Taxation is the mechanism that moves power from the people to the government, and increasingly politicians and their specific interests.
Do you actually believe that if your taxes went up, power would be less concentrated, or that you or your countrymen would have more power?
Every government goon doing authoritarian dirty work collects a paycheck and wouldn't do their job without it.
> Do you actually believe that if your taxes went up, power would be less concentrated, or that you or your countrymen would have more power?
Absolutely. The source of most of the corruption I see in the world today is wealth, and specifically wealthy people paying people off to get their own way. If there was less wealth inequality there'd be much less scope for this.
Note: I believe this would be the case even if the money was literally burnt/disappeated rather than being given to the government (not that I suggest that's what we do).
Politics has it's fair share of corruption too. But at least in my country (the UK) it's the lesser evil. And even if you look at a country like the US where there is a lot more political corruption, the source of a lot of that seems to be private money influencing elections.
Every marginal dollar* taxed is a dollar politicians don't have to scrounge from a wealthy donor, in order to get that politician's pet interests achieved. You are saying MORE taxation means less wealthy donor influence on private citizens. And parent is saying LESS taxation means less policy influence on private citizens.
Here's what I say: how about both? Or neither? I think the scope of the problem is defined too narrowly so far in this particular thread.
*Or say, 10 dollars, since a donor's dollar is leveraged
>Every marginal dollar* taxed is a dollar politicians don't have to scrounge from a wealthy donor, in order to get that politician's pet interests achieved.
You fundamentally misunderstand the relationship.
The donors donate because the politician will then direct more money at the donors interests.
I spend $1mil on lobbying, $1mil on bunk science at labs I fund or astro turf'd grass roots support (something the government can point to to justify their action), $1mil on donations I get a preferential change in law or rule, or perhaps even government investment in my industry, that lets my business make billions, bringing back say $6mil in profit to me personally. Repeat for all my other business activities.
Politician, political appointees and regulatory agencies pet interests only matter insofar as I get better value for my money by choose one who's interests align.
> Note: I believe this would be the case even if the money was literally burnt/disappeated rather than being given to the government
No need to literally burn the money, either: just use the entirety of that increased tax revenue on paying down the national debt, and lower the debt ceiling by the exact same amount so it can't go back up. This is an even better deal if you think "interest rates are too high, the Fed should cut a lot more". It all fits. And we managed this throughout the 1990s.
Of course it is. Things getting cheaper is really bad for the economy.
That's why computers never became an industry, they just kept getting cheaper every year so nobody bought them. If only computing power had kept getting more expensive every year, we might have some kind of tech industry!
In the traditional / academic sense of the word, it _is_ deflation. The repurposing of inflation/deflation to refer to consumer price action is much more recent.
Is there a strong correlation between higher taxes and decreasing wealth inequality?
The one part of your comment with which I certainly agree is:
> Note: I believe this would be the case even if the money was literally burnt/disappeated rather than being given to the government (not that I suggest that's what we do).
...except, I am perhaps prepared to suggest actually implementing such a system, at least as an experiment.
Removing spending power from places where it's concentrated seems to have obvious benefits, but giving it to the state (the entity in which political power is maximally concentrated, at least with respect to the legitimate initiation of violence) seems like it's moving the power dynamic in the wrong direction.
> Is there a strong correlation between higher taxes and decreasing wealth inequality?
A sufficiently strong progressive taxation regime would obviously have this effect, assuming you could actually enforce it. For example, if you taxed 99% of earnings above $10 million that would greatly reduce the wealth of the ultra-wealthy, even without taking into account how that money was redistributed.
That's obviously an extreme, and I'm not suggesting we do exactly that. But 80% tax rates were common as recently as the late 20th century, and coincidentally there were much lower rates of wealth inequality during this time.
Well I think we all understand the basic arithmetic; that's not what's in dispute.
The question is,
> even without taking into account how that money was redistributed.
...if you're taking money from people earning $11 million, and giving it instead of the military and prison industrial complexes, obviously you've concentrated, rather than diluting power.
I think there's a real question about how possible it is for a taxation regime to ever have a progressive effect inside the belly of empire.
> The source of most of the corruption I see in the world today is wealth, and specifically wealthy people paying people off to get their own way
This is so wrong, its not expensive to bribe politicians so higher taxes wouldn't stop this at all. The problem is that its possible to bribe politicians, meaning government has too much power, taxes would make that worse not better. And even more important most bribes doesn't come from individuals, it comes from super PACs and corporations, and those would exist regardless how much you tax rich people.
What you need is a less centralized government so its harder to bribe a few key people to get what you want, and a more direct democracy that can eliminate politicians that takes bribes.
When voters can't punish bad politicians since the incumbents has so much power to draw voting lines and decide who is on the ballots then corruption will always escalate out of control.
If the government doesn't have enough power, the wealthy won't need to bribe politicians to do their bidding. They will do their own bidding directly, and there will be nobody to stop them.
It's like, if you want to sell your cyanide penis pills under big government, you need to bribe someone. If you want to sell them under small government, you just... you just sell them, that's what.
There may be ways to design a government where power is better distributed, e.g. using sortition, but ultimately it needs to be richer and more powerful than its wealthiest citizens, otherwise these wealthy citizens will assess, correctly, that when push comes to shove, the laws won't apply to them, and they do not need the government's permission to do what they want.
Even a small government still has courts, in fact they would be a far more sizeable fraction of the government and thus a lot more effective. So if people like Epstein engage in criminal behavior, or even just unlawful behavior that they would be liable for, they can definitely be held accountable.
