1564
The rich convinced us that taxing them is too complicated but everyday people can be taxed pretty easily
(discuss.online)
this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
1564 points (99.1% liked)
Work Reform
16408 readers
495 users here now
A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Okay, so you're not serious about change to your supposedly better system.
What?
You're advocating for maintaining status quo "institutions". I'm advocating improvement. You're advocating regression. I'm advocating progress.
Your criticism here makes your stance seem wildly inconsistent.
I think you need to explain what you mean by "institutions" when you suggest that I will be destroying them.
The "institutions" I believe will be destroyed by a securities tax are overtly harmful and should be destroyed. Can you provide me an example of a beneficial "institution" that would not survive?
No, I can't "prove" to you that a "beneficial" institution would not survive because if I name an institution that I think is beneficial, like universities or research institutes, you'll either argue it's not beneficial or argue that it would survive via some other mechanism. Either way, it'd miss the point that there are in fact institutions that do good in the world that are built on the current systems and need some means of transitioning or surviving your radical change. You're clearly uninterested in those arguments, which basically means no decent people (i.e. people who are intent on minimizing harm) are going to be interested in working with you.
Honestly, I don't even really want to write this comment because I'm struggling not to assume you're just some angry kid. Like maybe you're someone who broadly agrees with me but just hasn't worked through the practical math of whole percentile wealth taxes on institutions or who doesn't yet appreciate that endowments effectively serve as a decentralized wealth re-distribution for public good causes. We're probably both positively inclined towards notions of wealth limits and income limits for individuals, but we clearly have very different views on how institutions and organizations should function. I don't really want to engage in an argument about that with someone who seems perfectly willing to see everything burnt to the ground in the name of "progress".
Do you know how you make progress? You gain a deep understanding of how things work and then you tweak, modify, and twist bits and pieces -- this doesn't result in marginal effects either because these modifications aren't just cumulative but synergistic and ultimately transformative. Institutions like academia have real problems, no doubt, but a few simple rules could dramatically improve them: limiting the ratio of administrators to other employees to combat administrative bloat, incentivizing use and teaching of FOSS to prevent corporate software entrenchment, addition of lotteries to application processes mitigate alumni advantages. There are lots of ideas that won't destroy every humanities department or every independent scientific research institute in the country by making endowments nonviable.
I don't believe I asked you to prove it. I asked for examples of such institutions. When you say "institutions", the first thing that springs to my mind are corporate landlords taking investor dollars to buy up residential properties, and artificially inflate housing prices. That is an example of an "institution" that is contributing to the problem. That institution exists primarily to benefit the interests of corporate entities and ultra-high net worth individuals. That is an institution that should not survive in its current form.
Name some. You're assuming I'm either going to destroy such institutions, or that I will need some sort of "exception" in order for them to continue operating. I don't think this is likely. I think that such institutions would fall well within this plan. I think they could, for example, structure their portfolios to pass the security tax obligation through to the natural-person shareholders who own and control them.
For example, that abusive REIT I mentioned above is currently under the control of Problem Class shareholders. That problem class is using that control to transfer wealth from the working class to the problem class. When the Problem Class shareholders withdraw, this REIT comes under the control of Working-Class Shareholders; the kind of people who are harmed by that exploitative behavior.
Which is why I'm asking for examples. What harm do you think is going to arise from driving the Problem Class out of these nebulous "institutions"?
I gave the two institutions I'm most concerned with: Universities and Research Institutes. Perhaps I'm not sure what you mean by structuring portfolios through natural-person shareholders, but this sounds like saying this person or that is responsible for this 10Mil of the portfolio. Problematic given that it would seem to give people the opportunity to run off with large amounts of money.
While exceptions are problematic since they're either too simple or too prone to corruption, I think there are exceptions that would be hard to abuse if properly defined and restricted. For example, democratically ran non-profit limited to $10M per voting employee. Perhaps this is what you're thinking when you say structuring portfolios through natural-person shareholders; though, these are rather different in terms of who owns the money, but I suppose you could argue that technically the democratic collective owns the money, so they're the "same". That's not how I interpreted what you said, but I hope that's what you mean, and I could probably agree with that. A $10M endowment is a smidge low for some types of research, but good enough for most especially if collectivized.