Wow it's almost like when taxes on wealth exceed a certain percentage people who can afford to move money out of the country will. This is why the burden of all wealth taxes falls directly upon the upper middle class. They have enough money to be affected, and not enough money to pay a tax attorney to find places to stash the money. I wonder if this clown with his degree in economics ever took a look at real data outside of academia. It is no mystery. If you want to solve this problem you need to disincentive people from moving their money overseas, perhaps by incentivizing contributions to lower and middle income people through job creation, investment in local business, investment in local housing, or some other way to afford them a tax write off that benefits the people that need it. If they truly have more money than any human could spend in 15 lifetimes INCENTIVIZE them to help. Taxation is theft, at the very least make it palatable to the victim.
If taxation is theft, then the only solution is less of it or to make it voluntary. Is there any region of the world anywhere where taxation is voluntary? What is the impact?
It's never been done as far as I can tell. It's a rallying cry of the libertarian/objectivist utopia. Theoretically private services would take over many services of the public. Roads would be maintained by private companies or associations. People would band together, pool resources, and pay for things they (as a group) want. Additionally, money would be paid for congresspeople directly from political associations or individual contributors. PACs wouldn't change. Social nets would become charities and pensions. The list goes on. You'd probably see almost no money contributed towards the military and a lot more contributed towards education. Police, firefighters, and EMTs would be privatized and likely paid for in an HOA. I was mostly using it to drive home the point that the smell test doesn't pass with taxation. Ask yourself these questions: 1. Is it theft if someone steals your wallet? 2. Is it theft if 3 people steal your wallet? 3. Is it theft if your neighborhood votes to steal your wallet (allowing you to also vote)? 4. Is it theft if (3) and they give a poorer neighbor 5% of what they stole, 15% goes to the association that determines the rules, and they use 20% of it to pay for lawn care for the neighborhood? (3) and (4) are our current system. The only difference between compulsory taxation and criminal theft is the illusion of democracy.
What a naive world view. In a culture where money is worshipped more than any religion people with the means to cheat will always cheat. The only way to stop cheating is to remove loopholes and aggressively go after transgressors and punish severely. The reason some of the rich cheat is because even when they are exposed they often get away with a monetary fine and not jail time. It's a naive view to want to incentivize the rich to keep the money in the country where it is taxed. Those with criminal energy will always commit crimes. History has proven such over and over again. Unless you make drug trafficking much much harder you will always have criminals who don't care about laws. Thinking you can incentivize them not to do so is a hilarious error of thought. The best path of attack is to viciously punish those who violate laws and jail them long enough where it really hurts badly and where it will scare others enough to follow in the footsteps. We are in an age where parents already teach their kids that no does not really mean no and where kids can jerk around lazy and weak parents. Few years down the road the same kids now in college or the work place will apply the same manipulative game to society at large. If government has to do the job of punishment and demanding consequences for bad action then so be it. Society will still benefit. But letting all those white collar criminals off the hook with manetary fines sets a horribly bad example and shows that those with just enough money can get away with anything. Taxation is not theft, it is the price to pay to do business and reap the benefits of infrastructure, access to demand, access to an educated workforce and the like. I am all for reasonable taxation but what value add some multi billionaires to a society. Next to none. I am strongly against socialism but disincentivizing people to concentrate ever more wealth in the hands of 1-2% is sound governance for any society that plans for the long term and for the benefit of a strong and motivated middle class. One of the most stupid arguments in favor of lower taxes for the super rich is that those super rich might leave the country. Sure, let them leave, so what. If they don't want to pay the price to do business here then don't grant them access, let's see how well Bezos will do without access to the US and European market or Buffet or the rest. You will see that they will happily pay a higher price for access to a large educated and well funded market of willing buyers.
Total bollocks. I am as conservative as it gets when it comes to gun laws, abortion, immigration. But hoping that utilities and public services in private hands will benefit anyone but those who own those assets is incredibly shortsighted. No electrical grid, water supply, waste management, gas supplies, education, defense, and other public services should EVER belong in private hands. History has shown that nothing good comes from that. Private ownership will ALWAYS strive for ever higher profit margins which squeezes everyone else and lowers quality of service. Name me one example where private ownership in above listed services has ever done anything good.
