Rereading this thread again, another reason occurred to my why taxing capital gains isn't a workaround to taxing corporations: fluctuations in stock price are not directly proportional to corporate profits. There are companies making no profit at all with exorbitant stock prices because of speculation, and the reverse happens as well.
Whereas passing all profits as dividends through shareholders and then taxing the shareholders directly taxes the corporation's profits, just taxing each owner directly instead of the corporation as a whole. Whether and how to tax the appreciation of the asset that is a share of stock is a different matter entirely, at best loosely correlated with taxing corporate profits.
This is a language difference, and a context issue. The English demonym for people from the United States of America is "Americans", and "America" the proper noun in the singular refers to the United States of America, while the continents of the western hemisphere are "the Americas", and terms like "North America", "South America", "Central America", etc, are proper nouns referring to regions of the Americas, not adjectives modifying the noun "America" (viz. "south America", the generic adjective applied to the noun, would be places like Alabama and Texas, while "South America", the proper noun, would be places like Columbia and Brazil). The English adjective "American" can, depending on context, refer to things from America or things from the Americas.
In Spanish, "America" refers to the continent (reckoned as singular) of the western hemisphere, and the north/south/central distinctions are identical whether you're using generic adjectives describing the whole continent or proper nouns. The adjective "Americano" refers to things from that continent. The Spanish demonym for people from the United States of America is "Estadounidense", as the United States (of America) is translated to Estado Unidos (de America).
It should have been very clear from the context of this discussion, especially since it's taking place in English, that "Americans" referred to people from America, the United States, and not to people from the Americas more broadly.
So... negative dividends automatically result in share sales to cover the loss, and positive dividends automatically result in share purchases. That would massively increase volatility. Each earnings report would trigger a mass sell or buy. That seems like a very bad idea, unless your holding in a particular equity consists of a number of shares plus a slush account... and that still wouldn't prevent instant mass automated selloffs if the negative earnings were bad enough or if a large number of investors had taken cash out of the slush account.
You're looking at this through the lens of the way shareholding is currently handled, where I'm talking about a completely revamped system. The idea I'm going for that you're interpreting as mass share sales and purchases is intended to be more like a stock split, but not exactly that either. It's like this: Alice and Bob each invest $100 into a venture together and so each own a 50% stake in that venture. That venture returns $20 on their investment, so there's $10 profit each for Alice and Bob. Alice decides to leave her share of the profit in the company's coffers to continue using (reinvesting it, which happens by default unless she chooses otherwise), while Bob takes his entire share of the profit to spend elsewhere. Thus Alice now has $110 invested in the company while Bob still has only $100; consequently, their respective stakes in the company are adjusted to 52.38/47.62 instead of 50/50. If both had let their profits be reinvested, or both had taken them all, or in any other case where they took the same amount of them, no ownership would change. Scale up to more realistic dollar amounts and numbers of shareholders. And then if it's a loss instead of a profit, just reverse all the signs, and thus who owes who for what outcome.
I'm not certain of the best way to implement that kind of behavior within the framework we currently have.
That's not how capital gains taxes work. They're paid only on realized gains, which are absolutely income. When you sell an asset that has appreciated, or when you receive a payment from an asset you own -- when you realize dollar income from the asset -- you have a taxable capital gain (unless it falls into some tax-exempt category). If the gain is short-term (less than a year) it's taxed as ordinary income. If the gain is long-term (a year or more), then you pay the lower capital gains tax rate on it.
