this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (24 children)

Thing is, America thinks giving us bread and circuses is "Socialism"

[–] Funkytom467 6 points 10 months ago (23 children)

Circuses isn't socialism, it's a pretty useful tool of capitalism, even though it ruins it in some cases.

Bread though, no capitalist will ever share their bread. Or anything for that matter.

[–] HardNut -3 points 10 months ago (20 children)

Historical precedence says you're wrong. Rockefeller, a prominent capitalist and thus commonly demonized by anti-capitalists, supported initiatives to combat hunger. His foundation provided substantial funding for soup kitchens during the great depression, and his foundation has continued to focus on public health, education, and scientific research.

JP Morgan, "the ghost of rich dudes passed", was also philanthropic as fuck. He didn't donate food directly, but his efforts supported educational institutions, scientific research, and the arts.

Even Elon Musk has a foundation that studies renewable energy research, space exploration, pediatric research, and more, all at cost for the betterment of the world. In fact, when it was especially popular to point out that his wealth could end poverty entirely, he started directly asking people for their metrics and potential methods. He was clearly ready to put resources into fixing a problem, but nothing ever came of it because no one actually had real metrics or methods, they just wanted a reason to dunk on Elon.

Okay so those are just some guys I already knew about, what if I just pick a random "capitalist" name I hear commonly thrown around. Carnegie, sure, not sure what he did but I know I've seen his name besmirched for being capitalist aaaaand yep look at that! In his older age he donated most of his wealth to the establishment of public libraries, educational institutions, and foundations aimed at promoting world peace. I literally had no idea about any details of this guy's life, but yeah, it's not surprising that a successful prominent capitalist lived a life of philanthropy in his later years, because that's the more consistent pattern.

Have you ever once even tried to look into whether what you believe is true or not? Or would you just rather hate a label you've been told to hate?

[–] c0mbatbag3l 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

All of these men would have made more of a difference and reduced their own wealth more if they'd supported a land value tax and the restructuring of capitalist economics to it's true form of laborers creating an increase in wealth due to labor, and having wages derived from said labor by estimating their personal effort and the increase in capital that comes from it.

Instead we have men who owned more of the economy than Bezos and Musk giving out a pittance to help the poor when they're the source of the problem with their pseudo-capitalism "trickle up" economics.

Fix the issue, rich people giving away 1% of their wealth isn't a solution when the problem is the system that allows for them by taxing the wrong people on the wrong items. Eliminate all taxes and institute the LVT so the middle class doesn't have to keep shouldering the burden that the rich should have an equal share of.

[–] HardNut 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Land value tax is simply unjustifiable, because land is the most important thing to leave in private hands. To allow for land tax is to concede that the state has a right to the land you own. The problems that has directly lead to in history are innumerable. From Rome to Russia, state control of land was at the forefront of their issues.

Why do you think reducing their wealth is a moral good? If you want to improve life for some people, your focus should not be on reducing wealth for others. The latter does not necessarily lead to the former, and it's an inherently destructive mindset. Destroying one person's wealth merely destroys their wealth, it does not make others lives better by default

[–] c0mbatbag3l 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I'm sorry but I completely disagree, the state of current affairs is a direct result of the private ownership of land with inefficient tax systems intended to staunch the flow of blood like a bandaid over a gushing artery.

Land and natural resources were not created by anyone and cannot be justified as being owned by anyone. The way we would represent public ownership of natural resources via capitalism would be a tax on the use of said resources, a rent paid to society for being allowed exclusive use of it.

I'm not advocating for socialism or communism which is where your issues regarding public ownership of land stem from, capitalism works just fine as long as the correct institutions are being taxed in an efficient manner. The LVT would work well because it doesn't allow land to just sit around unused. You either fulfill a direct supply need for a market or you sell it to someone who will do so. Not only does that put market direction and supply back into the domain of the consumer who's needs in terms of say... Housing are being left unfulfilled, but would incentivize the efficient use of land and help create something other than single family homes that most of society doesn't need and can't afford.

It also keeps the wealthy from dodging taxes, because it wouldn't be possible to hide the amount of land your businesses use the same way you can take stock options instead of an income or use tax haven bank accounts and deflect most of your tax burden. It also frees up the worker and their employer from taxes while putting the tax directly onto the people who provide the least value in the chain and derive the most wealth from that parasitic action, landholders. Individuals who own a couple houses aren't the target, we are talking primarily about businesses that take up hundreds of thousands of acres for manufacturing and who's owners possess more wealth than the rest of the nation combined.

As for your insinuation that reducing wealth doesn't equal more wealth for others, that's correct. However, the entire idea of wages deriving from capital and the malthusian doctrine are both fundamentally flawed and have lead to the idea that there has to be poverty, there has to be this significant of a class divide. It's just the laws of the universe, can't do anything about it! We have never seen the outcome of a society that taxes in this manner and provides services like an automated capitalist economy which uses land tax to facilitate a UBI, which is the inevitable endgame of modern LLM and robotics technology. If we don't plan for that by deciding now that land is publically owned and "rented" from society via tax then we are going to see continual wealth disparity and our Western cities are going to start looking a lot more like India with obscene wealth next to miles of homeless camps. Those that own the land and the capital will reduce our workforce while sucking up the increased profit margins and the eventual reality will be a few trillionaires alongside millions of destitute and starving people who don't have jobs to justify their existence. Only we won't have the ability to drag them into the street and cut off their heads like the French revolution, because they'll be living in underground bunkers on unmarked islands or in space stations at the top of the gravity well. Untouchable.

The human race is fucked, these issues were called out over a century ago and we might have gotten through to people, but because an entire generation of Westerners thinks public ownership of anything is LITERALLY COMMUNISM even when it's in a capitalist economy, we will just see the issue get worse as the middle class gets nuked into oblivion.

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