[kpmcc]

There is a method for dealing with widespread inequality coinciding with generational wealth transfer, it’s called taxation. Tax transfers of wealth. It’s not complicated and doesn’t rely on the goodwill of ‘values-driven, digitally native, and community oriented’ young people.

We have a system designed to incentivize greed. Gross inequality is the result. Taxation is one viable method to deal with such a failure mode.

[imtringued]

The economy has the equivalent of a permanent memory leak. The Austrians decided to restrict the amount of memory (money). The economy crashed like a program running out of memory.

Keynes said, let the memory leak and just get more memory. This works until it doesn't, which is still a bigger win than losing multiple times.

Meanwhile Gesell said, if you want finite memory, then you must penalize memory consumption.

The amount of memory that an economy needs depends on the total number of transactions (total throughput) and how fast each processor is (sequential throughout).

Many slow processes means you need more processes in parallel, which means you need more memory.

Curiously, transactions are taxed by the government. This means that taxation minimisation implies delaying and minimizing transactions. There is an inherent bias towards being slow. It seems like tax policy is completely backwards in most countries.

[throwaway48476]

Wage suppression has had a far bigger impact. Governments have lots of policies to prevent the 'wage price spiral' because they don't want the real dollar term asset distribution to change.

[mmooss]

It's almost like crowd-sourcing, while being more consistent, democratic and fair.

As long as we're discussing it on this level, why tax transfers of wealth instead of wealth itself?

[mvdwoord]

It's a method, for sure, but not a fail-safe one nor the only one. There seems to be an active experiment going on in the UK right now.

[bargainbin]

Care to elaborate a bit on the UK comment, because it’s not clear what you mean or if you even live here?

The UK doesn’t tax the wealthy or their corporations either. Meanwhile high earners like myself are kept from even middle class aspirations by aggressive income tax.

All signs point to that income tax, specifically at my bracket, increasing in the next budget, leaving me ostensibly poorer than people earning less than me.

The whole system is broken because they refuse to tax the wealthy at an equivalent rate to the working class.

[fabian2k]

Do you consider all taxes to be theft?

[rimbo789]

If the “victim” is a large corporation is almost certainly does

[aborsy]

This method has problems too. There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience, overall is not doing well.

[lenkite]

> There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience,

Are there really more beggars and homeless in the EU compared to the US ? Admittedly, my anecdotal viewpoint is only that of a visitor, but having been to both, it seemed US cities had a far more severe problem.

The first time it was a bit of a shock to me - the US had this patina of glory that crumbled for me after my first visit.

[neuronic]

Uh yea, thats because we tax everyone to hell EXCEPT the rich. Wealth inequality is a serious problem and we are moving to catastrophe sooner rather than later on the current path.

It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.