#mitigating power gravity

[mentalisttraceur]

I think we've failed as a society when positions of power are selfish wins to sign up for or be in.

The emotional experience of becoming a cop or a president or judge or legislator should be closer to "(deep breath) okay... fuck this is going to hurt... I kinda want to back out. Is it too late to back out? Arghh, no, I gotta remember the people I'm doing this for, it's worth it."

[mentalisttraceur]

On 100% Marginal Income Tax

The basic arguments against tax rates approaching 100% look something like "the most productive people will stop working as hard!" and "that's punishing people for success!"

Good, actually. Money is power, and power has gravity. We should stop people from gaining too much power relative to everyone else.

Even if your income reliably tracks the value you are contributing to society, too much power in too few hands is always eventually harmful to society and most of its people.

So a tax rate on all gains which gradually increases until it reaches 100% makes a lot of sense as a way for society to say where it currently thinks that limit is, and as the first approximation of preventing the excess or redirecting it for the greater good.

[mentalisttraceur]

Thinking about how lots of homes sit vacant because the prices are gouged by people who just want to make the most profit they can out of owning and selling them.

There's a real market price of what real humans with real demand for housing would pay for the housing supply, and there's this other largely decoupled market price of what people holding and flipping houses for profit are willing to pay.

But money that's not circulating might as well just not exist for a lot of purposes, and I think therein lies some sort of clue as to how we fix this. If we had a system that deliberately did the equivalent of making stagnant pools of money worth less, more than inflation already does because clearly that's not disincentive enough.

Presumably just a non-use tax would do it - of course a tax which hits harder the more you have, because we don't want to disincentivize grandma from saving money for a great retirement life in a bank account which isn't being used, and we want to put just a little disincentive on some CEO's third house which is unused most of the time, but we absolutely want to put strong disincentive on people and companies sitting on thousands of homes without matching them with real people looking for housing right now.

In fact applied more generally this might be pretty good protection against power gravity, or at least the money gravity part/form/dimension of it.