Rigorous testing is helpful, but I think it's the wrong approach. The problem here was lack of requirements and/or rigorous design. In the physical engineering disciplines, much effort is done to think about failure modes of designs before they are implemented. In software, for some reason, the lack of pre-implementation design and analysis is endemic. This leads to things like Heartbleed - not language choice, not tools, not lack of static testing.
I would also go as far as saying if you're relying on testing to see if your code is correct (rather than verify your expectations), you're already SOL because testing itself is meaningless if you don't know the things you have to test - which means up-front design and analysis.
That said, tools and such can help mitigate issues associated with lack of design, but the problem is more fundamental than a "coding error."
Mine is similar - I have a GE AM/FM alarm clock radio with red LED segmented display, but mine is a bit newer - I got I think in 1993. 21 years is pretty good - 100% fully functional (go go pre-ROHS analog radio!) and still keeps accurate time. Only thing wrong with it is the tab on the 9V backup battery compartment broke, so the door falls off if you lift the thing off the nightstand. I refuse to keep my phone by my bedside, so I still use the alarm function.
Contrast to a new one - it was either Emerson or Panasonic, can't remember which - I bought while on an extended work trip where I was put up in an apartment. This was in 2008, and the clock was so inaccurate it would gain 15 minutes a month.
I'd rather choose "Make it easier for people to make their own widgets or form companies to make widgets."
IP laws, some zoning laws, licensing laws, tax laws, accounting laws, and the like all make both making your own stuff or forming companies difficult; limited availability of low-cost machine tools and education makes it difficult to do stuff yourself. These are the things I would reform, not minimum wage or windfall profits tax.
I was trying to avoid being specific about which "things" needed to "cost less" - because any specific list tends to have more problems than a blanket statement like "things"...
I suppose I could have been a bit more precise: when I said we don't need higher incomes but things to cost less, what I should have said was "things to cost less relative to income, regardless of level of income." That said, my original assertion still stands: raising minimum wage will not reduce costs of items relative to wage in the long run (in the immediate short term it does, granted; but prices for most goods change much faster than wages so catch up quickly.)
Incidentally, removal of barriers to market entry is exactly the method to "rein in" corporate profits: profits are a sign of an inefficient market. Huge profits can only exist when it is too hard for competitors to enter a market - no invisible hand necessary. (Note: "too hard" to enter a market doesn't always mean something like a regulatory barrier; if a company out-innovates others, that is also a type of barrier.)
Price floors have never worked in all of history; I don't know why people think a wage price floor is a good idea. At best, with minimum wage, the long term effect is "nothing".
We don't need people to have higher incomes; we need things to cost less.
Somewhere along the way, society went from improving standard of living by creating new efficiencies to improving standard of living by taking as much profit from others as possible. The former is a sustainable non-zero-sum game, where the latter is zero sum and results in massive wealth concentration.
Raising minimum wage won't reduce the cost of rent, won't reduce the price of a new car, won't reduce the price of a gallon of milk, won't reduce the cost of health care. The only thing that will reduce prices is removing barriers to entry for things that don't need barriers - not adding more barriers.
(I wish, for instance, one of the provisions of the ACA was a new medical school in every state for instance and/or reduced requirements for general medical practice - bumps and bruises kind of stuff. That would reduce costs, not simple spreading costs among more people.)
Give it another 10 years and the gap will be getting near the,"let's form an angry mob and kill the rich guy, we can feed the whole city off of what is in his house.
I don't know many rich people that have a food warehouse in their residence. People tend to forget that most of the wealth of rich people is "paper" wealth - it still has to be converted to real goods and services at some point in time.
In the extreme situation you proposed - how are you going to ensure that farmers are still going to be producing food, and food delivery people are still going to be delivering food, so that taking the stuff in a rich person's house can still "feed the whole city"?
