general are forming an aristocratic class in the United States.

globalnode2• 3 months ago

this sort of article is ragebait for me. i dont understand how as a society we can let this sort of inequality run rampant. i mean i understand the mechanisms ofc but not the apathy. a wealth tax sounds like a great solution. people can still focus on acquiring stuff, we dont have to worry about how they hide the income and the theyll barely notice the tax anyway. then we'll have enough state money to care for these supposedly "mentally ill" people living on the streets. healthier happier society. as the article states: "no need for guillotines. yet".

globalnode2• 3 months ago

sometimes i wonder why i say such things on a venture capitalist forum. i must not like karma lol

Gathering6678• 3 months ago

The seemingly lack of any source for the first illustration (share of wealth) troubles me...

nickvec• 3 months ago

It is taken from the linked “Distribution of wealth” Wikipedia article with a corresponding source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#Wealth_...

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