Culled From TGGP's comment section:
Dain (Mupetblast) Says:
October 11, 2011 at 12:54 am
Now there’s this.
According to a press release for the march, the targets were, “specifically chosen for their willingness to hoard wealth at the expense of the 99%.”
Death to the hoarders! This shit is as ancient as it is base.
Reply
Hopefully Anonymous Says:
October 11, 2011 at 1:09 am
Where does your aesthetic come from? On the one hand “rational” targeting of rentier elites seems astroturfy to me because the masses are too stupid to have that as a schelling point.
On the other hand, it’s comical to have a good faith pity party for people at the beneficial 1% tail of just about any distribution pattern.
I’m not a progressive because my focus isn’t on either the central tendency or the left tail of the distribution when it comes to resource control (outcomes and safety nets is a trickier question but my focus sure as hell isn’t on risking survival of the central tendency to protect welfare or egalitarian conditions for the left tail).
But the baseness claim I don’t really get. Policing against resource hoarding doesn’t seem base to me in and of itself. Then the discussion becomes technocratic.
The question to me is whether these people are "hoarding resources" rather than "hoarding money". A consumption tax would handle resource consumption, but wouldn't necessarily do much about Warren Buffet.
ReplyDeleteTGGP,
ReplyDeleteLost on the comment either of old yglesias was a decent thread where we discussed wealth tax. Apparently a couple countries did it. Some commenter made a decent case for a 1 time modest wealth wealth tax to completely fix whatever debt problem we have -if and when actually necessary (their case was national "private" wealth way, way exceeds national public debt).
I suppose a WSJ op-ed type conservative would claim that would be as terrible for the US financial reputation as a debt default -but they come across as anti-knowledge assholes to me these days (and by these days, I mean at least our entire lifetime).
Hopefully Anonymous
A one-time wealth tax would be a surprise and have little effect if we were confident it would not recur. So the question is whether we can be credible about it being a one-time deal.
ReplyDelete