If there is a situation as you describe - all that "paper" wealth of the rich vanishes immediately... so are they really wealthy? The wealth of the rich really does depend heavily on the willingness of the masses to participate...
I'd rather go the other way, get the government out of picking winners/losers here and institute across the board apt tax while wiping out income/capital gains/inheritance taxes (keeping ss and gas taxes because they correspond with payout).
Depending on what your goals for a taxation system are, that's downright terrible. I agree with wiping out income tax, but not all capital gains tax. (I would eliminate capital gains tax on investments that produce new wealth - like profit made off buying new machines to build new products, but keep the tax for all "buy low sell high" gains) Inheritance tax I'd change along with property tax in general, which I'd change to be percentile based; that is, your tax rate is higher if you are in a higher percentile bracket of total wealth.
Consumption taxes are bad, because you are taxed if you have to consume (or the system must have complicated exemptions for "minimum allowed consumption"), but if you have extra to spend, you will (on average) consume less (in nominal terms) if consumption is taxed and you have the option of not consuming. Unless the taxing entity (government) adequately creates evenly-distributed demand with its tax revenue, consumption taxes will be a drag on the economy.
Unless you care about EMC or heat dissipation or something else that depends on the interactions between the components, yes, you can think of electronic circuits that way.
I suppose for logic-only devices this works, but as soon as you start wanting to do something that requires power, you can't just drop circuits together like that.
Personally I really *hate* watching blue ray movies in full resolution. Usually the material just looks cheesy to me, where you can see the boundaries of the CGI sequences, makeup smudges on the actors, obvious short cuts on the set construction and all kinds of things that just are not right. It actually makes it more difficult for me to suspend reality long enough to enjoy the movie.
Change the settings on your TV and/or BD player. Usually it's some kind of strange over-scan or post-processing mode with a name like "cinema view" or something unequally helpful. But I agree that "feature" makes movies look like they are stage plays - and it is crap, because SFX are made assuming you can't see it in that much clarity.
Forget about the privacy stuff - what about the advertisement crap!?
If "they" are going to use my car to display ads to someone else, then I better not have to pay anything for my registration. That should be paid by the people who want their ads displayed using my property.
The fact that the storm was larger in area and impacted regions with higher population density and correspondingly greater economic devastation was what made it newsworthy.
Indeed - I wish that, instead of just saying "most expensive storm ever!" they would normalize it somehow - perhaps to something like cost relative to annual mean salary per unit population density. This way you'd weed out all the effects of inflation and higher concentrations of development.
Perhaps mean salary isn't the correct metric - perhaps it's mean property value or something, but essentially something that would indicate indicate the relative damage of the storms rather than the relative amount of stuff we put in places that get hit by storms.
Why would the initial customers need to be charged? Presumably the folks would get enough funding from the Kickstarter (for example) that would include enough profit for them to be happy. This way, some other company "swooping in" won't have any impact on the ability to recoup R&D.
It's a very different model, yes - but it's one where instead of risking a small amount of your own (or VCs) money for a massive payout by winning the IP lottery, you have a (probably lower) guaranteed return with zero risk, assuming you actually met the initial funding threshold.
The way I see it - if you want the IP lottery, you can't complain about patent law
What about getting your potential customers to pay for the innovation itself, rather than some third-party VC group that generally only wants to pay for the right to earn profits off the innovation?
I think Kickstarter and the publicly-commissioned model could make the old funding models of VCs and banks and the like obsolete (for a large swath of products, at least). This reduces the middle-man effect, and ensures that the primary beneficiaries of innovation are the innovators and the consumers of the innovative products and services themselves, rather than the providers of liquidity.
Who is the "they" here? The employees of the company? Shareholders?
In either case I don't think it's relevant; my comment was more an observation of the fact that some people believe the only purpose of companies is to make money for the owners.
I might, though, go so far as to argue that most shareholders "do it" for almost nothing: they risk only financial loss, but have no responsibility for the activities of their company. Have shareholders ever been held responsible for the actions of the company they "own"?
