Thanks for the explain… I’ll give it a read… might be interesting.
Silhouette,
The only reason that every mega corporation in the United States is still ‘solvent’ is because of corporate welfare! Taxpayers pay for their bankrupt golden parachutes, taxpayers even pay for their taxes! The ultra rich incur no cost and no risk.
My solution is perfect because it creates ACTUAL capitalism. Yours? No!
i don’t think your idea would have much pull with the “right”, either (you mean rich capitalists I am sure, and not moms and pops with high moral standards out there in the sticks)
cuz you know what’s better than a fabricated number that means nothing but status?
the kind of number you can use to buy stuff
nothing says status quite like a 130ft boat
Anarcho-capitalism won’t work because capitalist systems are so wrought with conflict, they cant be sustained without artificial support by government.
The circle of life here - to put it in Elton John terms - looks like this:
Capitalist parasite class hijacks the government and forces it to assist it in its exploitation of the host working class. But what makes this so dumb is that the host class is paying the government so it can pay the capitalist parasite to… exploit them more efficiently.
This arrangement is so retarded I almost have no sympathy for the working class for allowing this to happen.
what’s so wrong about letting conflicting systems collapse?
law of nature
When I say I’m bridging the divide between the economic left and right in my opening sentence, I’m not directly intending to solve the social issues that might be more of a concern to “moms and pops with high moral standards out there in the sticks” or whatever other demographic that might be more concerned about social issues than economic ones.
However, it’s more than likely going to be the case that my economic solution will indirectly affect social issues in a particularly positive way. How many social issues are directly correlated to economic issues? A great many without doubt. In this way, the model that I’m suggesting ought to appeal to all types of Rightists just as much as to all types of Leftists.
And what makes you think that 130ft boats will be off the (water) table as a result of what I’m suggesting?
The consequences of my solution will be one of two possibilities - or perhaps a combination of the two:
On one hand, the sense in which the biggest spenders pay a surplus might make superyachts even more of a luxury than before, and therefore even more of a status symbol.
But on the other hand, my solution will bring about market forces to reduce the prices of luxuries such that the companies who provide them can maintain their market share - and this incentivises investment in the technologies that are required to supply luxuries: to more efficiently source the parts and enable the labour required to put them together - which is a positive force for technological advancement, which more quickly depreciates outdated technologies, making them more quickly available to the masses who are now more rich and more able to buy them.
And remember, the very richest person buying a boat is only paying less than 50 times the price that the average person would pay - and in doing so helps enormously with paying off the deficit incurred by the 91%, on top of gaining a huge amount of social credit “points”, as well as ending up with a huge tax free status symbol.
Where’s the downside here?
The collapse of conflicting systems is not without collateral damage. Naturally they will collapse by themselves anyway, yes, but it’s better to help them along their way to minimise said collateral damage. That’s the advantage that humans have over other life-forms - they are able to figure out how to mitigate suffering and speed nature up or down, whereas everything else has to wait for nature to run its course. That’s what civilisation is - and why Anarcho-capitalism is such a suboptimal option.
I know all this already.
In what way does “maximum wage” create ACTUAL capitalism? It’s overtly a restriction on capitalism. I’d be down for the policy you’re supporting too if it were actually possible to sell it to the economic right, but so far it hasn’t been for obvious reasons. The super rich have the Western developed world held to ransom - and leftist economic policy is struggling so much because it’s not offering those in power with enough of a gain, and it’s making them feel threatened by too much of a loss. You don’t get that much power unless you have their level of individualistic loss aversion. That’s why I’ve specifically catered my solution towards offering them a scenario where they have everything to gain!
And I don’t even have to affect Capitalism much at all to pull it off. All economics needs is an incentive for the rich to want to distribute their wealth, and the solution is simple: separate the money aspect from all the other gains of being successful and powerful. Look at “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” - the most basic stuff is the only part that really requires money. The higher needs don’t when they come into affect from the lower needs already being satisfied, but up until my solution, money was the only way to sufficiently measure the success of the higher needs. Your solution is still concerned only with tinkering about with money, which misses the whole point, and it’s why Leftism has always struggled so much despite policies like maximum wage being so obviously beneficial for everyone. There’s nothing about my solution that doesn’t achieve what yours does, but your solution lacks the key ingredient to make it appealing for enough of the right people to actually make it become a reality.
My solution is the best of both worlds because it’s extremely hard to make 10 million dollars a year (still capitalistic!). If you want a 100 foot yacht, you need to get support from another 10 people to do it. That’s called a co-op economy (my definition)
Every mega rich person is a psychopath. There is no compromise for psychopaths. Your plan is delusional.
The people need to stand up and say “enough”! And rewrite the laws.
Pleasing a psychopath is impossible. “Incentivizing” charity is laughable to them.
