▲ | spwa4 6 days ago | |
No, I don't (well, somewhere between 5% and 20%, it's not magical). But how it works, fundamentally, the rich exchange goods and services for new debt, in various forms. That also shows why you can't touch the rich with the government: first, where would it get goods and services? And when the government gets goods and services it's for "the public good", which effectively means largely for the poor (especially if you reason the way governments do: the palace for the prime minister is the infrastructure that provides for the poor. So that room is really for the poor too, just like the many side-hustles the prime minister and many government figures have. But even disregarding government excess ... mostly these goods and services acquired really are for the poor). Second, the wealth of the rich is really something like 1%-5% of those new goods and services produced. That's what it fundamentally is, that wealth. If you take that away, the incentive for production falls away. And even that ignores the added difficulty that the richest "rich" in the US, by an extreme amount, are the pension funds, especially in aggregate. Attacking the rich will mean taking pensions from old people. Which leads immediately to the consequence of going after big companies and "the rich": no more (much less) new goods and services. Because nobody's going to replace them, or, if someone does replace them, they become the new rich and you've achieved nothing. AND there's a major, major, MAJOR catch in replacing the rich. The current rich see the social contract roughly like this "if we provide society roughly as-is, we get to be rich". If you replace the current rich with new MAGA rich, for example, they will demand a new social contract which you may VERY much dislike. For example, Microsoft, Google (even Apple, when it comes to computers) see the freedom to develop and run your own programs, as well as free communication over the internet, as an essential part of their "deal" with society. Chinese and Indian computer producers very much do not see things this way (but are largely, not 100%, 99%, forced into allowing it, at least in the US and Europe, by the current US rich). It seems to me unlikely in the extreme that if the US gets a new rich class, replacing these companies, that this will remain so. |