a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
aidrocsid  ·  3186 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Anyone here a socialist as well?

Capitalism creates investment opportunities, though. I think it'd be lovely to have co-ops where the means of production are owned by the workers and they actually get the full value of their labor back. That'd be a great scenario for me and for most of the people I know. Where do we get our investment capital to create new businesses, though? Can we really fund everything with kickstarter? Economically it pays to have some very rich individuals around because they reinvest their capital.

If you have a lot of money and you keep most of it in a bank over a long period of time, you're a moron. Your interest rates will barely beat inflation if that. They certainly won't beat inflation right now. So in the US you can buy I-Bonds or TIPS, both of which are set to match the rate of inflation, or you can invest in commodities, or you can invest in stocks and mutual funds. All of those things provide funding for more economic activity, or in the case of government bonds, government services. Even what you do keep in a bank allows that bank to loan out more money.

So let's talk about redistributing wealth. Are we getting that wealth from taxes? I'd say that's a reasonable source, but you also have to be careful that you don't tax people so heavily that you deincentivize domestic economic activity. We don't want to go to such an extreme that people simply take their business elsewhere.

If we're looking at actually confiscating money, we run into all sorts of complications. Not just involving individual liberty and the extent of government influence over private property, which could cause a revolution on its own, but because most of these funds are in use by people who don't necessarily 'own' them. Again, you don't just keep a bunch of money stuffed under your mattress, you invest it. So all that money that any given filthy rich person 'owns' is mostly being used by other people to grow their businesses. Until Mr Moneybags actually uses that money, which he may never do with most of it as he can cover even the most extravagant of his own needs with relatively little, it's actually in somebody else's pocket.

Capitalism is already encouraging him to take that money he's got and let other people use it to make him more money. That doesn't happen without capital.

While I certainly agree with you that money (among other things) has too much influence on politics at the moment, I've recently seen an argument made, and I must say I have to agree with it, that the problem is congressional transparency, rather than the solution. I saw it on Hubski, actually! He makes quite a convincing argument.

Give it a gander and let me know what you think!