But suppose you have egalitarian nation N -- what stops the billionaire from non-egalitarian nation B from influencing your politicians? Especially if nation N is small and nation B is large.
Moreover -- why would low-level elites (think: entrepreneurs, small business owners, etc.) stay in nation N if it was more profitable to do business in nation B -- recall this is precisely the type of person that is often most mobile and internationalized.
The government is the majority of people. So the government very well can be against 49% of the people and it would still fit your definition.
If 100 people were about to embark on a journey on a ship, what makes you think 51 of them know who should run the ship if none of them have ever even been on a ship?
There are a variety of ways that democratic governments are structure that make this an inaccurate characterization of how things work.
The US, for example, apportions representatives and votes for President in a way that overweights less populated states, and there are various aspects of parliamentary systems that help avoid landing in a two-party system where a simple majority gets the say in everything—they force compromise and coalition building among disparate groups. Additionally, Constitutional systems will enumerate the rights of its citizens such that they cannot simply be taken away by a simple majority of any body.
Democratic countries are also basically never "pure" democracies where everyone votes on every decision as in your Plato's ship analogy—we elect people who audition for the role of running the ship, ostensibly those among the people who are best suited to the task.
First, it is not always the case that there are only two parties. You can totally have a government made by representants of all "relevant" parties (by "relevant" I mean that the party needs a minimum size, otherwise anyone could create a party of one person).
Second, your ship example is pretty weird. The people gets to elect representatives regularly. It's not embarking on a ship with complete strangers: you have been on this ship all your life. "Never have been on a ship" would mean electing a newborn baby... that wouldn't count as a functioning democracy :-).
> I think they mean "taxation of the too rich" in that case.
Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them, and for their own taxes to go down.
The problem is this is a collective negotiation, not a discussion about what to ask the genie for when we rub the lamp.
If the middle class wants to decrease their own taxes (which is the political issue that objectively affects them the most, and how they lose their power), then they are going to have to meet the wealthy half way.
Idealism is the enemy of the the common sense, rational, self-interested move.
> And needless to say, a non-functioning democracy is not a proof that the concept of democracy doesn't work.
Yes, democracy is a good idea precisely because imperfect implementations of it work well.
If it worked in theory and not in practice, then it wouldn't be a good idea.
Contrast it to communism, which is literally an info-hazard.
If you try to bring it in to existence, you won't achieve your goal, and the system you do create will be much worse for you.
Even if it works in theory, it's a bad idea because it doesn't work in practice.
There's no way that even the richest people in the world are "powerful" enough in that sense unless you're talking about literal royalty in resource-rich countries. Even Epstein's power was largely about his cronyism, not about directly expending his wealth.
Yeah, Epstein was removed since he didn't have much power compared to country leaders and so on. Even the richest people of the world has very little power compared to an authoritarian country leader.
I'm having difficulty parsing what you're saying in your first paragraph. What is it to 'meet the wealthy half way'? Did the ultra wealthy meet the middle class or the poor half way when they essentially ended their tax obligations and legalized mass influence buying in Citizens United? What's the 'half measure' that is going to rein all that back in?
No they did not. It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number.
The wealthy have about as much power as the entire middle class, but can wield it better because they are more nimble.
That doesn't change the state of the negotiation, which is that cutting taxes for the middle class will also require cutting them for the wealthy.
If you optimize for your own personal notion of fairness, or retribution, you may very well fail to coordinate in your own self-interest.
> It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number.
That's basically my main argument for replacing election-based democracy by lottery-based democracy. Electing the right representatives is a coordination problem in and of itself, a process which the wealthy are already quite adept at manipulating, so we might as well cut the middle man and pick a random representative sample of the population instead, who can then coordinate properly.
It's generally easier to make such a process tamper-proof than an election. You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment. Then anyone can verify the integrity of the process by verifying the seed includes their contribution, and computing the candidates themselves.
>You can pick a cryptographically secure open source PRNG and determine the seed in a decentralized way by allowing anyone to contribute a salt into a list which is made public at the deciding moment.
If that were a viable model for the real world, we could make existing elections just as tamper-proof.
I don't really want to cut taxes for the working/middle class though. I want to tax the everliving fuck out of the hyper-wealthy, to the point that they cease to exist. The money should go into providing goods and services for the working/middle class, but collecting that money and lighting it on fire (or parking assets in a sovereign wealth fund) is a superior option to doing nothing.
Neither our democracy nor our position as a world power survived capitalism eating itself and everything else. We are down to single individuals holding more nominal wealth than whole continents, and the worship of the billionaire has replaced the worship of Jesus Christ for most Americans, a palace cult committing national suicide on your behalf. If you want any of the things that America pitched as its merits in fighting for influence in the Cold War, you want this situation over with.
Let them eat three commas and not a penny more. When you become a billionaire we give you a medal and confiscate every dollar above 1 billion. Using a carrier strike group if necessary.
They're not standing still now. They're eating our entrails. Right now.
We haven't passed a budget in almost 30 years, we've been routinely filibustering nearly all legislation for 15 (breaking the gameplay loop for electoral democracy), we're unilaterally withdrawing from trade and military alliances week by week. We have fascist armies on the streets pulling people from their cars and houses. Our leaders openly brag about their corruption and a good fraction of our people praise them for it simply because it pisses other people off.
We are allegedly about to "Federalize Elections" and also enter a war with Iran that a supermajority of voters do not want.