Silhouette, please play out a few scenarios to illustrate the praxis of what youre talking about.
I find the arguments for it convincing but haven’t understood how this works in practice, other than suspecting it means that on the whole, the rich pay more for the same goods than the poor, though not so much as to annihilate the advantage of their wealth.
Long-winded solutions are never the answer… same as bad sex.
…and no, I’m no expert on bad sex or sex in general, as I rarely indulge. Only lowly minds would think otherwise, because they cannot think contrary to that which is exposed to them, and so think all manner of things that their mind allows and opens them up to.
Welcome to modernity.
MagsJ,
I’ve had sex exactly 15 times in my life. I’m 43.
Most 43 year olds have had sex 6000 times in their lives.
I always cared about truth more than sex.
My life is a testament to this. Even the sex I did have: I fucked up. This human species is not fit for sex! It’s a nice fantasy that they are; no bearing on truth whatsoever!
sounds an awful lot like progressive taxation
no?
suffering sucks but how many layers of comfort are we going to add to the existing comfort (in the 1st world at the cost of plenty of suffering in the 3rd world) before realize that the whole thing is artificial af and that what we are really doing is postponing the suffering so that we can have it all at once at some point in the future?
just let people die
people fucking die it’s natural
we do not need any more people eating and shitting on the planet and making 5 pounds of garbage per year for 100 years
and till the fuck out of the earth and then spray poison on it to produce enough corn to feed all of this goddamn people we allowed to live for 100 years by pumping them full of antibiotics and spraying them with alcohol
fucks sake
we don’t need any more busted systems to fix busted systems
we need less!!!
I do wonder what goes on in Silhouette’s mind/the mind of Silhouette… 
He talked of elegant systems, but his solutions are anything but… they are clumpy and clumsy, at best.
Fuck outta here!
Why’s man getting literal, as opposed to philosophical though?
Um… the Thread title says it all. 
Oh it is philosophical … and aside from the thread title, I’m responding to YOU!
If I knew at 16 years old what I know now, I’d never have had sex!
I took the hits for my sex (spiritual), I both cringe and chuckle at what you folks have to go through.
Like the John Lennon song, I was blessed (Cursed) with ‘instant karma’. I feel bad for all of you. Seriously. It upsets me to know your fates.
Tee hee hee 
There’s only one thing that sends someone to hell: contradiction.
MagsJ, I hope for your sake that you can currently admit that I understand existence better than you do.
As you being a moral nihilist (currently), I don’t hold out much hope.
Thank you for the guided tour.
As for long winded solutions, mine is as easy as this:
Was that over too fast? 
There’s minor but necessary details to work through, such as how far back in life ought each person’s/business’s rate of expenditure be considered valid for the above calculation? Perhaps just the past year to date ought to count (going by financial years is already pretty standard for businesses), in order to get a large enough sample size, yet to also take into account long term changes in rates of expenditure over a lifetime.
Also, how best might it be to apply the model to businesses? The intention is to optimally foster a Meritocratic outcome, which appeals to the Classical Liberal economic theory around “Perfect Competition” - we want the objectively best businesses to acquire the most credit “points”, but we also want to enable and reward as many start-ups as possible. To get this right will be another compromise that I’m still trying to work through. Any outside suggestions on these details are most welcome.
If there is to be any long-windedness to this solution, it will be in the persuasion of people to adopt it. Most of my original post was spent trying to translate my solution into appealing terms for very different mindsets, and laying out the two fundamental differences between my solution and the current situation: “a disconnect in the continuous flow of currency around the whole economy” and the addition of a measure to keep track of expenditure, indirectly rewarding altruism by rewarding self-interest. The math of exactly how it works is simple, and the practice of using it convert rates of expenditure into the prices you pay is even simpler.
Indeed it’s been studied how psychopathy is more common at the extremes of society. Perhaps you’ve come across the “Dark triad”, which links psychopahy with narcissism (and Machiavellianism) - and my solution takes perfect advantage of the narcissistic personality by converting the need to self-aggrandise into charity. The more they seek the former, the more they contribute to the latter, and they can act like the latter was what they sought all along as much as they like.
People standing up and saying “enough” happens all the time, everywhere, and it always has done. Still, the only laws that end up changing are the ones that benefit corporations. Events like Occupy Wall Street gain massive traction, yet they’re so easily forgotten and dismissed as quickly as they can be criticised for providing no clear alternative that can’t easily be written off as having been tried before without perceived success.
I’m providing a clear alternative that has no such precedent, which unites left with right, and solves all our economic problems.
Yes, it’s hard to make 10 million dollars a year, and yes, making that the “maximum wage” can allow you to be as capitalistic as you want… up until that point, after which it is overtly anti-capitalistic. So overall, conditional/limited capitalism perhaps - like all “Social Democrat” solutions are. Cooperatives (again, not your idea/definition) are another solution supported by some “Social Democrats” - basically all Western governments are Social Democrats to some degree. They want to keep their Capitalism, but to try and tame it - to give it a nice face, as Zizek would put it.
