Probably. Or at least that turned out to not matter so much. The alternative, keeping both control of resources and direct power in the state, seems to keep causing millions of deaths. Separating them into markets for resources and power for a more limited state seems to work much better.
This idea also ignores innovation. New rich people come along and some rich people get poor. That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power.
> New rich people come along and some rich people get poor.
Absent massive redistribution that is usually a result of major political change (i.e. the New Deal), rich people tend to stay rich during their lifetimes and frequently their families remain so for generations after.
> That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power.
Due to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth for day to day existence, it's only value to an extremely wealthy person after endowing their heirs is power.
> Absent massive redistribution that is usually a result of major political change (i.e. the New Deal), rich people tend to stay rich during their lifetimes and frequently their families remain so for generations after.
The rule of thumb is it lasts up to three generations, and only for very very few people. They are also, for everything they buy, and everyone they employ, paying tax. Redistribution isn't the goal; having funded services with extra to help people who can't is the goal. It's not a moral crusade.
> Due to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth for day to day existence, it's only value to an extremely wealthy person after endowing their heirs is power.
> In, for example, the Netherlands the richest people pay less tax [0]. Do you think this is not the case in many other countries?
That's a non sequitur from the previous point. However, on the "who pays taxes?" point, that article is careful to only talk about income tax in absolute terms, and indirect taxes in relative terms. It doesn't appear to be trying to make an objective analysis.
> Is that a benefit of having rich people?
I don't share the assumption that people should only exist if they're a benefit.
> If companies were employee-owned that tax would still be paid.
Some companies are employee-owned, but you have to think how that works for every type of business. Assuming that it's easy to make a business, and the hard bit is the ownership structure is a mistake.
> Well it's not a matter of the people existing, it's whether they are rich or not. They can exist without the money.
I meant people with a certain amount of money. I don't think we should be assessing pros or cons of economic systems based on whether people get to keep their money.
> Anyway, if you don't think it matters if they are of benefit
I don't know what this means.
> then why did you bring up the fact that they pay taxes?
I bring it up because saying they pay less in income taxes doesn't matter if they're spending money on stuff that employs people (which creates lots of tax) and gets VAT added to it. Everything is constantly taxed, at many levels, all the time. Pretending we don't live in a society where not much tax is paid seems ludicrous. Lots of tax is paid. If it's paid as VAT instead of income tax - who cares?
>I don't think we should be assessing pros or cons of economic systems based on whether people get to keep their money.
but earlier you said:
>They are also, for everything they buy, and everyone they employ, paying tax.
So if we should not assess the economic system based on whether people keep their money, i.e. pay tax, then why mention that they pay tax? It doesn't seem relevant.
> So if we should not assess the economic system based on whether people keep their money, i.e. pay tax
Not just pay tax. People lose money over generations for all sorts of reasons.
I brought up tax in the context of "redistribution", as there's a growing worldview that says tax is not as a thing to pay for central services, but more just to take money from people who have more of it than they do.
>> Due to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth for day to day existence, it's only value to an extremely wealthy person after endowing their heirs is power.
> I think this is a non sequitur.
I mean after someone can afford all the needs, wants, and luxuries of life, the utility of any money they spend is primarily power.
> New rich people come along and some rich people get poor
This is an overly simplistic look, and disregards a lot of history where, unsurprisingly, the reason there was wealth redistribution wasn't "innovation" but government policy
> This is an overly simplistic look, and disregards a lot of history where, unsurprisingly, the reason there was wealth redistribution wasn't "innovation" but government policy
The point is that wealth and power aren't interchangeable. You're right that government bureaucrats have actual power, including that to take people's stuff. But you've not realised that that actual power means the rich people don't have power. There were rich people in the USSR that were killed. They had no power; the killers had the power in that situation.
Wealth is control of resources, which is power. The way to change power is through force that's why you need swords to remove kings and to remove stacks of gold, see assinations, war, the U.S..
You need swords to remove kings because they combined power and economy. All potential tyrannies do so: monarchy, socialism, fascism, etc. That's why separating power into the state and economy into the market gets good results.
Power is things like: can lock someone in a box due to them not giving a percentage of their income; can send someone to die in another country; can stop someone building somewhere; can demand someone's money as a penalty for an infraction of a rule you wrote.
You don't need money for those things.
Money (in a market) can buy you things, but only things people are willing to sell. You don't exert power; you exchange value.
Money can and does do all of those things. Through regulatory capture, rent seeking, even just good old hiring goons.
The government itself uses money to do those things. Police don't work for free, prisons aren't built for free, guns aren't free. The government can be thought of as having unfathomable amounts of money. The assets of a country includes the entire country (less anyone with enough money to defend it).
If a sword is kinetic energy, money is potential energy. It is a battery that only needs to be connected to the right place to be devastating. And money can buy you someone who knows the right place.
Governments have power because they have resources (money) not the other way around.
> Through regulatory capture, rent seeking, even just good old hiring goons.
Regulatory capture is using the state's power. The state is the one with the power. Rent seeking is the same. Hiring goons is illegal. If you're willing to include illegal things then all bets are off. But from your list of non-illegal things, 100% of them are the state using its power to wrong ends.
> The government itself uses money to do those things. Police don't work for free, prisons aren't built for free, guns aren't free.
Yes, but the point about power is the state has the right to lock you up. How it pays the guards is immaterial; they could be paid with potatoes and it'd still have the right. They could just be paid in "we won't lock you up if you lock them up". However, if Bill Gates wants to publicly set up a prison in the USA and lock people in it, he will go to jail. His money doesn't buy that power.