In terms of state capacity, in terms of our agency in the world, in terms of what we historically regarded as our legacy and our culture and our material security and our institutions, we are in freefall. And it is mostly down to having far too much wealth concentrated in far too few people.
Have you considered that enforcing any right against a wealthy person is punishing them for being successful? They can't come on your property, that's a punishment.
The prospect of "Attack" and "Literal War" is limited by the fact that worst-case resistance involves a drone strike, and worst-case compliance involves retaining enough wealth for you and everyone you know to live on the beach sipping mojitos for the rest of your natural lives, while holding a nice trophy.
Just not, you know, a space program and a larger military than Krushchev's reporting to you personally.
Tax cuts for the ultra wealthy are routinely paired with tax cuts for the less wealthy, for the same reason that countries which tax the ultra wealthy a lot also tax the less wealthy a lot. Building support for taxation means convincing people that taxes are great and they should embrace the benefits of living in a society with lots of tax revenue to spend.
> Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them, and for their own taxes to go down.
That's not true at all. I make a good salary as a software engineer, I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create.
I believe this attitude is pretty common in many parts of the world.
That being said, I do think the extremes of wealth (there is a big difference between a millionaire and a billionaire) have a particularly detrimental effect on society by completely distorting our economic system (there can be no such thing as a free market when such a small number of individuals control such a large proportion of the spending power).
>...I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create.
Whether your gift will make a better society, I can't know - much like your taxes you have very little control over what the money is going to be used for.
>...(there can be no such thing as a free market when such a small number of individuals control such a large proportion of the spending power).
A free market is generally considered a system where there are voluntary exchanges between buyers and sellers based on mutual benefit. It seems odd to claim that since there are some very wealthy people in the country that somehow a consumer can't buy bread from a baker, etc. Maybe you can expand a bit on how you are defining free market.
> Maybe you can expand a bit on how you are defining free market.
Not OP, but just look at a company town as an example in a bottle.
When the rich and powerful control the means of production so completely that they are the only people one can buy what one needs from, then in what way can the exchanges still be called "voluntary" and in what way is "mutual benefit" achieved vs the lesser of two evils: "perpetual debtorship that one must endlessly toil to slow the progress of" vs "abject starvation"?
At the end of the day consent and free will are actually really complicated topics, and they can be surprisingly easy to pervert by unequal power dynamics. The market cannot be free whenever feudalism forms to take its place.
I'm curious about your thoughts on voluntarily donating the excess wages that you perceive earning.. and perhaps not directly to the US government (which is — to put it simply — not in a healthy state of mind at the moment), but instead to charity organizations that you can vet and trust?
Obviously actually vetting these organizations to make sure that your dollar accomplishes what you wish of it remains a Very Hard Problem, but at least while making baby steps from where we are right now (with our dystopian government) increases in taxation would not constitute a small step in the right direction.
EG: a better environment might look like a healthy government being supported by higher taxes than we see today, but without that first "healthy government" component the latter cannot be a net positive.
> That's not true at all. I make a good salary as a software engineer, I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create.
This confusion is precisely why the middle class has less power than ever before.
You and many others have been sold a meme that your tax dollars are in service to a greater good, and you are a bad person if you recognize this to be a scam.
At an individual level, for each person in the middle class, 90% of the social programs they pay for are negative EV for them personally.
It would be better for each of them if they just kept what they earned, and didn't expect to get it back "later" or "when they really need it" whenever that is.
This is an empirical, testable claim, and the math will be slightly different for each person. You should check for yourself.
If everyone turned off the news, and totally ignored the messaging around taxes and government programs and just looked at their own cash inflows and outflows to/from the government, the middle class would retain far more power than they do.
> If everyone turned off the news, and totally ignored the messaging around taxes and government programs and just looked at their own cash inflows and outflows to/from the government, the middle class would retain far more power than they do.
Are you only counting material benefit that you personally get from the government rather than the benefit that other less well off people get in your calculations? Because if my tax dollars enable otherwise less well off people to live a lifestyle closer to my own, then I would consider that a benefit to me and a large part of the intended outcome of that taxation.
> Because if my tax dollars enable otherwise less well off people to live a lifestyle closer to my own
That's a very big 'if'. Less well off people have to pay taxes too, such as payroll taxes on their labor income, or sales taxes on essential purchases that amount to a large fraction of what they spend money on. And government redistribution is extremely inefficient. They'd be far better off if most of these taxes were done away with for lower-income folks, letting them keep far more of what they earn from their work.
> They'd be far better off if most of these taxes were done away with for lower-income folks, letting them keep far more of what they earn from their work.
Well I'd certainly be in favour of a more progressive taxation system that taxes higher earners more and lower earners less, and puts more emphasis on wealth and income (incl. capita gains) taxes and less on sales taxes.
But I'm also realistic that as a software engineer, my salary is above the average, and thus in such a setup I'd likely end up paying more.
> At an individual level, for each person in the middle class, 90% of the social programs they pay for are negative EV for them personally. It would be better for each of them if they just kept what they earned, and didn't expect to get it back "later" or "when they really need it" whenever that is. This is an empirical, testable claim, and the math will be slightly different for each person. You should check for yourself.
This whole "expected value" concept when taken to the extreme is just rationalist patter. It's a useful exercise when you're running a business, but there is more to life than fiscal efficiency. Empiricism, when taken to an extreme, is as dystopian as anything else.
