Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
Wuf I am honestly trying to wrap my head around this idea. Can you help explain a) how this is fair and b) why this would result in a net positive for society?

Putting myself (and just about anyone else that I know of) in a situation where we are making, >250k, the only real logical thing to do then from a utility standpoint would be to do the least amount of work with the least amount of effort possible while still making 250k. Anything after that effectively would get split up 300,000,000 ways (over simplified, of course), essentially making it worthless.
I don't know what the best numbers are, but the base is in developing a system where one person's worth doesn't exceed a particular percentage of median would be probably the best realistic way of doing it. We already have very strong evidence for this kind thing anyways in that income of the wealthy has been dramatically increasing relative to median, yet the health of the society has gone down.

Other necessary things to look at include how there's generally a finite amount of stuff humans need or want, diminishing returns after a certain point, and that social health has been largely shown to be a product of equality levels not absolute wealth levels i.e. poor people with poor neighbors are happier than poor people with rich neighbors. Another thing that shows just how incredibly dependent on the social humans are is that some studies have been showing that financial rewards don't produce better results from employees, but in fact often make worse results. We're so deeply human that money is more of an afterthought to the work and interactions themselves

But the point is egalitarianism. Which is partially a foreign concept to humans. Only partially. Our biology was originally about organism survival of the fittest (which our economy reflects quite well), but animals and human specific evolution has changed it a lot of it from "survival of the fittest organism" to "survival of the fittest society". In some ways, we're still the isolated organisms fighting everything, but in most ways that has changed into being members of a social group. This is even why concepts like friends and family are so strong among humans. Imagine what a tiger would think about the idea of "friends"

I'm saying all this to lay the point that the goal should be striving towards the benefit of the society, and that alone is why clipping the capacity for too much wealth accumulation is beneficial to humanity.


Anyways, the kind of thing that would happen with a similar paradigm to what I propose is that median incomes go up by a lot (and thus top bracket goes up). Opportunity, that thing that libertarians and conservatives and capitalists say they care so much about, would SKYROCKET, and community and small business would return. The social model would be much more family and friend oriented, which isn't too much different than how it used to be before top earners got enormous with multinational corporations and such, and if you made it big, there would still be ample room for others to copy you, and in effect you would have copied somebody else.

Besides, they say the way to find your career is to find what you love. Well, if that's true then you're not going to suddenly stop loving what you do if it's not making you richer. In fact, there's a wealth of evidence that the best things come without monetary incentive. Most great artists and scientists did it for the love, not the money. They weren't babies like megacorp CEOs whining and lying about how if they don't get everything they want they'll stop creating jobs

Regardless of what it takes, my proposal is for a system that provides for people. In economics, this means that there can't be that much wealth inequality. As to how much, I dunno

To make sure to answer your question: the top bracket would be designed to be where the reasonable top level of wealth is. If this means after you achieve that wealth you give somebody else your job, sit back and live the good life and receive royalties, doesn't sound like a bad thing at all. Our problem is that we're just redefining royalty and serfdom with our system. Private jet richness is simply too rich. Our economy doesn't have enough wealth in it to provide private jets for some without really hurting a lot of others