Yes I know that's how it is currently reckoned, but we are talking about a hypothetical different way of reckoning it. When I said that capital gains aren't actually income, I meant that they shouldn't be reckoned that way. I then explained the reasoning, maybe a bit too succinctly, so here it is again in longer form: if I buy a widget from you for $X, then we've apparently agreed that the widget is worth the same thing as $X, so neither of us has gained or lost absolute wealth from this transaction; presumably we're both benefitting from the rearrangement of who owns what -- the widget and the dollars -- which is why we did it in the first place, but if we're going to tax that "gain", it would be both of us deserving of the tax since we both gained from the trade. Later on I sell that widget for $Y, and the exact same situation applies between me and the new buyer and the agreement about the value of the widget, so again, either there's no gain or we both gain (depending on how you look at it) so you either tax neither of us or both of us. I'm assuming the "tax both of us" situation is prima facie absurd, only partly because of the difficulty in assessing how much we mutually gained from the trade (it's not the dollar amount of the sale, because the seller lost that dollar amount of merchandise in exchange for that many dollars and vice versa the buyer, so what is it?), so the remaining option is tax neither of us. A capital gain is nothing but a pair of two such transactions, so if neither of them should be taxable, why should the pair of them be?
Are you seriously using "American" to mean "person from the Americas" (two continents) here, rather than "person from America" (the one country under discussion).
Modern trinkets like smart phones may be equal between rich and poor, but that's not a shit in the bucket compared to the unbelievably vast gulf between rich and poor when it comes to basic necessities like a place you're allowed to exist without bribing someone else for the privilege. Most people today will never own land, and will consequently be perpetual serfs to those who do. So what if you and I own the same goddamn cellphone or "ermagerg flat screen tv" when I have to pay half my income to you (because if not you, then to someone else) for the privilege of even sitting somewhere and starving to death even if I consume nothing at all, and you meanwhile get to live the high life courtesy of my labor because of that.
That ends up hurting the "middle class" (those who are already employed full time) and does nothing to the upper classes who are the ones who really need to shoulder the burden.
It's already hard enough crossing the threshold from lower-class to actually-middle-class (getting to the point where you only pay for what you consume and not just to service interest and rent). Reducing full time will make that even harder for those who already stand some shot of doing so by working themselves to death, and yes it will help out those who don't even have such a shot a bit, but all of them will then be equally stuck on the wrong side of the curve and none of them will be able to get over.
A solution needs to take money from those at the top to help those at the bottom. Taking from those in the middle just further separates the gap between top and bottom.
What about losses, are those assessed to the shareholders? If not, then your scheme means that corporations can't save/invest current profits to hedge against future losses
Yes losses are assessed to shareholders as well, but also reread the part about automatic reinvestment unless the investors opt out. The profits pass through the investors solely for accounting purposes, and then unless those investors individually choose to hold on to some of them (cashing themselves out of ownership as they do so, relative to those who let it reinvest), they pass right back to the corporation to continue using. Losses likewise pass through; just invert all the signs involved, and that means you pay up ("get paid" negative money) if you want to divest yourself of responsibility for a company you think is failing, or else if you have faith that it will recover, you can hang onto your share of ownership and let your part of the debt be cancelled later by future profits.
via capital gains taxes
Capital gains taxes are not ideal because in a substantial way capital gains aren't actually income. You're not getting paid for something. Something you own is just worth more than it used to be. (In my ideal tax system, trades of goods and capital would not be taxed at all; if you exchange money for something with the same value as that money you haven't gained or lost any actual wealth. Income from anything besides the sale of goods and capital, minus expenses on anything besides the purchase of goods and capital, is the measure of your actual change in wealth, and that is the value that ought to be subject to tax. Rents and interest even more so, or eventually, if possible, only so, because that is the way that having or lacking capital actually generates wholly unearned income or expense).
Letting investors choose how much of their investments' profits they want to be paid as dividends (counterbalanced by how that will grow or shrink their share of ownership) also means that investing is less speculative, less about hoping that something you bought becomes worth more to someone else later, and more about putting your money into ventures that actually generate steady consistent income. So the profits you make from investment come in the form of dividends, taxed exactly like any other income would be, and it doesn't matter so much what the price of a share of stock is, because you're not just looking to sell it later, and capital gains become less of a thing overall to begin with.
Correction: it's only a problem if the productivity-increasing technology is unevenly distributed.