90% of those social programs are what keep us from being killed in the street for our watches and jewelry. They keep people less fortunate than us from becoming desperate. They level the playing field so our children aren't all victims of the circumstances of their birth. By those metrics, which are my preferred metrics and not the size of my paycheck, they are a huge benefit.
Also one could argue that the US military is the world's largest social service program in that it provides jobs for a large part of the country that otherwise has no prospects for a good life.
This is where the Rawlsian veil of ignorance must be applied. What's the EV if you turn off all the tax programs and you don't know which class you're in? If it's negative, cut that program. If not, keep it.
I think GP is confused about the meaning of republican government. In a democracy like ancient Athens the people are directly involved in governance, but that's not what we have in the U.S. and other advanced countries. We elect representatives.
The natural flow of money tends towards pooling on certain individuals and groups, because accumulating capital is significantly easier when you start with capital.
This is unwanted, first because it produces individuals powerful enough to topple the people’s will, and second because it is not in the interest of society for wealth to be accumulated rather than moving.
By first principles you need a system to limit accumulation and redistribute it. That’s taxation.
The money not being extracted from the right places, or not being distributed where it should, is a sign that the government is unwilling or incapable or working for the people.
It is the people’s collective responsibility to prevent and fix that problem.
Agree, I think the issue is that taxes specifically flow to "the government" in the abstract. If there was a simple law like "95% of income or gains above $10M are taxed and redistributed equally via check / IRS rebate to every citizen automatically" then it could be a high-trust system that helps out everyone. Politicians, though greedy and self-interested, would have little choice but to continue the program untouched, similar to social security.
I'd also feel a lot better about "Elon gets $200B payout", because he gets $2B and $198B goes to tax payers -- seems pretty fair. $2B is still more than anyone ever needs to live a lavish life of luxury and/or start any reasonable self-business, or buy off any politicians.
Most super-wealthy folks are not going to spend anywhere on the order of $200B or even $20B (in the broad timeframe of Elon's payout) on their own consumption. Even if Elon spent $100B on a mission to Mars or whatever it is that he cares about, would you really have reason to object to that, any more than if the money was spent by NASA? (The whole Apollo program and surrounding stuff probably cost on the order of that amount of money once you control for inflation, so there's plenty of precedent.)
Nope no complaints, but most wealth isn't being spent. If the majority of the wealth was being spent, then there wouldn't be wealth imbalance (as all that money would flow elsewhere into the economy).
The only way a wealth imbalance can occur is that someone sits on wealth and that it continues to compound. The top 1% have wealth greater than the bottom 95% of the population combined. I don't see why its more moral for someone to sit on investments than to have the money distributed to others to spend.
In one case, the money goes to whichever investment the individual favors (e.g. buying tons of gold). In the "redistribute" scenario, it goes to improving the lives of many millions of people in real tangible ways, and creating a more equitable and balanced society and social trust.
The top 1% of the US hold roughly 30% of all the wealth. That's roughly the same as the bottom 90% of the population. I understand there are implementation issues, but I'm merely calling out the obvious immorality of "90% of people should scrape to get by while trustfund kid lives in 4th mansion, because 'market efficiency'".
> The only way a wealth imbalance can occur is that someone sits on wealth and that it continues to compound. The top 1% have wealth greater than the bottom 95% of the population combined. I don't see why its more moral for someone to sit on investments than to have the money distributed to others to spend.
The critical insight is that this doesn't actually work. When we say Jeff Bezos is worth $200B, we don't mean that he has $200B of money that's locked up in a vault when it could be redistributed. We mean that there are a variety of productive businesses in the world - for Bezos, mostly Amazon - which he holds ownership claims to. The vast majority of wealth in the modern US isn't money, and can only be converted to money by finding people with lots of money and selling them the right to sit on the investments instead.
Wealth that isn't being spent is effectively inert and frozen. It may have some precautionary value for the person who's holding it, but this is immaterial once you get to the million-dollar range, let alone the billions. The only interesting thing to ask about is what happens once the wealth is in fact being spent. (Of course, this wealth is generally invested in productive ventures and not literally 'frozen'; but this is a happy side effect, not something that's expressly chosen by whoever holds it. They're simply allocating it so that it 'compounds' effectively.)
> Even if Elon spent $100B on a mission to Mars or whatever it is that he cares about, would you really have reason to object to that
Of course I would. It shouldn't be up to Elon how that money (and the capital/labour they command) gets spent. It should be up to all of us. And if I want it spent on libraries or healthcare instead of space exploration then I should get my equal say in that.
Maybe this is me being a dumb peasant, but I can't imagine where I would get the right to have a say in that.
How is it different from me looking at my neighbor in his bigger house with his nicer car and deciding that those should be mine instead? Or my neighbor with a smaller house wanting my stuff?
If you believe in the equality of man then I think so. These people didn't individually invent and then produce 1000s of years of collective humam technology and culture and society by themselves to justify such extreme inequality.
And even if you thought so you can't be surprised when the have nots band together and attack or topple the rich society even if it obly for a small temporary gain. Desperation is the largest source of crime and political instability throughout history.
Yes, that situation is ridiculous and intervention is necessary. But don't paint it like it's just your feelings. The situation is objectively ridiculous.
What is it then if its not just my feelings? Can you give me some specific principle to go by? When is it OK for me to decide that someone else's possessions should be mine?
If you can justify it from behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance while taking the categorical imperative into account, and any other universal moral meta–rules that you may be aware of that I'm not
That's fine, you can leave it to philosophers if you want or you can go and learn it. I only referenced two principles and they both have Wikipedia pages. But don't make no effort to learn how people think about objective morality and then complain nobody knows anything about objective morality.