So, no. The state doesn't have power because it has enough money to pay for a prison and someone to throw you in it. People with money can't do what the state does.
The state is not a source of power, it is a holder of it. Plenty of governments have fallen because they ran out of resources, and any governments that run out of resources will die. The U.S. government has much, much more money than Bill Gates, but i am sure he could find a way to run a small prison, and escape jail time if needed.
The state only has the right to do something because it says it does. It can only say it does because it can enforce it in it's terrority. It can only enforce in its territory because it has people who will do said enforcement (or robots hypothetically). The people will only enforce because the government sacrifices some of its resources to them (or sacrifices resources to build bots). Even slaves need food, and people treated well enough to control them. Power doesn't exist with resources, the very measure of a state is the amount of resources it controls.
Money is for resources.
I am not arguing that anyone currently has the resources of a nation-state, it's hard to do when a state can pool a few thousand square miles of peoples money to it. I am arguing it money that makes a state powerful.
pt. 1: Whether he was right or wrong was pertinent. You can find plenty of eminent contemporaries of Marx who claimed the opposite. My point was that this is an argument made about technological change throughout history which has become a cliché, and in my opinion it remains a cliche regardless of how eminent (in a narrow field) the person making that claim is. Part of GP was from authority, and I question whether it is even a relevant authority given the scope of the claims.
> Was Marx Wrong?
pt. 2: I was once a Marxist and still consider much Marxist thought and writing to be valuable, but yes: he was wrong about a great many things. He made specific predictions about the _inevitable_ development of global capital that have not played out. Over a century later, the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few has not changed, but the quality of life of the average person on the planet has increased immensely - in a world where capitalism is hegemonic.
He was also wrong about the inevitably revolutionary tendencies of the working class. As it turns out, the working class in many countries tend to be either centre right or centre left, like most people, with the proportion varying over time.
> He was also wrong about the inevitably revolutionary tendencies of the working class.
Marx's conception of the "working class" is a thing that no longer exists; it was of a mass, industrial, urban working class, held down by an exploitative capitalist class, without the modern benefits of mass education and free/subsidized health care. The inevitability of the victory of the working class was rhetoric from the Communist Manifesto; Marx did anticipate that capitalism would adapt in the face of rising worker demands. Which it did.
Not true. In Das Kapital, Marx comments that working class is not only and necessarily factory workers, even citing the example of teachers: just because they work in a knowledge factory, instead of a sausage factory, this does not change nothing. Marx also distinguished between complex and simple labor, and there is nothing in Marx writings that say that it is impossible in a capitalist society to become more complex so that we need more and more complex labor, which requires more education. Quite the opposite, in fact. It could be possible to infer with his analysis that capitalist societies were becoming more complex and such changes would happen.
Moreover, you would know only if he was wrong about the victory of the working class after the end of capitalism. The bourgeoisie cannot win the class struggle, as they need the working class. So either the central contradiction in capitalism will change (the climate crisis could potentially do this), capitalism would end in some other non-anticipated way (a meteor? some disruptive technology not yet known?) or the working class would win. Until then, the class struggle will simply continue. An eternal capitalism that never ends is an impossible concept.
Not even talking about the various tin-pot dictators paying nominal lip service to him, but Marx predicted that the working class would rise up against the bourgeoisie/upper class because of their mistreatment during the industrial revolution in well, a revolution and that would somehow create a classless society. (I'll note that Marx pretty much didn't state how to go from "revolution" to "classless society", so that's why you have so many communist dictators; that between step can be turned into a dictatorship to as long as they claim that the final bit of a classless society is a permanent WIP, which all of them did.)
Now unless you want to argue we're still in the industrial revolution, it's pretty clear that Marx was inaccurate in his prediction given... that didn't happen. Social democracy instead became a more prevailing stream of thought (in no small part because few people are willing to risk their lives for a revolution) and is what led to things like reasonable minimum wages, sick days, healthcare, elderly care, and so on and so forth being made accessible to everyone.
The quality of which varies greatly by the country (and you could probably consider the popularity of Marxist revolutionary thought today in a country as directly correlated to the state of workers rights in that country; people in stable situations will rarely pursue ideologies that include revolutions), but practically speaking - yeah Marx was inaccurate on the idea of a revolution across the world happening.
The lens through which Marx examined history is however just that - a lens to view it through. It'll work well in some cases, less so in others. Looking at it by class is a useful way to understand it, but it won't cover things being motivated for reasons outside of class.
Anywhere where the working class rose up against the bourgeoisie/upper class because of their "mistreatment" (sense of victimhood instilled in them by Marxism), became dramatically worse in its civil liberties, and in its economic trajectory, in every respect.
And in most places there was no such uprising, and incidentally, those places fared far better.
So no, Marx was resoundingly proven wrong.
Even during his own lifetime, some of his pseudoeconomic ideas/doomsaying was proven wrong.
He claimed, like many demagogues and economic laymen, that automation would reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages:
>>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly? and
>>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
I dont think that AGI invalidates Das Kapital. AGI is just another technology that automates human labor. It does not matter that it's about intellectual labor. Even if we had sentient machines, at first they would be slaves. So in Das Kapital therminology, they would be means of production used in industry, which would not create surplus value. Exactly like human slave labor.
If things change, then either it is because they rebel or because they will be accepted as sentient beings like humans. In these sci-fi scenarios, indeed capitalism could either end or change to a thing completely different and I agree that this invalidates Das Kapital, which tries to explain capitalist society, not societies in other future economical systems. But outside sci-fi scenarios, I dont think that there's something that invalidates Marx analysis.
