The way I see it, society is basically a big ultimatum game: the rich get to steer it in whatever way they choose, and the masses can either accept what they do or smash everything and go back to the “stone age”. So that sets the terms of the ongoing negotiation. It’s hard to have something like a wealth ceiling because it’s hard for millions of people to commit to being okay with someone having $100,000,000 but blowing up the world if someone has $100,000,001.
The way I see it, life is like a game of monopoly. Those who have more power (money being one form of power) gradually have their advantage increase. The have-nots must forever spend effort and coordination to have a share of the pie at all, or see it regress to the haves by default.
But that said, I don’t agree with the “smash everything and go back to stone age” fearmongering. Communist countries, for all their terrible record on human rights, haven’t been especially backwards on science and engineering. Nor have countries with strong progressive taxation regressed to barbarism. When the weak join forces to win themselves a chunk of the pie, that can sometimes be nasty, but it isn’t necessarily, definitionally nasty. I’m convinced it can be done in a good way.
Sorry, I didn’t intend to fearmonger. I agree with pretty much everything else in this comment. European social democracies seem pretty nice, and communism isn’t necessarily always the worst thing in the world (although I usually avoid saying that on LW because it gets me downvoted). However, communism didn’t end up working out anything like the way early communists envisioned, and countries that ended up communist or social democratic had to go through specific historical events that ended up making them that way. Right now billionaires seem unwilling to make concessions because they think under the current circumstances they will win in a showdown with the public, and I don’t really see why they’re wrong. Why do you think they’re wrong?
The way I see it, society is basically a big ultimatum game: the rich get to steer it in whatever way they choose, and the masses can either accept what they do or smash everything and go back to the “stone age”. So that sets the terms of the ongoing negotiation. It’s hard to have something like a wealth ceiling because it’s hard for millions of people to commit to being okay with someone having $100,000,000 but blowing up the world if someone has $100,000,001.
The way I see it, life is like a game of monopoly. Those who have more power (money being one form of power) gradually have their advantage increase. The have-nots must forever spend effort and coordination to have a share of the pie at all, or see it regress to the haves by default.
But that said, I don’t agree with the “smash everything and go back to stone age” fearmongering. Communist countries, for all their terrible record on human rights, haven’t been especially backwards on science and engineering. Nor have countries with strong progressive taxation regressed to barbarism. When the weak join forces to win themselves a chunk of the pie, that can sometimes be nasty, but it isn’t necessarily, definitionally nasty. I’m convinced it can be done in a good way.
Sorry, I didn’t intend to fearmonger. I agree with pretty much everything else in this comment. European social democracies seem pretty nice, and communism isn’t necessarily always the worst thing in the world (although I usually avoid saying that on LW because it gets me downvoted). However, communism didn’t end up working out anything like the way early communists envisioned, and countries that ended up communist or social democratic had to go through specific historical events that ended up making them that way. Right now billionaires seem unwilling to make concessions because they think under the current circumstances they will win in a showdown with the public, and I don’t really see why they’re wrong. Why do you think they’re wrong?
Maybe they’ll just win. Or maybe the public can get more coordinated and get a better bargaining position; moving the needle toward that seems good.