It's a shame that people tend to view the purpose of (public) companies is to make money for their owners, rather than provide a product or service which can only be provided by pooling the resources of a group of people acting corporately.
And any economist will tell you trade creates wealth, by the simple fact that as long as both parties are willing, they're both getting something they want.
Not any economist I know!
Wealth is exactly constant during a trade. Now, value may increase (if it's a good trade), but wealth is constant. Wealth is only created by manufacturing and agriculture. Wealth is destroyed by consumption and decay (or active destructive activity like demolition, or disaters).
More trade may encourage the creation of new wealth, but it most definitely does not create it directly.
The trouble with most schemes to "better account for the cost of the externality" is that they don't actually better account for the cost of the externality. They just come up with some arbitrary pricing scheme (even a cap and trade market ends up being arbitrary) because the imposed cost is not linked in any way to the benefit of reducing the perceived unwanted external effect.
If, on the other hand, people had a market where (for example) you could trade health care discounts for increases in energy cost - then you would see a better representation of the cost of the externality. Or perhaps trading tax reductions for higher energy prices. I've never seen a proposal to do this, though. Instead people are asked to "pay more for energy now, so it will maybe reduce the chance you get sick in the future, and so maybe reduce the amount of health care cost increase in the future."
Ugh. I think the fair tax is perhaps the worst type of tax there is (consumption tax).
I've been reading and thinking a lot about taxes, and the perceived problems with taxes. Fundamentally, I believe that you should never tax consumption or production - what you should tax instead is "idle wealth" because you want resources to be used, not sitting idle. I therefore believe all taxes should be based on net wealth, but with a slight caveat:
The tax will still be an income tax only, but the tax rate is based on total net worth. This would help reduce the amount to which the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer" because poor people hold little wealth, so they will get to keep much of their income. The wealthy, however, since they are wealthy, would only be able to grow their wealth more and more slowly.
This is actually simpler than the Fair tax; you don't have to worry about taxing transactions or giving some kind of "credit" based on some average (and therefore incorrect) assumed "minimum standard of living" for food and clothing purchases or whatever.
Probably the most difficult aspects of what I've been thinking will be to figure out how to scale the tax rate appropriately to the wealth; it should probably be done somehow based on relative wealth (rather than an absolute number; e.g., perhaps your income tax rate should be the square of the wealth percentile in which you fall. If you're in the 1%-tile for wealth, your income tax rate is 0.01%; if you're in the 99%-tile for wealth, your income tax rate would be 98%). Note that this is not a marginal rate - this is the actual tax rate.
The other trick will be to figure out how to assign property, so people don't simply hide all their wealth in a holding company. Probably have to base it on shares held or something like that... but it's a proposal that is much more likely to help reduce income inequality, avoid punishing people for being productive, and prevent wealth from aggregating in the hands of a few.
I've always thought this "double taxation" argument is silly, because every single monetary unit exchanged is taxed multiple times.
Someone pays my employer money. My employer pays me some of that money and so pays payroll tax, and I pay income tax. My employer, presuming they make some profit, pays some corporate taxes on some of that money. When I buy something with my money, I probably pay sales tax on it. If I buy property, I pay property tax.
Where in this chain is there any money that is not "taxed multiple times"?
To be fair, there are a couple really good scenes in Revenge of the Sith. As a whole the movie is indeed pretty lacking, but if the whole movie had more scenes like the following, it could have been something truly grand:
The best is the scene (sans dialog!) where (eh, am I really going to spoiler this?) there is one character looking across the city toward where another character is doing something atrocious. That is a brilliant scene, where there is actually a glimpse of emotion, conveyed not by dialog or effects, but simple imagery and the score.
It's too bad, really, that the rest of the movie is so full of cliche and noise.
