I mean, the truth is that we've never found a way to prevent some people from hoarding huge amounts of wealth. Probably not a great sign for the future of our species.

[–] ebits21@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago

Guillotine was pretty effective in France for a bit…

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago

There's more good people than bad people. The only way the bad people win is by convincing the good people to give up.

Yes shitty people will always be fucking up things for everyone else. But that doesn't mean working to stop that is pointless. It's more the opposite, it means we have to be continually working to stop the assholes from fucking things up for everyone.

[–] FlexibleToast@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

It's a seriously hard problem. The IRS already can't keep up. In order to implement a wealth tax they would not only have to do what they do now, but also assess the value of every estate of every wealthy person. They would need experts in all sorts of things to even attempt to pull that off. Experts in fashion, jewelry, cars, planes, boats, art, etc... as soon as you let even one of those things slip through, that's what becomes the new wealth sync. Previously it's been attempted by they excluded art because that's notoriously hard to assess the value of. So the wealthy bought and traded a bunch of art to hide their wealth.

I got down voted for my previous comment, but it's the truth. The concept is simple and if it worked I would be all on board. It's the process for implementing it that is the hard part and has historically always caused a wealth tax to fail. It's not a new concept, but there is a reason it isn't used. I'm not saying we should do nothing, but that we should do something different. We could start with adding back some income tax brackets.