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I'm worried about the form of the redistribution. In France, we have small taxes in many places. Just one example: We dealt with copyright issues by creating a
by aragot 12y ago
I'm worried about the form of the redistribution. In France, we have small taxes in many places. Just one example: We dealt with copyright issues by creating a tax on storage mediums, from a few cents to 20-40€ depending on the container, the size and the volatility - more than 40 different tax levels (see tables here [1]). Obviously they included the bureaucracy feature, where if you're a company you can send back a form and be reimbursed. I'm confident the same kind of insane level of tax compexity exists in pretty much any country and it implements revenue equality by squashing entrepreneurship at its root. Less innovation, less inequality ;)
So let's go ahead: Which forms of redistribution would do you see? Your comment made me notice that taxes proportional to the number of ads already exist (the VAT) and doesn't help redistributing. We need to take into account the change of scale. Would it be a tax per number of available cars for car-sharing services, then a tax per node in the friend graph for social networks? Sounds insane, but is it what we're bound to implement?
[1] http://www.culturecommunication.gouv.fr/Politiques-ministerielles/Propriete-litteraire-et-artistique/Commission-pour-la-remuneration-de-la-copie-privee/Questions-pratiques/Les-montants-de-la-Remuneration-pour-Copie-Privee http://www.culturecommunication.gouv.fr/Politiques-ministeri...
- jdimov 12y agoRe-distribution?? Ex-cuse-me?? These aren't YOUR cookies, you bum! Make your own cookies and THEN worry about re-distribution! When someone else has made the cookies, YOU DON'T GET A SAY in how they are distributed, do you get that?
- EliRivers 12y agoThat is incorrect. In the typical modern liberal democracy, the right to vote and other such forms of political expression is not tied to how much wealth one generates.
- jdimov 12y agoNo, that's how disgruntled people WANT it to be. Luckily, it isn't and it never will be.
- EliRivers 12y agoI can look around me and see unemployed people voting, and I recall the top tax rate was once 90%. Where do you live?
- jdimov 12y agoNo, you see sheep, thinking they have a say in what piece of the pie they will get, when the answer, of course, is invariably: NONE You see stupid lazy bums pretending to be victims of the system, thinking someone owes them something and acting all righteous about it. You see scum. That's what you see. And they are right where they're supposed to be.
- EliRivers 12y agoYou're the new TempleOS. The only reason you haven't been hellbanned is that your particularly insanity, a weird Randian fantasy world, isn't inherently offensive.
- disputin 12y agoIf you don't share your cookies, we will revolt and take your cookies, and everything else you have while we're at it.
- jdimov 12y agoAnd you will still die poor and miserable, because try as you might YOU CAN NOT TAKE this which I have and you don't. You will just never have it and I always will.
- disputin 12y agoCan you explain that to this lot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebellions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebelli...
- jacquesm 12y agoEnjoy your cake. While you can.
- jdimov 12y agoI will. Forever. And other than bitch about it until you drain the last drop of life out of yourself, YOU CAN'T DO SHIT ABOUT IT!
- jacquesm 12y agoDo you feel that writing in all caps somehow makes you more right? According to your profile your mission is apparently to write the 'most downvoted comments on HN', it looks like you're succeeding.
- JonnieCache 12y agodude do you even invest?
- ukigumo 12y agoLet's talk about the ingredients you need to make your cookies shall we?
- jdimov 12y agoYes, let's do that! Here's a wake up call: I don't have access to any ingredients that everyone else doesn't also have access to! Because it's not the ingredients. It's how I see them and what I do with them. You choose to cry all day long about scarcity and injustice. I choose to rejoice in the abundance and the unlimited opportunities given to me. This is what makes me wealthy and you poor. Not the government. Not the political system. Not any form of justice or lack thereof. There is ULTIMATE justice in this world, ALWAYS. It is just as it should be.
- eli_gottlieb 12y agoSo, just to be clear, you are claiming that power and chance are the ultimate justice in this world? Are you the villain on a cartoon for 12-year-olds?
- ukigumo 12y agoI'm sorry, my previous comment was not an attempt at changing your functionalist, would-be-objectivist and elitist view of the world but just a veiled reference to space cookies because you seem to be high on something. Maybe it's a big white horse, who knows? If it matters to you I'm not poor, at least according to HMRC it's quite the contrary.
- jdimov 12y agoNo, you're poor. Make no mistakes about this. I don't care what HMRC says. You are poor because you don't believe in yourself. You are poor because you think someone owes you something. You are poor because you think others got lucky and you didn't. You are poor because you REFUSE TO SEE THE FUCKING DAYLIGHT but are more than happy to bitch about the wrongdoings and villainity of those others and drain all your energy doing this instead of CREATING the life and the WEALTH that you are here to create! That's why you're poor.
- aragot 12y agoWhether you like it or not, redistribution is the basis for most of the laws of my country (and certainly yours). It's not up to you or me, it's how the People think. In fact, that's what the OP is about. It is besides the point to know which side I am. In fact, I've just said tax complexity squashes new enterprises. I've written an article about how an entrepreneur in France loses 70% of his income in tax-and-administrative-burden [1]. So guess whether I enjoy redistribution or not? [1] http://adrien-ragot.me/why-i-say-70-percent-tax-in-france/ http://adrien-ragot.me/why-i-say-70-percent-tax-in-france/
- jdimov 12y agoJust because the majority think they are entitled to the 1%'s wealth, does not make it so. The French government might as well take 90% of that entrepreneur's wealth and "re-distribute" it to the so-called "People" (I call them "Sheep") and guess what? That one entrepreneur will still be wealthier than any of them and the "People" will still mumble. In other words, NOTHING will change.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago...except that 45% of the economy just got given back to the people, mitigating the shameful status quo. Now the regular folk run 95% of the economy. There's no issue of having rich people or not; its ok to be wealthy. Its not about punishing the rich. Its about them hoarding almost the entire pie.
- jdimov 12y agoNot almost. I will hoard THE entire pie and I will not feel ONE bit of shame about it, because it is MY PIE! You are the one who should be ashamed for wanting to steal from my pie just because you are incapable of baking your own.
- terminus 12y ago> because it is MY PIE! Not always. Most "pie" bakers either inherit their "pie" directly in terms of wealth or education or healthy upbringing from parents. The ones you call incapable of baking their own, probably did not have all the advantages that you did. There's also the aphorism about standing on the shoulder of giants (or indeed standing on tax created infrastructure.) That applies to all "pie" bakers.
- consz 12y agoMight makes right. If the rest of the world wants your cookies, then of course they can take it -- you'd either have to give it up or take a bullet to the head.
- jdimov 12y agoThis is what you don't get, pal. The rest of the world may be able to get some of my cookies but they will NEVER have access to the COOKIE MACHINE because they are SHEEP. They just don't have it in them! Get it? You know what this means? It means I'll ALWAYS have my cookies and they will ALWAYS starve.
- consz 12y agoWho cares? They can just take your cookies and throw you aside, you yourself are not unique. There's always going to be a bunch of gullible saps willing to work hard that you can tax and take from -- it doesn't matter that they get your cookie machine, just that there's always a cookies to take.
- sparkie 12y agoIf robots are replacing labor, tax the robots of course! Might sound silly, but to me, it's the most simple and sane thing we can do to sustain people who are put out of work by automation.
- jdimov 12y agoDid it ever occur to you that if you allowed yourself to be commoditized enough to lose your job to a robot, may be you don't DESERVE to be sustained!