There is no such thing as a "fair" tax other than a simple per-capita fee. Taxing income isn't "fair" because it's essentially a limited form of slavery (a portion of one's labor is forcibly appropriated by someone else). Taxing consumption isn't "fair" because consumption is a different fraction of wealth for different populations.
But people don't really want a "fair" tax; they want a "tax everyone else more than me" tax.
A much better system is probably something like an income tax based not on income, but on accumulated wealth. So an organization (individual or corporation or trust, etc.) with zero assets would have zero tax, but if there are equivalent assets of $10M per person, the income tax should be close to 100% (after all, $10M is enough for $100k for 100 years!)
Such a system would help the poor, would help address income equality issues, and is inherently progressive since taxation is not in any way related to consumption. When applied to corporations it would result in lower costs for everything or higher incomes for employes, as companies would have less incentive to simply accumulate massive profits. It's also self regulating, since if you have zero income then the taxes decrease each year as the assets are utilized (for instance, if you are drawing down savings). This system also doesn't tax activity - which is what any income or consumption based tax does. Instead, it taxes accumulation.
Now, this is a radically different system than anyone has ever implemented, so will probably find no support - especially not among the rich who will scream that it affects them negatively (and they'd be right; this is not a "fair" proposal).
Out of curiosity: are they buying physical gold, storing it in a safe under their own control?
If not, then their "purchase" of gold is just as useless as putting money in the bank, buying stocks, etc. If things really do get that bad, why on earth would a rational person think their "gold account" will still be credited to them?
There's a slight difference, though, between "being responsible" and "being forced to behave in a certain way."
I agree that it's disappointing that people don't do what they can, even simple things, but it's actually rational: the cost that "influential groups" are trying to impose on the individual is so high that those costs are perceived to exceed the benefits obtained by mitigating the externalities.
Consider people saying gasoline prices should double today; that will massively impact current quality of living, and people are just not seeing that it's worth it for the possibility of slightly lower prices for, say, home insurance, in the future. Compound that with the fact that people already know that prices of insurance are going up anyway, and then you realize that you're paying now for a lesser increase in the future, and it's wholly rational why people are resistant to pay for these things today.
If you could actually show that paying for things now would make other things cost less in the future (compared to now, not to some estimated future cost if the activities took place) and people would jump all over it.
Case in point: people won't even buy a Volt because it costs almost twice as much as a traditional sedan, even though you can probably recover that extra cost over the lifetime of the vehicle and come out ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
Rigorous testing is helpful, but I think it's the wrong approach. The problem here was lack of requirements and/or rigorous design. In the physical engineering disciplines, much effort is done to think about failure modes of designs before they are implemented. In software, for some reason, the lack of pre-implementation design and analysis is endemic. This leads to things like Heartbleed - not language choice, not tools, not lack of static testing.
I would also go as far as saying if you're relying on testing to see if your code is correct (rather than verify your expectations), you're already SOL because testing itself is meaningless if you don't know the things you have to test - which means up-front design and analysis.
That said, tools and such can help mitigate issues associated with lack of design, but the problem is more fundamental than a "coding error."
Mine is similar - I have a GE AM/FM alarm clock radio with red LED segmented display, but mine is a bit newer - I got I think in 1993. 21 years is pretty good - 100% fully functional (go go pre-ROHS analog radio!) and still keeps accurate time. Only thing wrong with it is the tab on the 9V backup battery compartment broke, so the door falls off if you lift the thing off the nightstand. I refuse to keep my phone by my bedside, so I still use the alarm function.
Contrast to a new one - it was either Emerson or Panasonic, can't remember which - I bought while on an extended work trip where I was put up in an apartment. This was in 2008, and the clock was so inaccurate it would gain 15 minutes a month.
I'd rather choose "Make it easier for people to make their own widgets or form companies to make widgets."
IP laws, some zoning laws, licensing laws, tax laws, accounting laws, and the like all make both making your own stuff or forming companies difficult; limited availability of low-cost machine tools and education makes it difficult to do stuff yourself. These are the things I would reform, not minimum wage or windfall profits tax.