Actually, it's only a problem if the productive capital necessary to live is unevenly distributed. You could give everyone in the world a free magic star trek replicator that can supply them with all the goods they want, and then all labor becomes worthless and the vast majority of human beings, who do not own land, suddenly are unable to pay their rent or mortgage and are up shit creek, all because that most basic form of capital, land, is unevenly distributed. So what should have been a utopia suddenly becomes a dystopia instead.
Once they have robots to build them all the shiny toys they want, and all of the capital they already have, they don't need "money" from plebs anymore. They continue to get richer in the way that really matters, the material goods and services available to them through the labor of the robots they own upon the capital they already own, and all the schmucks that they used to sell things to for money with which to employ them (to labor upon the capital they already own, including to make the things that they sell to get the money to employ them, in a nice self-sustaining perpetual free labor machine) can just die as quickly as possible and get out of the way for all they care, they have robots to work for them now so who needs people anymore?
A basic income plus a flat income tax with no exceptions creates a centerward pressure toward the middle class. Tax everyone x% of all income no matter what, give everyone x% of the mean income as a tax credit, people who make the mean income see no difference, people who make below it get money, people who make above it pay for that.
The way corporate profits and taxes are handled in the first place should be completely refactored.
100% of corporate profits should be paid as dividends, with automatic reinvestment of those dividends in the corporation (at a rate settable by each shareholder, defaulting to 100% reinvestment) in exchange for a greater share of the company (compared to those who opt not to reinvest).
Dividends are taxable, so the investors pay the tax, each at their own marginal tax rate (so small investors with meager incomes trying to save for retirement aren't taxed out the wazoo, but if some one individual personally owns vast swaths of the productive economy, they are).
Don't tax the corporation itself at all, because all of its profits are already being taxed at the shareholder level.
And like on Earth, the place complaining most about taxes will turn out to be a net beneficiary of wealth between them and the taxing body. So sure Lunies, we'll stop taxing you, and stop sending you the supplies that keep you all alive while we're at it.
More than the existing requirements for preemptive certification of everything already do? My proposal is basically to make what we already have in place optional, but opting out of it exposes you (the business) to legal risk, putting economic pressure toward doing things as we do them now, without quite mandating them and thus curtailing liberty a little less.
The usual libertarian-suggested response to fraud is lawsuits however, not having the FDA/USDA/etc preemptively inspecting everything to make sure that no poor schmuck has to sue Subway over the content of their meat in the first place.
As a left-libertarian myself, my preferred response would be somewhere in between. I'm against licensure of any kind because prior restraint is antithetical to liberty, but any wronged party should be able to easily (as in, at no cost and little paperwork) call upon the full force of the state to come down hard upon whoever has wronged them. So Subway (and their suppliers) wouldn't have to have the government preemptively certify that they meet all actionable standards for their products, but if they don't, anyone harmed at all as a consequence can make a simple phone call and then Subway / etc are in deep shit, so it's probably in their own best interests if they pay up front for those inspections and certifications to make sure that that's not going to happen. (And smart consumers meanwhile can choose only to patronize businesses displaying such certifications prominently, or else choose not to at their own risk, but a risk of harm they can easily get justice for if it should materialize).
Put it another way: if some omniscient computer were tasked with allocating resources in the way that does the most good for humans as a whole, it would not be the way capitalism allocates them, so capitalism is not allocating them effectively.
How do you define utility if not benefit to people? If the system is not benefitting most people it is not effectively maximizing utility, even if it maximizes utility among the subset of people who see any utility at all.
That distinction is entirely within the realm of people who have resources to allocate to start with. If you don't, you don't get a chance to be either a good investor or a bad investor; you don't get to invest at all, because anything 'allocated' to you must immediately be spent servicing unavoidable debts (like rent or mortgage interest) to others who then get to spend it again on someone who will just have to pay it right back to another capital owner.