I suppose my solution could be said to fit this shoe in some ways too, except it is better described as transcending Social Democracy by virtue of a critical difference: that Capitalism is no longer being pitted against socialising controls, the two have been melded and incorporated within one another to work together.
This is the fun part - to work it all through, to try and rip it apart and destroy it, and also to rebuild it better than before. Whilst I’ve traced the fundamentals of this solution to some of my works from at least 5 years ago, it’s only very recently crystalised in my own mind after a few strenuous weeks wrestling with the most basic building blocks. As such, even I can’t claim expertise on the praxis of the whole thing - and since it is without precedent, I’d be a fool to think I could foresee all the consequences that would actually result from implementing my solution in reality. I can however claim expertise in folly, so let surgery commerce. I’ve already mentioned the odd prediction of how I see the mechanisms unfolding upon application to things like luxury items.
It seems like you more or less have the gist of it, maybe you can think of some interesting applications of my economic solution, perhaps predict outcomes, potential abuses and fixes. I expect all degrees of quality in the contributions of posters here, I’m sure I’ll have thought of much that is to be said already, but ultimately I just want some food for thought and hope the menu is able to offer me the odd tasty meal.
Folks, this thread isn’t about sex, sorry.
Less of that and more caring about the truth, if you please.
Yes, with the critical difference that now there’s incentive to genuinely want to pay more, with the happy consequence that tax is no longer necessary if you do.
Much better than simple progressive taxation, no?
Yes, suffering sucks just as much as it is necessary - I’ve taken great care to maintain inequality with my solution. Too much suffering is as bad as too little, which is why I draw upon the 80-20 rule to optimise the middle-ground.
I like your attitude towards comforts and nature, and I think you’ll agree that before we naturally die, we live too. Most of us in the first world with perhaps too much comfort, and most of us in the third world with certainly far too little. The whole point is that before we die, a win-win situation is possible to get people to both selfishly and altruistically want to address this imbalance, and optimise it.
One phenomenon that tends to be observed is that the best antidote to too many people eating and shitting on the planet is to make them richer. As a result of my solution, 91% of the world will be paying less than the average, completely funded by the remaining 9% competing with each other to pay off this deficit in accordance with the Pareto Principle.
How is that a busted system? I’ve tried to make my solution as “less” as possible - in terms of complications and any potential to go bust.
I expect all the emotional “aversion to change” that posters here can each possibly muster. What I’m waiting for the most, though, is any intellectual and rational dissection and fair/insightful consideration of what would actually happen if it was put in place. What would change and how, if anything at all? How would you break it? How would you fix it?
Silhouette,
I’ve been told that people care more about being heard than anything. I’m not an exception to this rule.
The co-op economy that I espouse is that when you make over 10 million a year, you pay all your employees until they all make 10 million a year.
Now, you have a huge 10 million a year family to do whatever you want, the key being here that it’s necessarily social instead of anti social.
Silhouette, We both have systems that work in theory, the problem is sociopaths. (Who want neither of our systems!) My system works better for sociopaths because it requires cooperation for larger projects.
well my criticism, though maybe not necessarily thoughtful as I am sure you’ve spent a lot more time on this than I have, is that it sounds a lot like what we already have, as i stated above
high-end manufactures making high-end products to sell to high-end consumers for a lot of money
mid-range manufactures making mid-range products… et cetera
throw some magical welfare dust on it to subsidize lower costs for the poor and give bragging rights to the ones doing the welfaring
did I get it completely wrong, or does this sound about right?
if you’re basing it off on the pareto distribution, then there will always be an extreme low end just as there is an extreme high end
and I’ll go on a limb here and say that the distribution of wealth right now falls into a pareto ratio, naturally
so… what is it solving?
i mean what great advantage is there to warrant the disruption of the current system?
do… do I get a 130ft boat, for cheap? some rich ass motha is going to fund it?
does everybody get a boat?
hahahahah
Oh I was responding to something ecmandu said… along the lines of creating ‘actual capitalism’, as he put it.
Actual capitalism is how it works when smaller business fail. But at a larger scale businesses cant be allowed to fail because they provide so many jobs. The government is then forced to artificially support (ignoring the principle of free market) big businesses to avoid mass unemployment and low tax revenues.
So the situation for at the last hundred years at least has been this vicious circle of nonsense… all because the working class cant take the government themselves… cant become the governing power… cant take control of the means of production.
Seriously though, imagine the unemployment problem that would result if a major automobile manufacturer went out of business, for example. The government cant risk letting that happen, so it takes the money made by the workers and gives it back to the business so they can continue exploiting the workers.
Its the dumbest shit I ever seen.