I was trying to avoid being specific about which "things" needed to "cost less" - because any specific list tends to have more problems than a blanket statement like "things"...
I suppose I could have been a bit more precise: when I said we don't need higher incomes but things to cost less, what I should have said was "things to cost less relative to income, regardless of level of income." That said, my original assertion still stands: raising minimum wage will not reduce costs of items relative to wage in the long run (in the immediate short term it does, granted; but prices for most goods change much faster than wages so catch up quickly.)
Incidentally, removal of barriers to market entry is exactly the method to "rein in" corporate profits: profits are a sign of an inefficient market. Huge profits can only exist when it is too hard for competitors to enter a market - no invisible hand necessary. (Note: "too hard" to enter a market doesn't always mean something like a regulatory barrier; if a company out-innovates others, that is also a type of barrier.)
Price floors have never worked in all of history; I don't know why people think a wage price floor is a good idea. At best, with minimum wage, the long term effect is "nothing".
We don't need people to have higher incomes; we need things to cost less.
Somewhere along the way, society went from improving standard of living by creating new efficiencies to improving standard of living by taking as much profit from others as possible. The former is a sustainable non-zero-sum game, where the latter is zero sum and results in massive wealth concentration.
Raising minimum wage won't reduce the cost of rent, won't reduce the price of a new car, won't reduce the price of a gallon of milk, won't reduce the cost of health care. The only thing that will reduce prices is removing barriers to entry for things that don't need barriers - not adding more barriers.
(I wish, for instance, one of the provisions of the ACA was a new medical school in every state for instance and/or reduced requirements for general medical practice - bumps and bruises kind of stuff. That would reduce costs, not simple spreading costs among more people.)
I don't know many rich people that have a food warehouse in their residence. People tend to forget that most of the wealth of rich people is "paper" wealth - it still has to be converted to real goods and services at some point in time.
In the extreme situation you proposed - how are you going to ensure that farmers are still going to be producing food, and food delivery people are still going to be delivering food, so that taking the stuff in a rich person's house can still "feed the whole city"?
If there is a situation as you describe - all that "paper" wealth of the rich vanishes immediately... so are they really wealthy? The wealth of the rich really does depend heavily on the willingness of the masses to participate...
Depending on what your goals for a taxation system are, that's downright terrible. I agree with wiping out income tax, but not all capital gains tax. (I would eliminate capital gains tax on investments that produce new wealth - like profit made off buying new machines to build new products, but keep the tax for all "buy low sell high" gains) Inheritance tax I'd change along with property tax in general, which I'd change to be percentile based; that is, your tax rate is higher if you are in a higher percentile bracket of total wealth.
Consumption taxes are bad, because you are taxed if you have to consume (or the system must have complicated exemptions for "minimum allowed consumption"), but if you have extra to spend, you will (on average) consume less (in nominal terms) if consumption is taxed and you have the option of not consuming. Unless the taxing entity (government) adequately creates evenly-distributed demand with its tax revenue, consumption taxes will be a drag on the economy.
Unless you care about EMC or heat dissipation or something else that depends on the interactions between the components, yes, you can think of electronic circuits that way.
I suppose for logic-only devices this works, but as soon as you start wanting to do something that requires power, you can't just drop circuits together like that.
Change the settings on your TV and/or BD player. Usually it's some kind of strange over-scan or post-processing mode with a name like "cinema view" or something unequally helpful. But I agree that "feature" makes movies look like they are stage plays - and it is crap, because SFX are made assuming you can't see it in that much clarity.
Forget about the privacy stuff - what about the advertisement crap!?
If "they" are going to use my car to display ads to someone else, then I better not have to pay anything for my registration. That should be paid by the people who want their ads displayed using my property.