I'll even link them for you:
The veil of ignorance says you should design morals for a society as if you don't know which position you'll be in in that society. If you want to know if it's moral to feed people to crocodiles, imagine that your mind and soul is placed into a random body in the world where people are fed to crocodiles. You might be feeding someone to a crocodile, you might be fed to a crocodile, and in some versions you might be the crocodile. If you had the choice to live in that world but you don't know which one you'll be, would you take it? If you wouldn't because the chance feels bad to you, that's a sign it's objectively immoral.
Categorical imperative: follow rules that you'd be okay with everyone following all the time. Suppose you're very hungry and you see a supermarket and you steal a loaf of bread. Is this moral? "Everyone should steal food" quickly breaks down commerce and isn't good. "Very hungry people with no money should steal bread" works well enough because most people aren't very hungry with no money. We can say it's moral for very hungry people with no money to steal bread. "Very hungry people with no money should just die" works too, but it fails the other principle: that could be you who dies, and you'd rather be allowed to steal bread to prevent death.
These might be different versions of the same principle but I'm not philosophically savvy enough to know that so I'm stating both.
I don't see how either of those principles suggest I should go steal the steaks, because I could easily end up being the person who is stolen from.
Its not surprising when starving people steal, and you can't really blame them for it. And people shouldn't waste frivolously when there are people in their community that are lacking.
But adding these unwritten caveats to private property rights based on whether someone is satisfied with their lot or not... I can't wrap my head around it.
Elon and people like him are currently spending a similar amount of money on building AGI, how's it going, any reason to object?
Asthma and lung cancer from Elon's gas turbines, polluted water everywhere, high electricity prices everywhere, RAM and SSD price hikes, Micron and Nvidia completely stopped making equipment for consumers, disinformation is everywhere, the internet is full of slop.
Oh, seems like billionaire projects are actually bad for people and there's plenty of reason to object.
> This is unwanted, first because it produces individuals powerful enough to topple the people’s will
Making the government resistant to manipulation is a distinct problem.
It's a game theory/mechanism design problem, and its solution doesn't require taking in lots of money.
Giving the government more power/money causes people to spend more effort to manipulate it, so any weaknesses are exploited to the fullest extent.
> and second because it is not in the interest of society for wealth to be accumulated rather than moving.
This reveals a significant misunderstanding of how capital works in an economy.
None of the billionaires that come up when you type in "billionaires" into Google have access to liquid cash anywhere near the number that shows up next to their face.
Their money is invested in productive projects, it's paying salaries and invested in equipment.
Concentrating capital is what allows a civilization to take on big projects.
As a society we want big projects to be paid for by individuals bearing the risk (skin in the game).
In a free-market, capital concentrates in individuals who, empirically, know how to use it well.
Spending other people's money is a great way to make sure that money is spent frivolously.
You can criticize luxury spending all you want, and taxing that is something most people consider "fair", but you aren't speaking for anyone economically literate when you say that you don't want capital to concentrate.
I want it to concentrate as much as it does naturally.
Ideally yes, capital would be the machinery. Now, however, a lot of wealth is numbers sitting on a ledger and backed by stock valuations that have broken their connection with main Street. Or its rolling from one owner to another in derivative markets, doing scarcely little for the economy.
Power concentration can happen regardless of taxation level though. You can have relatively high taxes and relatively low authoritarianism. But you can also have low taxes and full blow dictatorship.
Taxes are much lower in Belarus and Russia vs western Europe, and they're much more authoritarian, coupled with third world tier public services outside of their capitals.
If that were true, then the wealthy and political establishment wouldn’t fight tax increases so damn hard. Over my lifetime, I’ve repeatedly watched wealthy individuals spend more money fighting tax increases than they’d end up paying.
Money is power. So to answer your question literally, if MY taxes went up, I would not have more power, but if the rich's did, I would because they'd have less power.
That's only true in relative terms.
In reality tax rates go up or down on everyone at the same time, because that's how the negotiations shake out.
If taxes go up on everyone, the rich are still the ones that manipulate the government, but now they have control over more tax revenue.
If taxes go down for everyone, the rich are still the ones that can manipulate the government, but now the government has less revenue and can't cause as much damage.
> In reality tax rates go up or down on everyone at the same time, because that's how the negotiations shake out.
This is absolutely false, especially in the US. Progressive tax brackets, breaks for the rich, and targeted changes for capital vs. income, deductions, etc. are the norm. Tax rate change is _always_ selective.
For example: I am a teacher. I run for office. I win. Now, as a consequence of my win, my tax bracket for the rest of my life, is 100% after i exceed the higher of either:
a) my elected official salary, OR
b) the average last 5 years of W2 income, OR
c) the average last 2 years of W2 income.
You'd delete inmediately all the grifters getting into government to be rich. And because those narcissists griefters people would self select themselves out of the running; it gives breathing room to those willing to actually do their DUTY for country. Those willing to sacrifice lifetime income.
This is pathway to the less charismatic, but more duty-oriented people that would not mind working in the govt and also do a good job. Under these rules, you dont care if I stay in govt forever, either. Limited terms have no point, when you can't grift.
This also takes care of those pesky post-election speaking fees, as well!
This would have deeply weird and counterproductive effects on election candidacies; ultimately, people are willing to do their duty for the country, but not at the expense of their entire future income growth. It's the constituents' job to vote for better candidates, there are no foolproof rules beyond that.
