Jesus the right wing has always been arguing against ideologies in all forms, targeting socialism. Very often rightly so, but more recently, at least in Europe, I see more and more dogmatic right wing ideology as well. Dogmatism and knee-jerking reactions must go. The future is in a pragmatic approach. A blend of socialism and capitalism, with a strong focus on meritocracy. Equal possibilites, open up on the top by strangling transfer of wealth through generations.
Lol and as Xant so perfectly puts it, Capitalism also works at someone else's expense. The invisible hand works to make sure you buy overpriced products, always struggling for monopoly and cartels, manipulates the money market, owns your work, and sell it off for 10 times more.. Makes it expensive to be poor, etc etc..
I'm for a meritocracy, but capitalism has inherent flaws that are opposing a meritocracy. For example that your inherited background plays a large role in your possibilities in life. On both ends, in that your connections, education, imagination, monetary freedom will never be on par with those that had it given, as well as later in life, the positions that you seek will be preoccupied by people that had it given. This is not always true on an individual level, but on a statistical level it is.
I think leveling the playing field, by redistributing wealth so it cannot be handed down through generations as now, would be the strongest, best thing a society can do to create a real meritocracy, where decision making is done by the best of us, who has earned it.
Funnily enough, right wing governments in Europe have barely or zero "Death taxes" while in the US they actually exist, and are imo the best tax there is. Something we can learn from the states..
The "invisible hand" (an idiotic concept and terrible pedagogy) works perfectly. The problem is us. Homo Economicus is a myth.
This is actually what I've been thinking too. Inheriting wealth and not having to lift a finger in your whole life is the cancer. There is a whole caste of "professional sons". Instead successful people should be able choose projects (for the "Greater Good") where to spent the majority of their accumulated wealth at the end of their lifes (or earlier). That could be science, infrastructure, public buildings - or a fcking moon base for all I care.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to inherit stuff in general but being rich or poor should depend on your skills and work ethic and not on your daddy.
Well that's exactly where the problem lies. Many people see it as a core human right to transfer at least some of their wealth to their children when they die, and considering biology this makes a lot of sense from an individual point of view. Before the French Revolution it even used to be much worse because the oldest son would inherit everything, concentrating money even further.
Well, in reality there are so many holes in the tax laws that it boils down to "The more money you have, less taxes you have to pay." That is European reality.
There cases where a guy earns 5 million € a year and pays 10€ taxes... That's the bigger issue compared to inheritance.
That is reality everywhere due to how easy it is to evade taxes in a world with dozens of rogue countries and the others staying comically complacent despite losing billions to this every year. The people most effectively taxed by a nation-state are always the middle class.
Previously wrote a long post about this in another thread, and Siiem's reaction is quite common. There should probably be a roof above where the death tax kicks in, idk where, but I guess 10mill usd would be fine. The main purpose is to secure that money with real decisionmaking power gets freed up (Say control of a factory or corporation). It's not about creating huge problems and disruption for "normal people" and small business, but force big shareholders to "sell off" their stocks before they die.
Now, how it would work in a globalized economy etc is not so easy to see, but everything is possible with enough oomph put behind it.
@Paul, an important problem arises if you let the dead rule the living. Like Rich people setting up trusts and institutions working and changing society long after they are dead. For goals that might be going out of date. (Like if Tom Cruise would set up a trust of his net worth working for his crazy sci fi church... )
Merely taxing large donations and inheritance at extremely high rates is a simple scheme that would allow a reduction of the burden on the low and middle levels of the progressive income tax and lower VAT. Less tax, more jobs, lower prices. Letting inherited money flow is literally useless for the economy. That said, the effect on government revenue would be relatively minor because most rich and old people would make sure to spend that money before it gets taxed away. Schemes where you force people to invest their money into arbitrary stuff (most people are familiar with housing safety regulations or mandatory car insurance...) are really terrible, it's much better to let them decide how to get rid of it.
People who get taxed at 52% have well enough of capital to take it earn back simply with their interest and those people don't have to worry for their children.
Lower wage in EU than in US???? Maybe for the top 1% but not for 60% bottom. Now ofc, you mix up french taxation with german worcking laws you end up with a non-sense country than can lead you into believing EU is fucked up. But generelly either you have good wage and high tax or low wage low tax, but either way you have better education for free and better health care and more safety nets than in US.
From Switzerland you wouldn't know. Your progressive income tax actually makes some sort of sense. Here my employer is spending more than 4000 euros on me and at the end of the month I get 1750. It only gets worse the more you earn. That's the problem with many EU income taxes: they are bottom-heavy because the countries need to support a lot of nonsense social programs that cost a lot of money. As I said before, the only way to make a lot of money for the government is to tax the middle class, so you get a country where most of the government money flows from the middle and low-paid jobs to the unemployed and elderly. Also the administrations tend to hate businesses out of principle. When you need more than a week to create a company, you know there's a problem. The US tax system has huge flaws when it comes to inequality, but at least the entrepreneurial culture there is not in complete shambles like here.
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