Indeed - I wish that, instead of just saying "most expensive storm ever!" they would normalize it somehow - perhaps to something like cost relative to annual mean salary per unit population density. This way you'd weed out all the effects of inflation and higher concentrations of development.
Perhaps mean salary isn't the correct metric - perhaps it's mean property value or something, but essentially something that would indicate indicate the relative damage of the storms rather than the relative amount of stuff we put in places that get hit by storms.
Why would the initial customers need to be charged? Presumably the folks would get enough funding from the Kickstarter (for example) that would include enough profit for them to be happy. This way, some other company "swooping in" won't have any impact on the ability to recoup R&D.
It's a very different model, yes - but it's one where instead of risking a small amount of your own (or VCs) money for a massive payout by winning the IP lottery, you have a (probably lower) guaranteed return with zero risk, assuming you actually met the initial funding threshold.
The way I see it - if you want the IP lottery, you can't complain about patent law
What about getting your potential customers to pay for the innovation itself, rather than some third-party VC group that generally only wants to pay for the right to earn profits off the innovation?
I think Kickstarter and the publicly-commissioned model could make the old funding models of VCs and banks and the like obsolete (for a large swath of products, at least). This reduces the middle-man effect, and ensures that the primary beneficiaries of innovation are the innovators and the consumers of the innovative products and services themselves, rather than the providers of liquidity.
I still think there's a difference between the following philosophies:
Who is the "they" here? The employees of the company? Shareholders?
In either case I don't think it's relevant; my comment was more an observation of the fact that some people believe the only purpose of companies is to make money for the owners.
I might, though, go so far as to argue that most shareholders "do it" for almost nothing: they risk only financial loss, but have no responsibility for the activities of their company. Have shareholders ever been held responsible for the actions of the company they "own"?
It's a shame that people tend to view the purpose of (public) companies is to make money for their owners, rather than provide a product or service which can only be provided by pooling the resources of a group of people acting corporately.
Not any economist I know!
Wealth is exactly constant during a trade. Now, value may increase (if it's a good trade), but wealth is constant. Wealth is only created by manufacturing and agriculture. Wealth is destroyed by consumption and decay (or active destructive activity like demolition, or disaters).
More trade may encourage the creation of new wealth, but it most definitely does not create it directly.
The trouble with most schemes to "better account for the cost of the externality" is that they don't actually better account for the cost of the externality. They just come up with some arbitrary pricing scheme (even a cap and trade market ends up being arbitrary) because the imposed cost is not linked in any way to the benefit of reducing the perceived unwanted external effect.
If, on the other hand, people had a market where (for example) you could trade health care discounts for increases in energy cost - then you would see a better representation of the cost of the externality. Or perhaps trading tax reductions for higher energy prices. I've never seen a proposal to do this, though. Instead people are asked to "pay more for energy now, so it will maybe reduce the chance you get sick in the future, and so maybe reduce the amount of health care cost increase in the future."
Ugh. I think the fair tax is perhaps the worst type of tax there is (consumption tax).
I've been reading and thinking a lot about taxes, and the perceived problems with taxes. Fundamentally, I believe that you should never tax consumption or production - what you should tax instead is "idle wealth" because you want resources to be used, not sitting idle. I therefore believe all taxes should be based on net wealth, but with a slight caveat:
The tax will still be an income tax only, but the tax rate is based on total net worth. This would help reduce the amount to which the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer" because poor people hold little wealth, so they will get to keep much of their income. The wealthy, however, since they are wealthy, would only be able to grow their wealth more and more slowly.
This is actually simpler than the Fair tax; you don't have to worry about taxing transactions or giving some kind of "credit" based on some average (and therefore incorrect) assumed "minimum standard of living" for food and clothing purchases or whatever.
Probably the most difficult aspects of what I've been thinking will be to figure out how to scale the tax rate appropriately to the wealth; it should probably be done somehow based on relative wealth (rather than an absolute number; e.g., perhaps your income tax rate should be the square of the wealth percentile in which you fall. If you're in the 1%-tile for wealth, your income tax rate is 0.01%; if you're in the 99%-tile for wealth, your income tax rate would be 98%). Note that this is not a marginal rate - this is the actual tax rate.
