South Korea has a 50% heritage tax - and it applies, as far as I'm aware, to everything. Causes and absolute havoc when billionaires die and the companies need to be broken up, but ultimately it seems to work
Won't anyone think of the havoc people still inheriting millions of dollars have to go through? 🎻
More people might have an opportunity to buy in on the society's corporate institutions? 🎻
That sounds like the right thing to do for a society that values... Society.
When someone dies, something happens to the assets they own. It doesn't matter what happens or how it gets divided, but the South Korean government takes 50%.
If it's just human nature, then why do we need a militarized police force to enforce order? Having workers go to a workplace, do labor, and then send the profits to some far away entity that probably isn't even there is actually very far from human nature. It's something that necessarily requires the implied threat of violence to maintain. Same with tenants and landlords. No one would pay rent if it wasn't for the police, who will use violence to throw you out otherwise.
It also frustrates me how that argument just waves away the incredibly complex and actually extremely arbitrary legal structure of capitalism. What about human nature contains limited liability for artificial legal entities controlled by shareholders? "Ah yes, here's the part of the human genome that expresses preferred and common stock; here's the part that contains the innate human desire for quarterly earnings calls."
Its so dumb. "Human nature" according to who? Ignoring that appeal to nature is a logical fallacy its also just...fake. humans are social obligate primates. We naturally form small communal groups. We've interacted cooperatively and altruistically since before we were anatomical humans. If capitalism is human nature why did it take 19,700 years for anatomically modern humans to invent it. Because for one thing, commerce is not the same as capitalism. And even commerce is somewhat recent. Most of human history we didnt barter, pre-money barter economies are a myth. We had "gift economies" where we simply helped and gave each other what we needed. Without explicitly demanding a return but understanding others will help you out the same when you need it.
From what I've learned it feels like we're just not supposed to be critical of it. It reminds me of being a kid and adults being upset when I ask too many questions or questions they might not want to face. I know you didn't ask but Mark Fisher has a compelling way of describing it as capitalist realism and I wanted to leave this quote:
Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action
That's exactly it, liberals don't want us to question capitalism. In a discussion about socialism, some shitlib came by and asked what my job was. When I told them, they assumed I made a lot of money and said it was hypocritical for me to criticize capitalism. When I told them that I actually only earn $42k in a city with a living wage of $58k, suddenly I was just bitter and bitching about my low paying job, so I should get a good paying job.
Putting yourself and whoever you consider your tribe above others is human nature, so capitalism plays pretty well into that by rewarding fucking others over.
Wow. Almost every single thing he listed at the beginning (before I turned this off because I was getting the urge to punch his face so strongly my work computer's screen was at actual risk) has taken enormous amounts of "big government" subsidy. And well over half of them (possibly much higher!) are actively damaging society.
Advances were made and sustained principally through labor organization, not government regulations.
Much of the manipulation in the presentation from PU is based on constructing a false dichotomy between organization through either private business versus central government.
A common tactic is to bait an antagonist into attacking private business, but then shifting from a defense of business to a criticism of government. It is employed by proponents of marketism, and commonly involves insertion into the discussion, often as a straw man, the Democratic Party or the Soviet Union.
Such proponents often respond poorly to suggestions about cooperative organization, or to reminders over the natural tendency of business to seek increasing protection from the state.
There's something disconcerting about the structure of that person's face and the ways it does and does not move how it should when the person it belongs to speaks.
When I bring up that 80-90% of an average top billionaire's wealth is their share of their company, it's usually to counter the perception that those hundreds of billions of dollars are deadweight. I do still think the rich should be taxed, though I would lean towards taxing the personal assets more than business stock.
As if liquid assets are the only thing that can be used to influence and gain more power and wealth. Smh. Capitalists use capital, liquid or not to keep hoarding all of it for themselves.