It's draconian to have some upper limit on wealth? what if a small number of people managed to, legally, extract wealth to the point where we all became vassals? (Or is that what we've already gone very far towards?)
You may think it's no biggy since the limit will be so high.
1. First of all, when party A contracts with party B, party C (that's you) does not have a moral right to dictate an upper limit on how many times they can do that or what the terms can be as long as the transaction is legal and A and B are willing participants.
Thus, either A or B can build up an arbitrary amount of wealth and you have exactly zero to say about it. Would you have similar concerns for people who have a disproportionate number of friends, or sex partners, or hit songs, or hell, even votes?
2. If there were to be an upper limit, what is the limit? Today it's a billion dollars. What if it's 100m next, then 10m, then 1m, then 100k? What happens after a couple of decades or centuries of inflation? I suspect you don't care about this because the limit seems far out of reach to you. And so it might be - for now.
3. If there was a limit, who will decide what it should be? What are their incentives? Do you really want a jury of your peers reviewing your financials and drawing lines through it?
4. If there was a limit, who will enforce it? And how? Hand over a check or you go to prison?
There's no way to implement this without an authoritarian regime that has unlimited power over its citizens.
Feudal systems are better described as local organised threat of violence.
There are castle strongholds, control of choke points, a lower strata that are required to work the land and pay tithe upwards to the military heirarchy.
Feudal systems have existed in times and locations where there was little need for military defense against external forces, they persist in form as a polite, polished, chivalrous bikie club on horses, mafia with great houses.
A farm is a system with many living beings, but most of the benefits accrue to those we call the farmers.
A farmer farm is a called a fief (feudum in latin), so it's no surprise that under feudalism most of the benefits accrue to those who have control over heaps of feuda.
Would it be true that under capitalism most of the benefits accrue to those who have control over heaps of capital?
[to the original point: capitalism works very well when it allows people to trade and specialise in their comparative advantages; under what conditions might it work less well?]
EDIT:
> little need for military defense against external forces
I think they were also successful even where there was need, as long as those external forces were also based on a warrior class.
What Napoleon managed was to "scale" the nature of warfare; two poorly remembered quotes from a book one of his cavalry generals wrote:
— 10 mamluks could beat 30 french, but 100 to 100 was even, and 300 french could beat 1000 mamluks
— our troopers' horsemanship was pitiful, and their officers' not much better, yet with this cavalry we made the tour of Europe
I'd say both point to innovation in the use of mass over class.
Morally speaking, is ((profit<->negative externality) <-> (speculation<->liquidity provision)) a tautology i could get any of u curious about?
It motivates a search for the mystical beast: Marxist financier (not the pastry?)
(Not to mention elucidates the boney/HF-inspired principle of intertwining* (wrt scaling — CENDEC, decentralizing by centralizing — marxist-financing-in-itself))
Defo! (but not necessarily a tautology: there are models where it's false, it just happens to be true both for Marxists and for financiers — or have we some axioms which would make these models inconsistent?)
[the distinction between ownership and benefit in both code and common law jurisdictions has its roots in roman law, but unless either of you are really interested I'm not going to delve in that graveyard]
EDIT: HF? Our Ford?
EDIT2: for an SAP advertorial, I like TLTF! pigs acorns etc.
I think anti-trust laws are generally more effective at dealing with that than wealth limits. When capitalism is functioning well, what cones up must go down, and the main trick is to make sure the ultra-wealthy can't leverage their wealth to prevent anyone competiting with them.
What goes up accumulates and is effectively removed from circulation, allowing money to be printed at a minion level while still struggling to avoid deflation.
I recommend this question as an interesting conversation starter at parties: Is it in the self-interest of the most successful capitalists to have a well-functioning capitalism?
Obviously not. Which is why we have antitrust laws. If it was in the self-interest of the most succesful capitalists, we wouldn't have to have laws about it.
> I don't think anyone disagrees that monopolies and other anticompetitive behaviour is a thing that exists.
There are people who never learned this or have essentially forgotten it. Some ideologies bury such truths.
Among business/tech circles, there is a fairly common disdain of regulation. People can conveniently forget that self-interest taken too far can destroy the conditions that make competition work.
It is one thing to criticize a powerful monopoly that isn’t you. It is another thing to say “Oh. Maybe what I’m doing is part of the problem.”
No. But it is a slippery slope of having limits on people, from wealth to anything you can think of (random example: limit ownership to a single car). In the end if it is all legal, it is nobody else's business. If it is illegal, setting an upper limit is not the moral solution.
Where $1 billion is about 40,000 Honda Civics, I think most people would support limiting ownership of cars to 39,999. It doesn't even have to be a hard limit, just a luxury tax on cars that cost more than, say, $1 million, and on owning more than 40,000 cars. If you want a 40,001st car, your can do it but it means you're going to have to pay an extra fee that goes towards helping people with less.
"most people would support" is mob rule or tyranny of the majority. Not morally right. People have no right to tell you how many cars (or something else) you are allowed to own.
how many slaves do you own, how much cocaine do you own, how many guns do you own? how many crocodiles or tigers can I keep as a pet? there are lots of limits on what I can own
You can make just about anything a slippery slope if you wanted to - “they’re putting limits on guns, what’s next, kitchen knives?”
Morally you should probably be spending more time figuring out how to get everyone their first car instead of worrying about your legal rights in owning your second.
Why yes, there are countries with limits on kitchen knives.
And if your focus is on providing that first car, then the system currently doing that en masse for billions of previously-poor people is called “capitalism” and your moral imperative is to speed it up, not slow it down.
Capitalism only works when you have a middle class. Protecting billionaires’ abilities to hoard wealth is not in the interests of the middle class.
To be charitable I’ll point out that in general that’s not what you’re arguing for. There is a real sense in which personal freedom is essential to people making it out of poverty. Protecting one person’s and not another’s would defeat the point.
Here is the compromise. It should be easy for people to do things that billionaires would have no point doing (i.e. take out a business loan of $10K) and difficult for billionaires to do things that people would have difficulty doing (hoard the global supply of some good). That’s if your goal is to have an equitable society where everyone is on the same difficulty level, more or less.
Approached this way there would not be a slippery slope because the delineation is quite clear. Moreover there’s no squashing of personal freedom, a billionaire is always free to do things a regular person is able to do. In fact the system we have now basically squashes the freedom of the average person because they are not free to do things (buy a house, have a chance in court) by virtue of not having money while other people have a ton.
"Capitalism only works when you have a middle class" - I never saw a scientific demonstration of this. It is always in the "everyone knows" fallacy class of statements pulled out of the landing gear.
well, see, it's embarrassing to admit, but you see, I'm a billionaire. I mean, I'm not one right now, it's a temporary thing. Once I'm back on my feet, I'll have a billion dollars and then, see, I just couldn't have restrictions like that placed on me. I think everyone should be able to get that. So even though it's hurting me now that the rich don't get taxed more, it's just this temporary embarrassing thing where I'm not currently a billionaire.