Taxation is what moves power from the powerful to the people. All of the Epstein crap was proceeded by Reagan and Thatcher and their trickle down BS that made the rich and powerful even more rich and powerful while everyone else could languish
This statement essentially boils down to "The only right way to fight me is in an environment where I expect to win"
That's how you know the DeFlock strategy is effective. They aren't playing the game that the CEO wants to play, they are playing the actual game.
The actual game is minimizing the impact of cameras that are now everywhere.
Some individuals may take it upon themselves to vandalize the cameras, which can't be planned via conspiracy (that would be illegal), but those radical individuals can be "set up for success" through information.
This strategy of creating an environment where effective vandalism is easy, is also part of the actual game.
> This looks a lot like a manager-once-removed undermining a reporting manager by supporting an engineer to go rogue.
Yes, and this is unfortunately the best move in many situations given how hard it is to fire people.
The ideal thing to do is fire the incompetent manager who is a tax on their team rather than a multiplier.
That unburdens the highly competent engineers on their team to do good work.
However, that might not be possible or even a good idea.
A failed hire might reflect badly on the upper manager, or prevent them from hiring a replacement.
It might require a lengthy performance improvement plan, which means you have a burdened team for that whole duration.
It's often easier to de-claw the bad manager, and take back on their responsibilities yourself.
Not ideal, but the best of a bad situation.
> This looks a lot like a manager-once-removed undermining a reporting manager by supporting an engineer to go rogue.
The second red flag in all of this is that an engineer doing good work on their own is labeled "rogue".
Management's job is to make people productive, if they can't realize that the best configuration for their team involves some individuals working largely separate from the managers own mediocre day-to-day ceremonies/projects, then they aren't doing their job.
People that don't need to be managed are the best kind of people, if you can't spot them and leverage them, get out of management.
I'm picturing a 10 second clip showing a child with a green box drawn around them, and position of gas and brake, updating with superhuman reactions.
That would be the best possible marketing that any of these self driving companies could hope for, and Waymo probably now has such a video sitting somewhere.
It depends on the video. What they should do is arrange for the video to get leaked and let the Internet courts argue about it, and then based on the Internet verdict, come out and claim it's real and they fired somebody for leaking it, or it's AI generated.
Love him or hate him, releasing the video is something I can see Elon doing because assuming a human driver would have done worse, it speaks for itself. Release a web video game where the child sometimes jumps out in front of the car, and see how fast humans respond like the "land Starship" game. Assuming humans would do worse, that is. If the child was clearly visible through the car or some how else avoidable by humans, then I'd be hiding the video too.
I once took a philosophy class where an essay assignment had a minimum citation count.
Obviously ridiculous, since a philosophical argument should follow a chain of reasoning starting at stated axioms.
Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority (a fallacy that they teach you about in the same class).
The citation requirement allowed the class to fulfill a curricular requirement that students needed to graduate, and therefore made the class more popular.
In coursework, references are often a way of demonstrating the reading one did on a topic before committing to a course of argumentation. They also contextualize what exactly the student's thinking is in dialogue with, since general familiarity with a topic can't be assumed in introductory coursework. Citation minimums are usually imposed as a means of encouraging a student to read more about a topic before synthesizing their thoughts, and as a means of demonstrating that work to a professor. While there may have been administrative reasons for the citation minimum, the concept behind them is not unfounded, though they are probably not the most effective way of achieving that goal.
While similar, the function is fundamentally different from citations appearing in research. However, even professionally, it is well beyond rare for a philosophical work, even for professional philosophers, to be written truly ex nihilo as you seem to be suggesting. Citation is an essential component of research dialogue and cannot be elided.
> Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority
Hmm, I guess I read this as a requirement to find enough supportive evidence to establish your argument as novel (or at least supported in 'established' logic).
An appeal to authority explicitly has no reasoning associated with it; is your argument that one should be able to quote a blog as well as a journal article?
It’s also a way of getting people to read things about the subject that they otherwise wouldn’t. I read a lot of philosophy because it was relevant to a paper I was writing, but wasn’t assigned to the entire class.
Huh? It's quite sensible to make reference to someone else's work when writing a philosophy paper, and there are many ways to do so that do not amount to an appeal to authority.
> Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority (a fallacy that they teach you about in the same class).
an appeal to authority is fallacious when the authority is unqualified for the subject at hand. Citing a paper from a philosopher to support a point isn't fallacious, but "<philosophical statement> because my biology professor said so" is.
Okay now factor in the probability of divorce, and the amount you get to keep afterwards, and discount it to present value, vs. paying more taxes and keeping it all.
Also remember that you typically lose half of income forever, not just wealth in a divorce.
It is important to understand the consequences of breaking any contract you enter into, including marriage. Luckily, you're not stuck with default terms to that contract, and if you're not comfortable with them pre-nuptual agreements can modify those terms.
> I don't think there's any question at this point that it's in Nordic self interest to develop a nuclear deterrent.
Yes, it definitely is.
> The worst change is of course the fact that the odds of a complete societal collapse have increased dramatically.
A nuke means that anyone who wants to invade you needs to price in a total loss of their largest city as a possible outcome.
That is a great disincentive, one that Ukraine probably wishes it had against Russia.
> and the risk of major accidents will increase.
I don't think that's reasonable to say about a bunch of countries getting their first nuke.
The concern should be more with countries like the US and Russia that have so many nukes, which they can't possibly use effectively, and don't have the ability to properly maintain.