The other trick will be to figure out how to assign property, so people don't simply hide all their wealth in a holding company. Probably have to base it on shares held or something like that... but it's a proposal that is much more likely to help reduce income inequality, avoid punishing people for being productive, and prevent wealth from aggregating in the hands of a few.
I've always thought this "double taxation" argument is silly, because every single monetary unit exchanged is taxed multiple times.
Someone pays my employer money. My employer pays me some of that money and so pays payroll tax, and I pay income tax. My employer, presuming they make some profit, pays some corporate taxes on some of that money. When I buy something with my money, I probably pay sales tax on it. If I buy property, I pay property tax.
Where in this chain is there any money that is not "taxed multiple times"?
To be fair, there are a couple really good scenes in Revenge of the Sith. As a whole the movie is indeed pretty lacking, but if the whole movie had more scenes like the following, it could have been something truly grand:
The best is the scene (sans dialog!) where (eh, am I really going to spoiler this?) there is one character looking across the city toward where another character is doing something atrocious. That is a brilliant scene, where there is actually a glimpse of emotion, conveyed not by dialog or effects, but simple imagery and the score.
It's too bad, really, that the rest of the movie is so full of cliche and noise.
The "Fair Tax" .... isn't
There is no such thing as a "fair" tax other than a simple per-capita fee. Taxing income isn't "fair" because it's essentially a limited form of slavery (a portion of one's labor is forcibly appropriated by someone else). Taxing consumption isn't "fair" because consumption is a different fraction of wealth for different populations.
But people don't really want a "fair" tax; they want a "tax everyone else more than me" tax.
A much better system is probably something like an income tax based not on income, but on accumulated wealth. So an organization (individual or corporation or trust, etc.) with zero assets would have zero tax, but if there are equivalent assets of $10M per person, the income tax should be close to 100% (after all, $10M is enough for $100k for 100 years!)
Such a system would help the poor, would help address income equality issues, and is inherently progressive since taxation is not in any way related to consumption. When applied to corporations it would result in lower costs for everything or higher incomes for employes, as companies would have less incentive to simply accumulate massive profits. It's also self regulating, since if you have zero income then the taxes decrease each year as the assets are utilized (for instance, if you are drawing down savings). This system also doesn't tax activity - which is what any income or consumption based tax does. Instead, it taxes accumulation.
Now, this is a radically different system than anyone has ever implemented, so will probably find no support - especially not among the rich who will scream that it affects them negatively (and they'd be right; this is not a "fair" proposal).
Out of curiosity: are they buying physical gold, storing it in a safe under their own control?
If not, then their "purchase" of gold is just as useless as putting money in the bank, buying stocks, etc. If things really do get that bad, why on earth would a rational person think their "gold account" will still be credited to them?
There's a slight difference, though, between "being responsible" and "being forced to behave in a certain way."
I agree that it's disappointing that people don't do what they can, even simple things, but it's actually rational: the cost that "influential groups" are trying to impose on the individual is so high that those costs are perceived to exceed the benefits obtained by mitigating the externalities.
Consider people saying gasoline prices should double today; that will massively impact current quality of living, and people are just not seeing that it's worth it for the possibility of slightly lower prices for, say, home insurance, in the future. Compound that with the fact that people already know that prices of insurance are going up anyway, and then you realize that you're paying now for a lesser increase in the future, and it's wholly rational why people are resistant to pay for these things today.
If you could actually show that paying for things now would make other things cost less in the future (compared to now, not to some estimated future cost if the activities took place) and people would jump all over it.
Case in point: people won't even buy a Volt because it costs almost twice as much as a traditional sedan, even though you can probably recover that extra cost over the lifetime of the vehicle and come out ahead.