Yes it is. You don't sound like a conservative. You don't even sound like a classical liberal. You're like a socialist with cheap conservative make up on. You think guns and abortion define a conservative. This is the actual naive view. For what it's worth in America waste management is generally handled privately. I pay ~$20 a month to have a private company take waste from my house to their landfill. Electricity and gas are both privatized (but heavily subsidized because this country is backwards). Defense is mostly privatized - the only people paid with taxes are professional bullet sponges. Water supply here is also private, again heavily subsidized. Education is compulsory here where you COULD attend a bottom tier K-12 mostly free (or totally free if you are a drug dealer pretending to be poor) or pay to have your child go to a private school. Post secondary education is universally private, though you could make an argument student loans are effectively a subsidy our children shoulder because the government declared they cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. Generally speaking roads are maintained by private organizations. The government won't allow people to pave a road unless there are businesses to pay for it. Fees related to home ownership or the purchase of land parcels generally fund this. Hell, mail delivery is privatized. Most public services can be privatized. The greed is because of regulatory monopoly. You missed a great example of your alleged "evil schemes of the rich" diatribe - The Last Mile. The reason this exists is because regulatory monopolies given to Bell and Co. over a century ago that granted virtual perpetual monopolies via the government to otherwise private industries that would, today, be rife with competition if it weren't for regulatory capture and the subsequent monopoly. If you want to talk about people who are inappropriately rich, tell me how a congressperson makes a salary of 120,000 a year and is somehow worth over 100MM. Almost like regulatory capture has a perverse incentive and you and I are paying for it. You have literally no idea what you are talking about. I could counter myself using your position better than you are doing yourself.
You again don't get the point at all. The question is not whether utilities can be privatized or not. Yes they can. The question is whether there is any long term benefit to privatizing utilities and education and health care. There is none because private entities will always minimize cost, meaning, they will peruse every conceivable loophole there is to minimize their cost to the detriment of the mass population and advantage of the few who own the assets. And please don't pull an identity politics stunt on me. I reject to be classed into any group. I debate issues, I identify with stances on issues. I am not left or right not liberal nor conservative across the board. I understand it's convenient for you to label people according to how you see fit but you add zero value by doing that other than limiting your own thought process and potential. Most of the rest of your points re privatization are borderline ridiculous. Let's start: you pay 20 bucks for waste management and then? Don't need to care anymore cause the garbage is "gone"? Well, what do you think the history is of garbage disposal in private hands? Just Google it, there are countless examples where despite stringent regulations time and again private companies dumped garbage in ways that violate regulations, they lobby local municipalities to dump your garbage in front of those who don't have much voice via having a say in landfill zoning. Then your other utilities are subsedized because otherwise you won't be able to afford the higher prices in the private sector because often times what happens is that cartels form that agree on prices and hence dictate prices. Why do you think historically the mafia is so interested to be in the business of waste disposal and utility management? If there was a well funded public school system and no private schools the average quality of education would go up. Of course the average quality of the education of private schools that currently cater to the super wealthy will not be matched for obvious reason, but the whole point here is that a majority of the population will actually benefit. Free education for everyone until and including college. Works perfectly well in Germany for decades and tax rates are way lower than anywhere in Scandinavia. It's a well funded system there that benefits a broad public. Road construction is so littered with abuse and corruption in private hands I don't even know where to start. Sure there are areas where privatization might work but it has to be in sectors with broad competition between private sector firms. That is often times not the case. And a congress person with 100mm in wealth? Oh wow, you found one or two? So what? Did they derive their wealth from corruption or bribes? Then jail them. Otherwise I think having 100m is obscene any way you turn it. Nobody needs 100m to live an obscenely lavish lifestyle, please don't mention now that for some lavish means a 100m yacht, ridiculous. I mean by all means let anyone have their 100m yacht, but tax them a lot higher to disincentivize people to amass such fortunes because the utility to society is actually negative. Hence a higher tax to pay for the negative utility. Your entire thought construct relies on a single premise: the belief that by letting private entities compete with each other as unregulated as possible that such actors will behave responsibly and will ultimately benefit society more than supervising and regulating them. Please don't make me laugh hysterically.
Just a heads up, Tradator started a thread on the same article yesterday : https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/wealth-disparities.332764/