If every western country had exactly one nuke, the world would probably be much safer than if the US has all of them.
> A nuke means that anyone who wants to invade you needs to price in a total loss of their largest city as a possible outcome. That is a great disincentive, one that Ukraine probably wishes it had against Russia.
It's even more complex than that. If Ukraine responded conventional war with nukes, it can be sure Russia would retaliate with even more nukes, practically extinguishing their statehood.
The equilibrium is reached when the exchange is equally devastating, so the only winning move is attacking first, and only if the attacked won't be able to retaliate. The Cold War never ended, just warmed a little, because it doesn't exist (yet) a guaranteed way to avoid an all-out nuclear retaliation.
Russia didn’t start this war with the intention of getting into a protracted slugging match over 20% of Ukraine - they got into for the whole thing.
Luckily Ukraine beat back the drive on Kyiv. But if Russia’s success metric at the outset of the war (the complete capitulation and conquest of Ukraine) carried a credible risk of losing Moscow or even smaller cities closer to the front would they have been anywhere near as likely to have made such an attempt?
Russia did not start this war after a rational and accurate assessment of reality.
Why do you believe they would rationally and accurately assess nuclear war probabilities?
The entire problem is that these leaders are fucking nuts, and surrounded by people who cannot defect from sycophancy to burst the stupidity bubble and bring people back to reality.
What would have saved Ukraine is actual support.
Arguably what would have been Ukraine's best bet is if they had substantial independent oil reserves that they could not tap alone. The USA would have "liberated" them years ago. Hell, Trump is literally going this direction now, demanding "mineral rights" to do what we should be doing already.
Re-read what you wrote. That's exactly what this was is about: who gets to control a colony. And from that angle, the US went from having 0% of Ukraine as its colony to having 75%, including all mineral rights. At this point continuing the war is too expensive, which is why the US and Russia want to just stop. Europe keeps jamming up the gears though because they got a terrible deal.
that was the etymology, given the world we were emerging was one where major world powers came directly to blows amongst themselves rather than through the countless small-scale, regional proxy wars we saw over the 2nd half of the 20th century.
It's not up to me. So I'm not "letting" or not "letting" anyone do anything.
I was stating what I believe to be a true counter-factual. If every western country had 1 nuke, the world would be safer than if a single country has all the nukes.
The west is also not "my side". I have no stake in most western countries, and their success or failure is not something I feel as part of my day-to-day.
I'm glad there is more than one, so if something goes wrong I can go to another one.
The west gets special treatment because it is filled with prosperous democracies. Democracies are relatively stable, and rarely do things outside their Overton windows, like launching a nuclear weapon unprovoked.
Prosperity is what makes people peaceful. Prosperous people have more to lose. No one in the west wants to backslide towards a state of nature because an invasion or unprovoked conflict went the wrong way.
I am not convinced that the likes of Putin or Trump would care about the total destruction of their largest city, so long as they weren't there at the time.
This completely misses the reason why you need to hire the best initially. It has nothing to do with the hardness of your own company's problems.
It has everything to do with the distribution of productivity among any kind of engineer.
Engineers follow a pareto distribution. In a normal sized team, with a typical hiring funnel, you will have a few high performers, who are responsible for most of the team's productivity.
If you can only hire one person from that team, then it is more likely than not that you will hire someone with productivity below the team's mean.
At an early startup, this could be a death sentence.
Especially since we typically reason and plan in terms of means, so it may come as a surprise that your single engineer is less productive than the mean of most teams that you have worked with.
The other reason (also not mentioned) is that you eventually want to scale hiring.
That means that you need to have people, that you have hired yourself, hire more people on your behalf.
The best people (A players in the metaphor) don't have imposter syndrome, they know how good they are, and how good they aren't.
They want to work with other talent, that makes their lives easier, more interesting, and less stressful than covering for/babysitting other people.
It's also the only way they can grow from where they are at.
So they can be trusted to hire more A players, out of self interest.
The median engineer (let's call them a B player) often knows about where they stand as well, and often they will have started to diversify their skillset into organizational politics.
They intuit: hiring people more competent than them gives them less leverage, and they are pretty good at zero-sum status games, that's their edge.
They don't want competition, so they hire C players.
So the reason you want to start with the best is because it's the only way to ensure you can move fast when you need to, and the best way to keep the organization effective long enough to exit.
All organizations decay into incompetence, but hopefully you can get yours and get out before that happens.
I would extend that even further, I'm a fan of the idea that you should thoroughly vet the founders for excellence if you want to maximize your chances of ending up at a great startup. Not just your eng manager and peers.
Like with your "A player" engineers example, founders need to be exceptional if they want to attract great talent to work for them. So if you're pretty unimpressed with them as you're getting to know the company, the likelihood that the team they hired makes up for that deficiency is very low, and you'll end up around non-A players.
So... every company only hires the best!? I jest, I jest!
In general, I've found that the younger engineers (20s, up to 30s) have a lot of vim & vigor; but, even the very best ones generally do a lot of spinning-in-place, when they think they're making progress. Almost anyone above a certain level -- call it the 30–40% mark (it's low!) -- can be raised up to be a competent engineer. Probably what'd be called an "an A- or B+" player? That's just part of a good training & onboarding regime; although, it can take 1-3 years, depending on the person. Very good "natural" talent can definitely boost top performance to an A+, but it won't substitute for literal time-under-stress of delivering high quality product-ready code to clients.