The population density of California is on the same order of magnitude as the US as a whole, and many other countries. It is populous but also very big.
That is a tough problem but capitalism does not solve it effectively, as it preferentially allocates resources to those who already have a surplus of them and away from those with a defecit of them, precisely the opposite of an effective solution.
I like a lot of what you have been writing in this thread, but as a semi-rural liberal (libertarian socialist actually) this post just makes me think: maybe we shouldn't live in cities then.
In a slave economy, the masters own their servants directly.
In a feudal economy, the lords own the land the servants live and work on, and the servants are free... to choose which lord they will serve in exchange for the land to live and work on.... or to not work, and not live, if they prefer.
In a capitalist economy, the capitalists own different kinds of capital besides land and the servants can mix and match whose capital they work on and whose capital they live on and try to pair it up so some of their masters^W lords^W capitalists pay enough for work to cancel out what the others charge to live.
What most people today call "communism" is just state capitalism, where there is only one master/lord/capitalist that owns all the various kinds capital and for whom everyone works and by whom everyone lives: the state.
It's all just degrees of abstraction away from slavery unless you own all the capital you need to live on and work with yourself; and by the time you're there, it's an easy step further to get some poor schmuck to work it for you in exchange for borrowing what he needs to live, and then you are part of the problem yourself, an effective slavemaster with your first servant.
10% of America live in a place with exorbitant cost of living. Something must be done, and moving them all to effectively another country isn't an answer.
I live in CA and watching HGTV makes me depressed because it's nothing but one young couple after another effortlessly realizing a dream that will take me an entire life of hard work and sacrifice to even have a hope of securing before I die.
Actually, I just had a spot of hope after rereading this just now:
It only takes one robot-owning elite with his unlimited robot-supplied resources to decide that he'd like to give everyone free robots, and bam, utopia for everyone. So long as not 100% of the eventual robot-owning elites are complete heartless monsters, it's utopia for everyone. Hurray!
Slashdot Mirror
Rereading this thread again, another reason occurred to my why taxing capital gains isn't a workaround to taxing corporations: fluctuations in stock price are not directly proportional to corporate profits. There are companies making no profit at all with exorbitant stock prices because of speculation, and the reverse happens as well.
Whereas passing all profits as dividends through shareholders and then taxing the shareholders directly taxes the corporation's profits, just taxing each owner directly instead of the corporation as a whole. Whether and how to tax the appreciation of the asset that is a share of stock is a different matter entirely, at best loosely correlated with taxing corporate profits.
This is a language difference, and a context issue. The English demonym for people from the United States of America is "Americans", and "America" the proper noun in the singular refers to the United States of America, while the continents of the western hemisphere are "the Americas", and terms like "North America", "South America", "Central America", etc, are proper nouns referring to regions of the Americas, not adjectives modifying the noun "America" (viz. "south America", the generic adjective applied to the noun, would be places like Alabama and Texas, while "South America", the proper noun, would be places like Columbia and Brazil). The English adjective "American" can, depending on context, refer to things from America or things from the Americas.
In Spanish, "America" refers to the continent (reckoned as singular) of the western hemisphere, and the north/south/central distinctions are identical whether you're using generic adjectives describing the whole continent or proper nouns. The adjective "Americano" refers to things from that continent. The Spanish demonym for people from the United States of America is "Estadounidense", as the United States (of America) is translated to Estado Unidos (de America).
It should have been very clear from the context of this discussion, especially since it's taking place in English, that "Americans" referred to people from America, the United States, and not to people from the Americas more broadly.
So... negative dividends automatically result in share sales to cover the loss, and positive dividends automatically result in share purchases. That would massively increase volatility. Each earnings report would trigger a mass sell or buy. That seems like a very bad idea, unless your holding in a particular equity consists of a number of shares plus a slush account... and that still wouldn't prevent instant mass automated selloffs if the negative earnings were bad enough or if a large number of investors had taken cash out of the slush account.
