Tonight on GeekNights, we consider how you must tax the rich if you wish to have a society. In the news, Mayor Mamdani ends those ridiculous criminal summonses for cyclists, BTS returns, and America's war against Iran endangers the world.
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If you’re into dry ass tomes I can’t recommend Thomas Piketty’s “Capital In the 21st Century” and “Capital and Ideology” enough. Both are serious, numbers driven analysis by an honest to god economist of capital, it’s growth and contractions through history, and how it affects the world. If you’ve ever wanted hard numbers to prove that those with wealth has always, and will always, push down on everyone below them to maintain their state these books are for you! His analysis focuses, at first, mostly on England, France, and America, because we’re the ones with hard records for wealth that goes back the furthest.
He then later expands that analysis to India and China. If I recall correctly he even shows that a non insignificant portion of those who are crazy wealthy in China today were from families that were wealthy before communism took hold in China. Which just goes to show that even murdering tons of rich folks won’t get rid of them all.
On the more sad note, he does also show that the 20th century is really just an aberration in history with the levels of equality that we’ve seen and that we’re rapidly heading towards a world that more closely resembles the Belle Epoch where the poors are kept poor by the rentier class who use rents to squeeze the people out of every last cent they have.
He is more descriptive but does some analysis on wealth taxes and shows that they really are the only way to avoid this sort of world.
This is something that is really important to emphasize. A true middle class has existed for only brief periods of history in a few places. But a lot of people alive today, self included, were fortunate enough to have lived, or still be living, that lifestyle. People like me have never lived a life of poverty nor of wealth. It’s really hard to get the correct perspective when the only thing someone has ever known their whole life is the experience of an extreme outlier.