How wealthy would the wealthiest person be in your ideal society?
How wealthy would the wealthiest person be in your ideal society?
Where would their wealth come from?
In my ideal society (assuming money still exists) the wealthiest person would be a single digit millionaire (on the low side) and their wealth would come primarily from their income as a highly specialized worker (brain surgeon, nuclear physicist etc) rather than stocks and owning the means of production and so on. I dont think anyone needs or deserves more than that and even if I did I still think anything beyond that would be detrimental to society as a whole.
Where would their wealth come from?
In my ideal society (assuming money still exists) the wealthiest person would be a single digit millionaire (on the low side) and their wealth would come primarily from their income as a highly specialized worker (brain surgeon, nuclear physicist etc) rather than stocks and owning the means of production and so on. I dont think anyone needs or deserves more than that and even if I did I still think anything beyond that would be detrimental to society as a whole.
Comments (52)
Exactly as wealthy as the poorest. They would both own their homes and control enough land to cultivate food for their family and community, have their own source of energy, transport and communication devices, share in recreational facilities and health services, contribute to those services and practice a useful trade the product of which is distributed in the community - from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
Wealth is an evil concept.
Poorest: the price of a small flat or house. £100,000 or something. Security of accommodation, and ownership of home.
:clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:
Nurture people and flora and fauna and justice and purpose and meaning, not personal wealth, status and power. Every human being alive should be able to take all their basic needs for granted, from cradle to grave. That has to be a prime directive, imo.
So long as they are just in their transfers there is no reason to prevent someone from becoming wealthy. To do so would be to engage in the unjust transfer of wealth, for instance through theft, exploitation, and forced labor like taxation.
No; it's not about them: some of them are benevolent, some malevolent, some are unintentionally destructive others do it on purpose; some wield the power invested in them by the control of wealth less harmfully than others.
It's about the very notion of dividing the resources of a community or society unevenly, giving some people - more or less at random - the ability to control the lives of many other people. That's simply wrong. There no "noble" qualities that can be identified at birth, to determine which few babies ought to receive high quality nurturing and training and which millions should be forced to fight over their leavings.
Quoting Vaskane
Show me the "good" uses of an instrument designed explicitly to inflict pain, damage and death.
From where does a man strive toward then? Rather, to? What purpose does he have to excel, to defeat that lesser man in the mirror he woke up to? None. None whatsoever. And this constraint, is the father of all squalor and mediocrity.
This sounds nice, but never works in practice.
From birth to dotage, for self-esteem, the love of a happy family, the respect of his fellow citizens, the satisfaction of contribution to the common weal.
Quoting Outlander
self-fulfillment, the attainment of skill in his craft and the privilege of passing on hard-earned wisdom to the next generation.
Quoting Outlander
Why defeat? Why not simply improve upon, day by day?
Quoting RogueAI
The question was: Quoting Captain Homicide
Not "What would work in our terminally ill civilization?"
Meh. Opinions and perspective, be they internal or external, are cheap, as ever changing as the winds. and often out of one's control anyhow. Lest you give turmoil and tempestuousness power, they matter not. Contribution is important. However, one can contribute a Trojan Horse unknowingly that provides great benefit, until it is revealed it in fact has not.
Quoting Vera Mont
Wisdom... how fantastic. Utilization of knowledge. How many times has such utilization damned entire empires? It is not what is taught it is how to use it.
Quoting Vera Mont
If one is without fault, one is without care.
As we here all attest.
Surely just because one is limited to the certain cheapness that comes with the human existence does not mean bargains are not to be found? :)
My claim is simply that without some unnecessary, perhaps even gross and offensive to the enlightened mind, idea, concept, or "dream" even, the majority would not be as eager as they should be knowing the full value of their efforts, despite being unable at the present. Is that not fair?
Sure. They can all vie for the title of Who Acquired More Stuff for Their Heirs to Sue Over.
Within the admittedly poor limits of my knowledge, the majority is neither eager to contend nor able to attain anything like the full value of their efforts. Is that fair? I don't think so. But, as you say, opinions are cheap.
Intelligence agency driven. Just more scams.
In my IDEAL society, there would not be "the wealthiest person" because one person's wealth requires someone else's loss. Even in an ideal society, the underlying reality is that there is only so much to go around. Wealth requires an uneven distribution.
Quoting Vera Mont
Everyone having to own a home, own enough land, generate their own energy, transport, and communication, and so on sounds like pioneer life on the Great Plains. I don't want to build my own hut, farm 40 acres with a mule, operate my own windmill and solar panels, and everything else. Whatever happened to cooperative, collective systems?
