hey shuffle,
i own a brick and mortar magic the gathering store. have since 1993. i charge sales tax on all my purchases and then send that money to the state d.o.r. mr bezos does not charge sales tax on all of his sales. he screws over the states he sells in that impose a sales tax. and yet i do not care what he does with his money. he does not break any laws to get it. he does not have to care about anyone but himself. he does not force anyone to work for him. so in ending i repeat who cares what he does with HIS money. this was sent from my laptop

thank you for your glowing endorsement. i wonder though how do you look at someones entire posting history? this was sent from my laptop

This might be interesting in the abstract, but in the real world, applying this sort of thinking would be a 5000 variable problem that encompassed factors like skin color, genetics, familial wealth, access to education, access to clean water, government system, weather, various parental characteristics (substance abuse, intelligence, propensity for violence).

And no one would agree on how to rank the factors. Who started with the bigger advantage in life -- the child of two, stable, loving, middle class academics in the US, or the child of a drug addled, but extremely wealthy, rock star in the US? The answer to that sort of question isn't obvious.

Point is good, but I think the answer to that hypothetical is really obvious as long as you aren't measuring a life in dollars.

thank you. this was sent from my desktop

Wealth taxes are fine. It's what Pickitty suggested against Bill Gates' suggestion of a consumption tax because wealth is much simpler to define than consumption, though a consumption tax is fine too

Too bad wealth isn’t necessarily liquid, and there aren’t any other consequences when wealthy people try to liquidate it to pay taxes. Sorry comrade.

Seems odd to deduce from first principles these dire effects when we have real life empirical evidence. France has a wealth tax and it's not a dystopian hellscape.

I agree, but a lot of people sort by dollars.

Never heard of it and looked it up. Apparently ran from 2011-2017 and was up to 1.8%. In 2017 they changed it so it's just a real estate property tax. All US states have property taxes ranging from .27% to 2.4% (Hawaii and NJ respectively). In CA anyway, some cities and counties add on to that a little.

Becky is pretty bad at using computers for someone who's only 30 years old.

most stocks these days are bought thru index funds, and put in retirement accounts where they stay for the indefinite future. how much "excess" wealth does the average stock purchaser have when compared to bezos? most ppl aren't 10% of the way to having the same personal wealth as the GDP of an entire continent.

holy **** the ****ing balls to say this ****, blows my mind.

i think i have more than 10% of antarctica's gdp

unless those penguins are worth something, then definitely less

I think plenty of people could tell you what motivates them beyond money to push forward in their careers. I'd say it's pretty unhealthy if they couldn't. I doubt Bezos gives much of a **** about moving from 5bil to 150bil anyways.

Besides, the issue is much much bigger in scale than you're attempting to address here. Most of the world is getting ****ed over by,

A, failing to be a historical colonial power who got to fast-track their snowball of capital accumulation and be at the front when the industrial revolution started (most opportunity to accumulate the type of wealth we're talking w/ Bezos either come from extreme wealth, or come from an upper class+ background w/ extreme luck [ex. bill gates])

B, having a lack of state infrastructure and stability to protect their ability to innovate (you need a state to protect property rights, intellectual rights, it's pretty hard to build the next iphone when you have no schools and your country is being bombed to shreds by two different countries fighting a proxy war over a couple ports *cough cough Syria*)

C, state leaders from countries w/o that infrastructure and stability having more incentive to coalesce to foreign old wealth than to current upstarts

i'm realizing I could go on forever, but there's so many reasons that even the implication of a fair market is absurd. people who have the wealth to change the status quo have direct incentives to keep things as ****ed up as they are currently. and honestly outside of health, i'm not sure i give a **** about innovation as a value in the first place, and to act like the incentives in medical research are aligned w/ those of the people receiving treatment is so ****ing idiotic I don't think I have to go to the trouble to explaining it.

and i wonder how old you are and what made you the person to judge how bad i am at using computers

France saw their upper class move away at pretty quick clips during those years which is why they changed the policy.

https://money.cnn.com/2016/04/01/new...nce/index.html

If you want wealth going abroad then this is a good solution.

dem belly full but we hungry

The best part of this thread is learning that the revolutionary new idea akin to atom-splitting was *checks notes* selling stuff on the internet.

And yet coincidentally, scientific and technological progress exploded with the rise of capitalism in the 1600s.

And honestly if we're gonna shove all in with the poker analogies I'd say that Bezos et al are angleshooting capitalism. Sure, you can throw capital at a red business until you corner the market and it turns green whilst making your employees wear diapers and die from heat stroke, but it's just so unseemly and ungentlemanly.

In fact that's what I'll say to Bezos when his head is in the guillotine, right before the blade falls, "See man, it's not that you're even a bad person; it's just that your behavior was so... uncouth."

Remember when .Alex. said he was a left-libertarian and then he started debating tomdemaine, an actual left-libertarian?

The satisfaction of a job well done?

Wait.

The satisfaction of a job well done.

Did I already use 'the satisfaction of a job well done'?

He was a left-libertarian and I agree with like 95% of his posts, but he's not really posting like one itt.