this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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I am not opposed to inreasing taxes necessarily, but people need to understand that the income of wealthy individuals is not used purely for the fulfilment of their needs and wishes. Rich people play a rather important role in allocating and managing resourses(capital) in society, and increasing the taxes will decrease the capability of rich people to invest, which is not ideal.
Also, if the tax increase is percieved to be unfair, rich people can just leave and go to Monaco or Switzerland or any other "rich friendly" country. They are pretty much free to do so and they do it all the time. So increasing taxes will not necessarily lead to more tax revenue if they are increased above what is reasonable.
I am so happy karma is not a thing here btw. I would be in an unenviable position otherwise.
fuck off with that neoliberal bullshit.
Governments already do "investing". Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world thanks to the US government subsidizing Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink. Your tax money is already going into allocating and managing capital in society, so how about instead of letting wealthy individuals choose how capital gets invested we let the government decide that? It's neoliberal brainrot that wealthy capitalists, without any real oversight, should be the ones to dictate how capital is used.
And let them go. The wealthy can go wherever they want but most their wealth is tied to their businesses and moving those businesses elsewhere is extremely expensive. The can take their wealth with them only if they spend an insane amount to transfer all their businesses out of the country or if they cash out their businesses. Both come with a significant drop in wealth, so they're not going to do that. You've been fed bullshit propaganda.
Governments invest in some things, but they can't effectively manage the entire economy. It is too complex, and markets provide information that will simply not be available under central planning.
Hell, even now government investments are highly inefficient for many reasons. The government is getting ripped of by private contractors, as they can't control the complexities of production, have nearly unlimited resources, so they do not optimise, and a lot of asinine decisions are made because nobody cares enough. Look at how bloated the military funding is in the US for example.
That's an interesting point. The government tends to get ripped off because of negotiation issues. Private orgs can hire and retain the best negotiators, whereas govt can't afford that and if they can, they'd still be vulnerable to accusations of cronyism to have the best of the private sector's negotiators negotiating with the companies they've probably dealt with privately before and who they will likely be back with in the future.
This is one reason why competitive procurement is such a big deal and so complicated and time consuming.
We know from bitter historical experience that privatising public operations, especially natural monopolies like utilities, results in worse service and higher prices, coupled with sub-par investment. A private company can be bailed out if it goes bankrupt sending all its profits out to shareholders. A public org has an incentive not to waste taxpayer money.
That is true, some things should stay public. But you can surely see why making the government run everything is inefficent amd stupid(ignoring all the other problems with that).