I want a society where we work together to provide what we need -- from each as they are able, to each as they require.
Home ownership, under capitalism, has been something of a scam. #1) Mortgages have been an effective way to tame the working class. If you want to keep your home, you'd better keep that job at all costs. #2) Home ownership involves buying and selling a given house over time, repeatedly. A 100 year old house may well have been saddled with a succession of mortgages for 100 years. Great for the banks! #3) Renters are held in low esteem because they are not saddled with the mortgage, and they can move more freely. Renters support the parasitical rentier class, true, but multi-family housing need not be privately owned.
Starvation would be much more common if we all had to raise our own food. The most competent farmers can not guarantee a harvest. We have a sort of collectivized agriculture (under private ownership), and because it is under private ownership for the purpose of maximizing return on investment, bad things are happening to the land.
Your controlling a part of that co-op doesn't prevent anyone else from having the same degree of control; you can all agree to pool land and resources, so long as every adult has an equal say. Owning the solar panels on your roof doesn't impede anyone's access to the electric mill; autonomous use of your share without interference doesn't preclude helping to build the communal infrastructure. And you shouldn't need a mule when a very efficient solar tractor is available to anyone in the community.
Quoting BC
Isn't that what I said?
Quoting BC
Let's paraphrase that more succinctly: capitalism, has been a scam
Quoting BC
Not if we did intelligently.
https://www.aftaweb.org/about/what-is-agroforestry/forest-farming.html
https://www.permaculturenews.org/what-is-permaculture/
https://www.greenhousecanada.com/cold-growth-in-northern-climates-32606/
https://www.freightfarms.com/urban-farming
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-rise-of-vertical-farms/
With the current numbers, nothing will survive for very long.
With current mind-set, neither will we.
Which country do you think has a superior system?
I haven't been keeping track. According to this site, Luxembourg must, since it's rated highest for quality of life. But we're all caught in the web of global capitalism; no individual country is free to or able to enact a radically different system of governance or economy.
No, that's fair. Though bear in mind people fight and kill over far less. If they raised their heirs properly and morally, or at least with an innate desire for peace as well as the knowledge of the value of avoiding avoidable discord, conflict can be minimized if not removed from the dynamic altogether.
That's but one way of looking at it, is what I mean. Family strife is undesirable but it is unlikely to be disappearing altogether any time soon. How I look at it is, people vote with their resources, in this case, their money. So if many people buy my product or service, it clearly benefits them and thus society, which encourages innovation and progress, thus not only rewarding me for my efforts but encouraging the next innovator who may bring something even better to the proverbial social table. Now I'll be the first person to say, innovation can sometimes go too far for one's own good. That said, the old adage comes to mind, "if you don't do it, somebody else will anyway". Along with "give them enough rope, they will hang themselves". But that's beyond the point so I digress.
Quoting Vera Mont
I disagree somewhat. Though not entirely. What is the "full value" of one's efforts? Sure that modest tailor who hems clothes and fabrics could be making more money if he happened to have been educated in technological innovation and managed to have come up with the steam engine. I completely get the sentiment, at least my understanding of it, of "not wanting to contend" as in not wanting to pit myself against my fellow man where if I succeed he falters, especially in the context of superfluous resources or wealth and unneeded quality of living. I get that completely. That said, when one looks beyond the short term and gazes into the long term of society as a whole, one might find it is not quite the zero-sum game. I think so at least.
Perhaps I misspoke regarding my remark of "opinions are cheap". They are dynamic, if not shifting, and often ill-formed, therefore placing prominent and pertinent value on something that is as ever-changing or resolute as the tides can be an unwise principle to adhere to in life. What I mean is, just because someone doesn't like you or something about you, doesn't automatically give the concept merit.
Regardless, I enjoy reading and becoming aware of the opinions of those I respect, such as yourself. Even online. For I believe, if not know, they are definitively grounded in many of the same truths and values I call my own. Thanks for the reply. :)
Yes, as I said, over the crumbs off the rich man's table.
Quoting Outlander
IF. But they don't raise their heirs at all, do they? Nannies, tutors, private schools and academies raise them as the special class of privileged little lords and ladies their family fortune makes them.
Family strife is the least damaging of the possible outcomes. I don't want to point any fingers, but is family unity so desirable ?
Quoting Outlander
That's a happy perspective. I wonder what percent of the world's population shares it? Not these people, probably. Or these... How about them? Are they getting full value? Closer to home, are these guys? They get $19-23,000 a year; the guy up in the big corner office takes home $1.2 000,000,000. Gee, Donnie must work really, really hard and never go to the bathroom at all!