You're looking at this through the lens of the way shareholding is currently handled, where I'm talking about a completely revamped system. The idea I'm going for that you're interpreting as mass share sales and purchases is intended to be more like a stock split, but not exactly that either. It's like this: Alice and Bob each invest $100 into a venture together and so each own a 50% stake in that venture. That venture returns $20 on their investment, so there's $10 profit each for Alice and Bob. Alice decides to leave her share of the profit in the company's coffers to continue using (reinvesting it, which happens by default unless she chooses otherwise), while Bob takes his entire share of the profit to spend elsewhere. Thus Alice now has $110 invested in the company while Bob still has only $100; consequently, their respective stakes in the company are adjusted to 52.38/47.62 instead of 50/50. If both had let their profits be reinvested, or both had taken them all, or in any other case where they took the same amount of them, no ownership would change. Scale up to more realistic dollar amounts and numbers of shareholders. And then if it's a loss instead of a profit, just reverse all the signs, and thus who owes who for what outcome.
I'm not certain of the best way to implement that kind of behavior within the framework we currently have.
That's not how capital gains taxes work. They're paid only on realized gains, which are absolutely income. When you sell an asset that has appreciated, or when you receive a payment from an asset you own -- when you realize dollar income from the asset -- you have a taxable capital gain (unless it falls into some tax-exempt category). If the gain is short-term (less than a year) it's taxed as ordinary income. If the gain is long-term (a year or more), then you pay the lower capital gains tax rate on it.
Yes I know that's how it is currently reckoned, but we are talking about a hypothetical different way of reckoning it. When I said that capital gains aren't actually income, I meant that they shouldn't be reckoned that way. I then explained the reasoning, maybe a bit too succinctly, so here it is again in longer form: if I buy a widget from you for $X, then we've apparently agreed that the widget is worth the same thing as $X, so neither of us has gained or lost absolute wealth from this transaction; presumably we're both benefitting from the rearrangement of who owns what -- the widget and the dollars -- which is why we did it in the first place, but if we're going to tax that "gain", it would be both of us deserving of the tax since we both gained from the trade. Later on I sell that widget for $Y, and the exact same situation applies between me and the new buyer and the agreement about the value of the widget, so again, either there's no gain or we both gain (depending on how you look at it) so you either tax neither of us or both of us. I'm assuming the "tax both of us" situation is prima facie absurd, only partly because of the difficulty in assessing how much we mutually gained from the trade (it's not the dollar amount of the sale, because the seller lost that dollar amount of merchandise in exchange for that many dollars and vice versa the buyer, so what is it?), so the remaining option is tax neither of us. A capital gain is nothing but a pair of two such transactions, so if neither of them should be taxable, why should the pair of them be?
I'm awa
Are you seriously using "American" to mean "person from the Americas" (two continents) here, rather than "person from America" (the one country under discussion).
Modern trinkets like smart phones may be equal between rich and poor, but that's not a shit in the bucket compared to the unbelievably vast gulf between rich and poor when it comes to basic necessities like a place you're allowed to exist without bribing someone else for the privilege. Most people today will never own land, and will consequently be perpetual serfs to those who do. So what if you and I own the same goddamn cellphone or "ermagerg flat screen tv" when I have to pay half my income to you (because if not you, then to someone else) for the privilege of even sitting somewhere and starving to death even if I consume nothing at all, and you meanwhile get to live the high life courtesy of my labor because of that.
That ends up hurting the "middle class" (those who are already employed full time) and does nothing to the upper classes who are the ones who really need to shoulder the burden.
It's already hard enough crossing the threshold from lower-class to actually-middle-class (getting to the point where you only pay for what you consume and not just to service interest and rent). Reducing full time will make that even harder for those who already stand some shot of doing so by working themselves to death, and yes it will help out those who don't even have such a shot a bit, but all of them will then be equally stuck on the wrong side of the curve and none of them will be able to get over.
