EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

Tin-foil hat territory mixed with a misreading of history.

That'll do for me. Seldom use the 'ignore' option,
but I'll make an exception for this.

future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see it is going to be confiscated.

That's clearly bollocks. Lots of people have started and developed successful businesses when tax rates have been much higher than they are now.

If 'redistributionists' were serious, what they would want to distribute is the ability to create wealth and ways to be productive to a wider society.

What by making sure that the wider population are healthy (well-funded healthcare), well educated (free lifetime education), well trained (cheap subsidised skills training), mobile (cheap or free public transport), not tied up in childcare (free universal childcare), and possibly with a basic income to invest in themselves and their business ideas (universal income/citizens dividend)? Sounds like a plan, but it's going to require a bit of taxation to fund all of those things.

Of course, you don't actually mean "wealth creation" do you? You mean "wealth accumulation". You're trotting out the basic defense of unfettered capitalism which somehow thinks it's a good thing for a small number of individuals to accumulate wealth because they've had a good idea that has been developed and maintained through a wide network of (publicly educated) employees who might well be underpaid to the point that they require state assistance. Yeah, I think most people are past that.

I dunno, ask some CEOs or shareholders who are accumulating wealth that their employees have worked for.

Well done for wholesale copying your entire post, removing the references to Hitler and Stalin, and presenting the bizarre and unfounded argument as your own.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/thomas-sowell-on-the-fallacy-of-redistribution/

Well done for wholesale copying your entire post, removing the references to Hitler and Stalin, and presenting the bizarre and unfounded argument as your own.

Burns!

Nice! Time for the ignore button.

I've blocked him, so this thread is somewhat interesting to make sense of.

However, I'd just like to point out that he's not got a single opinion of his own - hence the ctrl-c/ctrl-v he's just been busted for. He's what you'd get if you sat an AI in front of YouTube and entered "Great Replacement", and just let the algorithm feed him RWNJ grifter output.

It's possible that if you took the Internet away from him he'd turn into a normal human being in a couple of years, then die of diabetes when he can't afford insulin anymore.

.

This is what I think! This is what I stand for! This is the hill I shall die upon!

ctrl-v

No such thing as a "free" dinner.

What exactly is your "fair share" of what someone else has worked for?

This is an interesting question.

Ignoring politics, it becomes a mathematical question, of maximising some quantity, whilst varying another.

If you take the view that you want to maximise financial equality (which may be debatable, but certainly minimising inequality seems laudable), whilst varying taxation rates then you can begin to apply economic mathematic models to see what you come up with.

The London Mathematical Laboratory have done some really interesting work in this area. It is part of their wider thesis that a lot of economic mathematics is cast incorrectly, using errant probabilistic approaches. Their approach, using Ergodic averaging, seems to be giving some very accurate models of inequality growth inherent in current capitalist economic theory. Their research also proposes models for calculating optimal taxation rates to combat the growth of inequality.

(Disclaimer, I am friends with one of the directors of the institute.)

Christ, is the chimp still flinging shit?

Can it be viewed online?

Sounds really interesting. Thanks.

http://lml.org.uk/research/economics/

Totally, but how are you going to go about "those that have been left behind?"

Taxation and socialism?
Socialism has a track record so poor it's impossible to ignore or evade it.

This is an area where getting bogged down in semantics is important.

What is socialism and what is capitalism, and what do we mean by there application in modern societies?

There are plenty of successful European countries that I would cite as showing socialist policies clearly work. People often shout them down as not being "true" socialist societies. On the flipside, I struggle to think of any "true" capitalist societies.

But to specifically answer your question, yes. Taxation.

I struggle to think of any "true" capitalist societies.

Honduras is apparently moving that way, and it's potentially an utter shitshow.

But even there we see how hard it is to extract which factors impact the most.

My understanding was a large part of the breakdown was due to efforts against the drug trade elsewhere in the region which has moved it to Honduras - specifically the east which geographically is pretty sparse and wild. It's definitely the only place in Central Am I felt unsafe the majority of the time.

Even if you wanted to use the drug industry as an example, is that "true" capitalism? Or does the use of illegal force invalidate it.

Basically I feel that the "no true Scotsman" argument only seems to play one way.

I don't know a great deal about the situation, just a few comments that I've read regarding plans for deregulation and the possibility of extra-governmental (essentially corporate-funded) judiciary bodies and regulators being set up and the likely effect on human/workers' rights and the environment. I wasn't particularly referring to the drug industry in any respect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Cox

If you take the view that you want to maximise financial equality (which may be debatable, but certainly minimising inequality seems laudable), whilst varying taxation rates then you can begin to apply economic mathematic models to see what you come up with.

Surely the easiest way to do that is everyone has zero.

Seriously though, it's an interesting question. In particular would this starting position:
maximise financial equality
result in more wealth to the majority than
maximise wealth overall and where would you have to flex the left-behinds (1% of the population, 33% of the population, etc) for the majority to be better off.

We'd still be living in squalor if it wasn't for capitalism. Hence the current problem of trying to undermind it.

I’m pro capitalism and pro democracy. But I think it’s idiocy to elect politicians who are unwilling to temper the obvious and inherent negative effects of capitalism on regular people.

Really well put. Particularly:

The problem comes when people become invested in those models (because they resonate with them). That leads them to push them as a cast-iron "truth" and universal explanation for all possible societal phenomena.

Capitalism has lifted more people and nations out of poverty than any other system ever.

The most successful regime on the planet right now is an authoritarian Communist Party so careful with that argument. The US (a social democracy with sort-of free market capitalism) isn’t lowering poverty or raising living standards for regular people and hasn’t been for a while now.

The good old "fallacy of redistribution"!

• Espouses European Values

• Doesn’t believe in wealth redistribution

^ fucking memeworthy. How do you think we emerged from fudalism?

Even if you wanted to use the drug industry as an example, is that "true" capitalism? Or does the use of illegal force invalidate it.

Arguably the drug industry as currently constituted in places like Honduras isn't "true" capitalism because it's predicated on drugs being illegal, which substantially affects the supply/demand dynamic. A true no-holds-barred capitalist would make all drugs legal and freely saleable. At which point the profit margins in drug dealing shrink substantially and it all gets taken over my large corporations.

See Fentanyl, valium, Prozac etc to see what happens . Tobacco for that matter.

It's not pretty.