Quoting Outlander
No. But if they dislike you for giving children cancer or killing all the fish, you might deserve some of the blame.
So dictates the law. Reason dictates otherwise.
If Rawls' theory of justice is correct in concluding that "economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged" then this maximin principle may entail that taxation is just.
Although I suspect you agree more with Nozick.
But what about freedom and [s]greed[/s] self interest and, most important, incentive? Who will want to innovate and be an entrepreneur if they dont have the possibility to hoard more wealth than half the world population combined?
Unacceptable. Because liberty. Freedom. Socialism. Big government. So forth.
Yes, the acquisitions and transfers need to be just in order for the distribution to be just. Taxation is not a just acquisition or transfer.
The problem is that "contracts" aren't aimed at reaching morally just outcomes; they are generally not included at all. So the idea people have an extra-legal moral right to pre-tax income is fundamentally flawed.
That sounds like a lot of work. Rather, the conviction that I ought not to take another's things is enough to refrain me from doing so. The law, on the other hand, is inconsistent. It forbids stealing for some but allows it for itself.
Why is it flawed? It could be that one has a moral right to some X but no legal right to it. Case in point: abortion in some countries.
It is if Rawls' (or some other) theory is correct. See distributive justice for a more in-depth account.
Naturally, Im in the retributive justice camp myself.
There is something special in having a few people able to actually shake things up a little. Such as with Elon Musk.
I do wonder though whether or not people like him would be inhibited or not by caps on wealth? Guess we will never know (well, at least for a good few decades!).
Given that my "ideal society" consists in post-scarcity economic democracy, "wealth" would be measured only as personal reputation acquired by positively contributing to (A) excellence (i.e. singular performances, innovations, inventions, discoveries) in culture and/or (B) positivesum conflict resolutions, such that "the wealthiest person" at any time would be the one who is most esteemed (trusted?), or among a cohort of the most esteemed, by her society for service to the overall well-being (i.e. flourishing, sustainability) of her society.
I would refuse to answer how wealthy the wealthiest person should be without first being aware of how it came to be that this level of relative wealth was ensured.
Wealth is just the sum value of one's private property, and there's nothing inherently wrong with a person being wealthy. Under capitalism, important mechanisms are responsible for creating individuals with extreme wealth. Replacing these mechanisms to ensure people aren't too wealthy may have unintended consequences.
I would say that to allow capitalism to flourish, it'd be disastrous to limit wealth to just a few million. It must be several magnitudes higher than that.
The uber-rich may say that they need incentives to continue, and that's true, but certainly not incentives at the current level. There should be no cap, but it should become progressively harder and harder to build wealth beyond certain levels. These levels need to be far higher than a few million though.
Quoting Philosophim
Philosophim's comment is spot on and can serve as my conclusion.
Guess the richest guy or girl should be able to buy a kickass Mercedes and a Lambo, Have a nice villa of say 250m2 and one really nice or 2 pretty nice summer homes. Making say one travel yearly to an exotic place
Nothing more than that. No yatchs or private jets. And massive propaganda not to spoil kids but making them equal in opportunity save the gene material.
But when the lambo rolls down the street it would be accompanied by commoners taking their hats off and bowing in revere for someone that produces real miracles, not the fake miracles of Gods.
But Socrates really had a better suggestion sketched out 2k+Ys ago.
Quoting Captain Homicide
My ideal society would be orientated around a different value system to our own and the idea of personal wealth, in terms of money or belongings, would be obsolete. Access to decent housing, health services and good food would be available to all, with no special rules and privileges for some at the expense of a less privileged class.
To get to the tech level needed for post-scarcity, something like a profit-motive will have to exist.
Profit and wealth would be hard to get rid of, even in a post scarcity society. While a scarcity of material goods wouldn't exist, a scarcity of services provided by humans would and people with wealth who are used to having enough money to pay for whatever services they want would be loathe to give up that wealth.
Ubiquitous AI-automation would eliminate that "scarcity" (as it's already incrementally doing now).
Silly question. Besides generational migration to space habitats, thinning the human herd is much easier and more efficient. :smirk:
If I can build 20 birdhouses a day and you only 5, I'd be opposed to a law limiting my birdhouse building to 5 so we can all have the same amount.
And should I be required to give my extra birdhouses away for fairness' sake, I'm pretty sure I'd stop making surplus birdhouses and we'd just have less birdhouses.
People like to have children, and like to have a bit of room, so it's a bit silly is to imagine an end to all shortage and limitation. Perhaps we will start building ring worlds?