A solution needs to take money from those at the top to help those at the bottom. Taking from those in the middle just further separates the gap between top and bottom.
What about losses, are those assessed to the shareholders? If not, then your scheme means that corporations can't save/invest current profits to hedge against future losses
Yes losses are assessed to shareholders as well, but also reread the part about automatic reinvestment unless the investors opt out. The profits pass through the investors solely for accounting purposes, and then unless those investors individually choose to hold on to some of them (cashing themselves out of ownership as they do so, relative to those who let it reinvest), they pass right back to the corporation to continue using. Losses likewise pass through; just invert all the signs involved, and that means you pay up ("get paid" negative money) if you want to divest yourself of responsibility for a company you think is failing, or else if you have faith that it will recover, you can hang onto your share of ownership and let your part of the debt be cancelled later by future profits.
via capital gains taxes
Capital gains taxes are not ideal because in a substantial way capital gains aren't actually income. You're not getting paid for something. Something you own is just worth more than it used to be. (In my ideal tax system, trades of goods and capital would not be taxed at all; if you exchange money for something with the same value as that money you haven't gained or lost any actual wealth. Income from anything besides the sale of goods and capital, minus expenses on anything besides the purchase of goods and capital, is the measure of your actual change in wealth, and that is the value that ought to be subject to tax. Rents and interest even more so, or eventually, if possible, only so, because that is the way that having or lacking capital actually generates wholly unearned income or expense).
Letting investors choose how much of their investments' profits they want to be paid as dividends (counterbalanced by how that will grow or shrink their share of ownership) also means that investing is less speculative, less about hoping that something you bought becomes worth more to someone else later, and more about putting your money into ventures that actually generate steady consistent income. So the profits you make from investment come in the form of dividends, taxed exactly like any other income would be, and it doesn't matter so much what the price of a share of stock is, because you're not just looking to sell it later, and capital gains become less of a thing overall to begin with.
Correction: it's only a problem if the productivity-increasing technology is unevenly distributed.
Actually, it's only a problem if the productive capital necessary to live is unevenly distributed. You could give everyone in the world a free magic star trek replicator that can supply them with all the goods they want, and then all labor becomes worthless and the vast majority of human beings, who do not own land, suddenly are unable to pay their rent or mortgage and are up shit creek, all because that most basic form of capital, land, is unevenly distributed. So what should have been a utopia suddenly becomes a dystopia instead.
Once they have robots to build them all the shiny toys they want, and all of the capital they already have, they don't need "money" from plebs anymore. They continue to get richer in the way that really matters, the material goods and services available to them through the labor of the robots they own upon the capital they already own, and all the schmucks that they used to sell things to for money with which to employ them (to labor upon the capital they already own, including to make the things that they sell to get the money to employ them, in a nice self-sustaining perpetual free labor machine) can just die as quickly as possible and get out of the way for all they care, they have robots to work for them now so who needs people anymore?
Oh and right now 75% of people make below the mean income so if you do that to what we have now, most people get money out of it.
A basic income plus a flat income tax with no exceptions creates a centerward pressure toward the middle class. Tax everyone x% of all income no matter what, give everyone x% of the mean income as a tax credit, people who make the mean income see no difference, people who make below it get money, people who make above it pay for that.
The way corporate profits and taxes are handled in the first place should be completely refactored.
100% of corporate profits should be paid as dividends, with automatic reinvestment of those dividends in the corporation (at a rate settable by each shareholder, defaulting to 100% reinvestment) in exchange for a greater share of the company (compared to those who opt not to reinvest).
Dividends are taxable, so the investors pay the tax, each at their own marginal tax rate (so small investors with meager incomes trying to save for retirement aren't taxed out the wazoo, but if some one individual personally owns vast swaths of the productive economy, they are).
Don't tax the corporation itself at all, because all of its profits are already being taxed at the shareholder level.
