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0 pointsKye6y ago0 comments

>> "and the effect would be stopping anybody new from becoming rich."

I read this as you thinking there's a problem with no more people getting rich. Can you expand on that?

For example: how many people need to get rich to balance the economic, social, and political power of the people who already are? Is this the best way to achieve that balance?

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taborj6y ago

How many things were invented or financed because someone wanted to get rich? What happens to those types of things when it's impossible to get rich?

The answer is they don't happen here, they'll happen somewhere else. They may happen with the same people even, and then you're losing knowledge and experience to other countries, which is fine as long as those other countries choose to be friendly with you.

In other words, you willfully put your country's advancement into the hands of other entities. You no longer control your future.

Barrin926y ago

>How many things were invented or financed because someone wanted to get rich?

Not as many as you think I would suggest. In the US a golden era of invention was the postwar era during which inequality fell and the American middle class rose to power and the American government still participated actively in shaping innovation and economic future. Even the Soviet Union invented a good deal of stuff.

Today economic growth is low, inequality is high, it looks like we're on our way to a second gilded age and the things that we call innovation are escooter startups and expensive juice machines. Even die-hard capitalists like Thiel have pointed this out.

If you want innovation what you need is a healthy, equal society, individual opportunity and collective ambition.

sabarn016y ago

Every other developed economy was destroyed by the war. The rise of the middle class here was a result of overall economic growth and the economic suicide of the two world wars and the depression. Holding up the 1940's and 1950's as a model removes the context of cataclysmic world events of the 30's and 40's. Also remember that the US had virtually no welfare state at that time and used higher taxes to pay off war debt.

jtolmar6y ago

No new people becoming rich is fine, but that plus keeping the existing ones is more than a little oligarchic.

whatshisface6y ago

>I read this as you thinking there's a problem with no more people getting rich. Can you expand on that?

At least with our current system the rich people change every couple generations, if income and capital gains were frozen after $100M without any other changes to the tax code, everyone who is presently rich would keep their money while suddenly there would be no risk of replacing them. Bill Gates would become the richest man in the world, not just today, but forever. That's terrible according to Marixist and modern economic consensus: so not a good plan!

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