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this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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We The People have the power to criminalize the ownership of more than $1 billion dollars of wealth.
We have the power to re-establish punitively high, confiscatory top-tier tax rates on income, forcing the highest earners to spend their earnings, or lose them.
We have the power to create, and phase in a progressive tax on SEC registered securities. A wealth tax. We can confiscate the shares of publicly traded companies held by individuals, and turn them over to IRS liquidators. They can dispose of those shares by selling them on the open market in small lots, no more than 5% of the total traded volume.
We have the power to drive the wealth of the richest among us out of the market, making room for the rest of us to invest our own capital, and more equitably share our societal gains.
The cure for mass suicide is the same as it is for most of today's problems: A new French Revolution, where we strip the first and second estates of their power to continue fucking us over and making us want to kill ourselves.
I am totally with you in the broad sentiment you're expressing, but almost everything you said is ultimately just bandaids that still don't address the real deep, systemic problem, and this mode of production that will always reward greed. You were most onto something towards the end. But rather than a new French Revolution, which just sets things up for this to happen all over again, how about a new Bolshevik Revolution that aims not just to try to do capitalism more fairly, but reorganizes society in such a way as to eliminate poverty and all need in what is already a post-scarcity human epoch.
We the people have the power to seize the means of production. We the people can set society on the road to the complete abolition of class.
Basically, because socialism fundamentally requires centralized control, and I don't trust centralized control. I fully expect corruption and greed to exist, and to gravitate toward power.
I don't trust society not to deliberately appoint a tyrannical megalomaniac: I've seen them do it entirely too often.
How would you implement your progressive tax system without centralized control?
Centralized control over whom?
Socialism controls the means of production, which means (in theory) it has a direct affect on every shop, every worker. Any errors, mistakes, or corruption in the system that causes harm will impact our entire society.
A punitive cap on wealth at $1 billion directly affects only 756 people in the US. If we progressively apply a securities tax above $16.7 million, it directly affects a maximum of 1% of the population. Any errors, mistakes, or corruption in that system affects only a very small segment of society, and only that segment most able to mitigate the damage of such harm.
I'm less concerned with the harms that come with centralized control when those harms only affect the most privileged among us.