And like on Earth, the place complaining most about taxes will turn out to be a net beneficiary of wealth between them and the taxing body. So sure Lunies, we'll stop taxing you, and stop sending you the supplies that keep you all alive while we're at it.
More than the existing requirements for preemptive certification of everything already do? My proposal is basically to make what we already have in place optional, but opting out of it exposes you (the business) to legal risk, putting economic pressure toward doing things as we do them now, without quite mandating them and thus curtailing liberty a little less.
The usual libertarian-suggested response to fraud is lawsuits however, not having the FDA/USDA/etc preemptively inspecting everything to make sure that no poor schmuck has to sue Subway over the content of their meat in the first place.
As a left-libertarian myself, my preferred response would be somewhere in between. I'm against licensure of any kind because prior restraint is antithetical to liberty, but any wronged party should be able to easily (as in, at no cost and little paperwork) call upon the full force of the state to come down hard upon whoever has wronged them. So Subway (and their suppliers) wouldn't have to have the government preemptively certify that they meet all actionable standards for their products, but if they don't, anyone harmed at all as a consequence can make a simple phone call and then Subway / etc are in deep shit, so it's probably in their own best interests if they pay up front for those inspections and certifications to make sure that that's not going to happen. (And smart consumers meanwhile can choose only to patronize businesses displaying such certifications prominently, or else choose not to at their own risk, but a risk of harm they can easily get justice for if it should materialize).
Put it another way: if some omniscient computer were tasked with allocating resources in the way that does the most good for humans as a whole, it would not be the way capitalism allocates them, so capitalism is not allocating them effectively.
How do you define utility if not benefit to people? If the system is not benefitting most people it is not effectively maximizing utility, even if it maximizes utility among the subset of people who see any utility at all.
That distinction is entirely within the realm of people who have resources to allocate to start with. If you don't, you don't get a chance to be either a good investor or a bad investor; you don't get to invest at all, because anything 'allocated' to you must immediately be spent servicing unavoidable debts (like rent or mortgage interest) to others who then get to spend it again on someone who will just have to pay it right back to another capital owner.
The population density of California is on the same order of magnitude as the US as a whole, and many other countries. It is populous but also very big.
That is a tough problem but capitalism does not solve it effectively, as it preferentially allocates resources to those who already have a surplus of them and away from those with a defecit of them, precisely the opposite of an effective solution.
I like a lot of what you have been writing in this thread, but as a semi-rural liberal (libertarian socialist actually) this post just makes me think: maybe we shouldn't live in cities then.
In a slave economy, the masters own their servants directly.
In a feudal economy, the lords own the land the servants live and work on, and the servants are free... to choose which lord they will serve in exchange for the land to live and work on.... or to not work, and not live, if they prefer.
In a capitalist economy, the capitalists own different kinds of capital besides land and the servants can mix and match whose capital they work on and whose capital they live on and try to pair it up so some of their masters^W lords^W capitalists pay enough for work to cancel out what the others charge to live.
What most people today call "communism" is just state capitalism, where there is only one master/lord/capitalist that owns all the various kinds capital and for whom everyone works and by whom everyone lives: the state.
It's all just degrees of abstraction away from slavery unless you own all the capital you need to live on and work with yourself; and by the time you're there, it's an easy step further to get some poor schmuck to work it for you in exchange for borrowing what he needs to live, and then you are part of the problem yourself, an effective slavemaster with your first servant.
10% of America live in a place with exorbitant cost of living. Something must be done, and moving them all to effectively another country isn't an answer.
I live in CA and watching HGTV makes me depressed because it's nothing but one young couple after another effortlessly realizing a dream that will take me an entire life of hard work and sacrifice to even have a hope of securing before I die.
Actually, I just had a spot of hope after rereading this just now:
It only takes one robot-owning elite with his unlimited robot-supplied resources to decide that he'd like to give everyone free robots, and bam, utopia for everyone. So long as not 100% of the eventual robot-owning elites are complete heartless monsters, it's utopia for everyone. Hurray!