Wealth Tax

= "for most of human history, most people lived in societies that were actively and intentionally egalitarian. They saw this as an adaptive technology. If you want to survive and thrive within any given ecosystem, you quickly realise that inequality is dangerous". [1]

Discussion

Jason Hickel:

"All of us who owe rents and debts are under tremendous pressure to find ways to pay tribute to people with wealth.

One way to solve this problem is with a wealth tax – an idea that is presently gaining a lot of steam. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have proposed a 10% annual marginal tax on wealth holdings over $1 billion. This would push the richest to sell some of their assets, thus distributing wealth more fairly and cutting rent-seeking behaviour. The upshot is that the rich would lose their power to force us to extract and produce more than we need, and as a result, remove pressure from the living world.

Progressive taxation has another ecological benefit: it generates revenues that can be invested in universal public services, like healthcare, education, transportation, affordable housing and so on. This is important, because expanding universal services is the single most powerful way to deliver high levels of well-being for all without needing to pursue high levels of GDP.

Given the severity of our ecological crisis, perhaps we should be more ambitious than what Saez and Zucman propose. After all, nobody "deserves" extreme wealth.

Read Ingrid Robeyns’s piece on why nobody should be allowed to be a billionaire here. It’s not earned, it’s extracted – from underpaid workers, from nature, from monopoly power, from political capture and so on. We should have a democratic conversation about this: at what point does hoarding become not only socially unnecessary, but actively destructive? $100m? $10m? $5m?

The ecological crisis – and the science of planetary boundaries – focuses our attention on one simple, undeniable fact: that we live on a finite planet, and if we are going to survive the 21st century, then we need to learn to live on it together. Toward this end, we can take lessons from our ancestors. Anthropologists tell us that, for most of human history, most people lived in societies that were actively and intentionally egalitarian. They saw this as an adaptive technology. If you want to survive and thrive within any given ecosystem, you quickly realise that inequality is dangerous, and you take special precautions to guard against it. That’s the kind of thinking we need." (https://thecorrespondent.com/728/we-cant-have-billionaires-and-stop-climate-change/842640975176-f7bab0dc?)