One reason you see a pareto distribution in "normal sized" teams is not solely because of competency, but because the 80% can rest on the 20% and therefore don't feel too pressed to work that much. Therefore the pareto model breaks down in 1-man teams.
Yes this is the proverb. I often hear it quoted as A hires B hires C, as a remark on organizational decay.
But the original (and the way you phrased it) is a statement about what kind of person each wants to hire out of their own self interest.
That's the more insightful version IMO.
AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.
There's no reason to believe that's the case.
LLMs and specifically auto-regressive chat bots with transformers for prediction will probably not replace engineers any time soon.
They probably won't ever replace humans for the most cognitively demanding engineering tasks like design, planning, or creative problem solving.
We will need a different architecture for that, transformers don't look like they get smarter in that way even with scale.
AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task
This is probably true, but on a time horizon that is almost certainly much much longer than we think. Centuries. Perhaps millennia, even.
It's fun to go back to the newspapers of the 1920, 30s, and 40s, and see how absolutely CERTAIN they were this was going to happen to them. I'm sure there are examples from the 19th and 18th centuries as well.
Advancement happens in fits, and then tends to hibernate until another big breakthrough.
And even when it does happen, humans love to do things, just for the sake of them. So I highly doubt art, music, literature, or any other thing humans love to intrinsically do are going away, even if they can be done by AI. If anything, they'll be done MORE as AI enables wider participation by lowering the cost and skill barriers.
I think I completely agree with you but I think HN folks seriously underestimate the rate of progress. Believe what you will about the magnitude of capex but it’s coming and it’s coming fast. And we are extremely extremely close now. I agree we constantly have gotten timelines wrong, and I think it’s easily possible SOME capabilities may take longer but I think it’s hard to overstate just how much we are accelerating progress like in the next year or two.
But yea: self driving cars are still not here, see e.g. all the other AI booms
Difference here is we’re seeing it with our own eyes and using it right now. So much absolutely existential competition between companies (even within them!) and geopolitically.
Yeah they are, even if you don't have one yet. We can rathole into whether the need to hit level 5 before it "counts", but Waymos drive around multiple cities, today, and Tesla FSD works well enough that I'd rather drive next to a Tesla with FSD than a drunk driver.
If your evidence that AI isn't something to be worried about is saying self-driving cars aren't here, when they are, will then, we're fucked.
The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. For cars, this manifests as they're physically not available everywhere yet. For programming, it's unevenly distributed according to how much training data there was in that language and that domain to scrape across the whole Internet.
Oh wait I’m not sure if I was clear I just mean: yes we’ve gotten lots of hyped claims like “FSD will be here in 5 years” in 2014 wrong but it is to our peril not to take the very short AI timelines seriously
Also — I think the arguments of yourself and another comment are also great analogies to AI situation, we can haggle over “ok but what is {FSD, AGI} really and in many ways it’s already here!”
I agree totally and I would just point out we’re at an even more intense moment in the AI space
That's one of my triggers that we've reach AGI. In may senses, self driving cars are here. In the vast majority of tasks self driving likely works fine. It's when you get to the parts where you need predictive capabilities, like figuring out what other idiots are about to do, or what some random object is doing in the road that our AI doesn't have the ability to deal with these things.
The particular problem here is the past has very little predictive power on when something is going to happen in the future.
There were plenty of people in 1890 saying heavier than air powered flight was never going to happen.
>humans love to do things, just for the sake of them.
This said, it doesn't prove a negative. How many things would people be doing if they could get paid for it. It's easy to say these things in generalities, but you do any specific things, especially for a living, those could dry up and disappear.
> AI will replace every humans in performing every cognitive task
Maybe? I guess the better question is "when?"
>unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.There's no reason to believe that's the case.
How about the fact that we don't actually know enough about the human mind to arrive at this conclusion? (yet)
Will we be able to construct a supercomputer/datacenter that can match or exceed human intelligence? Possibly, even probaby.
But that would only be one instance of such an AGI then and it would be very expensive. IMHO it will take a long time to produce something like that as a commodity.
So far it looks like AI will go the same road as other technological analogues of biological systems: not a self-contained unit (powered by currently technologically unreachable nano-mechanisms), but infrastructure that produces and maintains specialized units.
A tractor can't reproduce or repair itself, but it is better than a horse for farming. A self-driving car can't learn by itself, but a datacenter can use its data to train a new version of the car software. A humanoid robot by itself might not be flexible enough to count as AGI, but it can defer some problems to an exascale datacenter.
Remember when a digital computer was not a device, but the entire floor of a building?
We will be able to construct a datacenter that exceeds human intelligence. And every year after that the size of the datacenter will get smaller for the same intelligence output. Eventually it will be a rack. Then a single server. Then something that is portable.
> Remember when a digital computer was not a device, but the entire floor of a building?
Well I don't actually remember, because - depending on your definition of digital computer - it was around 80 years ago and I wasn't born yet. Which is kind of my point. Eventually, we might get there. And I can imagine that simpler AI systems will help to bootstrap more AI systems. But there is still a lot work to be done.
>>>AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation.
Because humans will want them to in order to outcompete the other human who currently has the most powerful AI, unless we show restraint and cooperation the kind of which we’ve never displayed in our existence.
We might end up answering the Fermi paradox within our lifetimes.
The cost of iteration here is so high that we will likely remain in a bioengineering winter until there is a way for individuals to iterate on these compounds in their own self-directed research.
We need a ham radio equivalent for synthetic molecules.
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