Taxing wealth instead of work is touted as an important part of the solution to the wealth gap, but I’m curious which other solutions have been proposed or attempted and have succeeded or failed.
Taxing wealth instead of work is touted as an important part of the solution to the wealth gap, but I’m curious which other solutions have been proposed or attempted and have succeeded or failed.
Inequality is always going to be prevalent in a meritocracy. And that’s okay. It should be possible to just get by nowadays and if you want a little extra, you can work or invest what you already have. A Universal Basic Income paid for by a wealth tax would work. There are of course also other means of financing UBI. Heavier taxing of luxury products, air travel, mileage taxing for cars, there are tons of options. Sadly none of these will ever be applied because countries are usually run by people who would feel these measures themselves and it would prevent them from putting spinning rims on gold jetskis.
Inequality will always be present. We aren’t all the same (I think that’s physically impossible as the universe prefers chaos) and thus any system we exist in will have inequality. It isn’t limited to meritocracy, idiocracy, or whatever.
We are the 99%. If we had a common goal and agreed on a major path to get there, it could be achieved. Tax Wealth, Not Work is a big thing right now (at least in my bubble) but I’m trying to look outside of it and thus this question came up.
You are correct but I do have one thing to point out. We do not live in a meritocracy and we never have. It is a cultural myth that is very harmful, in that it is a major force in maintaining inequality.
Smart work and dedication can certainly improve a persons individual circumstances, that’s just the way of things. But we most assuredly do not put those with merit on top. It’s the other way around, we ascribe merit to those on top in direct contradiction to any reasonable measure of ‘merit’.
We culturally use the myth of meritocracy to justify extreme wealth accumulation. Once a person gains a certain amount of wealth, their money makes money for them plus society has this lovely tendency to overlook misbehavior if the miscreant has money.