Comment on Really, ….. it's my fault they built a terrible system?
Devouring@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The irony is that people think that giving the government more power and more money will solve their problems… weird that 100 years ago when taxes were miniscule and government funding was too small, people were rich compared to today, and a single income was enough to fund a whole family.
s1ndr0m3@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The period of time 100 years ago is referred to as “The Roaring 20s” and it led to the Great Depression. In the 1950s we had a top marginal tax rate of 90% and that period saw the largest and wealthiest middle class we’ve ever had.
dx1@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Several oversimplifications in a row. “Roaring Twenties” were fed by the nascent Federal Reserve ballooning the economy through the 20s and an inevitable contraction occurring at the end with a huge regulatory clampdown, expansion of the state and prolonged low interest rates/inflation into the 40s. The “top marginal tax rates” were essentially base rates and the effective rates paid were close to half that. A more meaningful metric is federal spending as % of GDP by year:
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which, taking into consideration that the economy has been growing in the last 80 years, indicates that federal spending has been gradually increasing ever since. The spike in the 40s is of course the enormous WWII spending.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
Marx points out the unregulated economy will always pull capital to the top. So how do we prevent the government from its fate of getting captured by the bourgeoisie?
dx1@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The more I went over this, the more I realized there is no “unregulated market”. There’s basically a status quo of rules of property distribution accepted by a society. Even what people refer to as a “free market” gets extremely complicated the second you get into the questions of property and contract law, with questions that in total can completely change the outcomes of the system depending on how you answer them. If you had no state but a society unanimously committed to equalizing the distribution of wealth, it would still happen.