South Korea has a 50% heritage tax - and it applies, as far as I’m aware, to everything. Causes and absolute havoc when billionaires die and the companies need to be broken up, but ultimately it seems to work
Won’t anyone think of the havoc people still inheriting millions of dollars have to go through? 🎻 More people might have an opportunity to buy in on the society’s corporate institutions? 🎻
That sounds like the right thing to do for a society that values… Society.
Can’t the heirs just adjust between themselves who gets what and in what form?
It would make more sense to just pay out some heirs and keep companies and other high value assets as undivided as possible.
When someone dies, something happens to the assets they own. It doesn’t matter what happens or how it gets divided, but the South Korean government takes 50%.
I explain myself poorly.
The state getting a 50% cut over total value of assets and money is a no brainer. If one million is left in cash+stocks+bonds+property, 500k goes to the state, although I think it’s a bit cloudy when it comes to paying tributation on property.
But a company has - usually - its own legal status. A company by itself is an entity that can not by cut up at will, unless dissolved and reformed under diferent parts.
The company isn’t necessarily broken up, but the shares of the company are owned by individuals, and those shares go to the government. To your point, you could keep “the more valuable shares”, but the shares are valued in currency by both you and the government, so it’s kind of hard to say which are more valuable than others
We all seem to be thinking towards openly traded companies but how small(er) companies would go through such a process?
A traded company is not a head splitter to tax as an inheritance: shares are owned in a given number, there is a given number of heirs, each share has a given publicly tradeable value. Keeping with the Korean example, if there are 100.000 shares to split between two heirs, each heir receives 50.000 shares, which at a spot valuation of $2, implies each heir has to pay $50.000 in taxes, the 50% cut for the state.
I don’t really see any logic in the state entering in true possession of company actives when what is due is its monetary value, which can be paid in cash by the heirs.
But a non-traded company will not be as easy to tax because it has no easily measurable value. A father leaving a company with a total social capital of $100.000 to two or three sons can in fact be leaving a company with a lot less true value, after considering loans, assets, values due to pay and receive, etc. And such an entity is not easy to split into equal parts.
Seems like there should be an easy way for any BIG company: a stock split. Any company that has shares, even private shares, can be forced to undergo a stock split of which the government gets half. Boom, government owns half the company. To get more surgical about it, only shares held by the deceased would be split.
Smaller companies don’t have such an easy mechanism but it seems to me they would cause less chaos.
Of course, this seems like a colossal incentive to never incorporate in Korea.
Presuming there is such a structure. Non traded companies can have huge values without having a stock structure.
And what is the logic of a government owning a part of a company by default when what really matters is receiving the corresponding liquid monetary value?
There are specific sectors where state must hold objective interests and in some cases even hold complete control but most sectors are more of liability than an asset to a government.
“Capitalism is just human nature.”
If it’s just human nature, then why do we need a militarized police force to enforce order? Having workers go to a workplace, do labor, and then send the profits to some far away entity that probably isn’t even there is actually very far from human nature. It’s something that necessarily requires the implied threat of violence to maintain. Same with tenants and landlords. No one would pay rent if it wasn’t for the police, who will use violence to throw you out otherwise.
It also frustrates me how that argument just waves away the incredibly complex and actually extremely arbitrary legal structure of capitalism. What about human nature contains limited liability for artificial legal entities controlled by shareholders? “Ah yes, here’s the part of the human genome that expresses preferred and common stock; here’s the part that contains the innate human desire for quarterly earnings calls.”
edit: typo
Its so dumb. “Human nature” according to who? Ignoring that appeal to nature is a logical fallacy its also just…fake. humans are social obligate primates. We naturally form small communal groups. We’ve interacted cooperatively and altruistically since before we were anatomical humans. If capitalism is human nature why did it take 19,700 years for anatomically modern humans to invent it. Because for one thing, commerce is not the same as capitalism. And even commerce is somewhat recent. Most of human history we didnt barter, pre-money barter economies are a myth. We had “gift economies” where we simply helped and gave each other what we needed. Without explicitly demanding a return but understanding others will help you out the same when you need it.
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Mark Fisher ❤️
That’s exactly it, liberals don’t want us to question capitalism. In a discussion about socialism, some shitlib came by and asked what my job was. When I told them, they assumed I made a lot of money and said it was hypocritical for me to criticize capitalism. When I told them that I actually only earn $42k in a city with a living wage of $58k, suddenly I was just bitter and bitching about my low paying job, so I should get a good paying job.
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Putting yourself and whoever you consider your tribe above others is human nature, so capitalism plays pretty well into that by rewarding fucking others over.
Capitalism produces fragmentation and alienation that obstruct broader solidarity.
“Of course the CEO deserves 399 times your pay, they take 399 times the risk!”
“and what is the penalty if they lose that risk?” “Why, they become a labourer like the rest of us!”
But the UnReALiZEd Gains
Honestly their Super Yachts, mansions, and luxury climate bunker compounds should be eligible for section 8 housing subsidy if you think about it.
They have so little liquidity, couldn’t you just die?
In the Arms of the Angels plays to images of sad Warren Buffets, Elon Musks, etc…
“They make everything: The wine, the glasses, the chairs, the buildings. Without their investment, none of that could be made.”
PU has already compiled the best ones.
The one mentioning the iPhone will long be a favorite.
Wow. Almost every single thing he listed at the beginning (before I turned this off because I was getting the urge to punch his face so strongly my work computer’s screen was at actual risk) has taken enormous amounts of “big government” subsidy. And well over half of them (possibly much higher!) are actively damaging society.
Woohoo! Capitalism!
do you use an iphone
you can make a similar argument for slavery
you dont want the government…
triangle shirtwaist fire ._.
do the people who don’t like government regulations know how working conditions were before government regulations
Advances were made and sustained principally through labor organization, not government regulations.
Much of the manipulation in the presentation from PU is based on constructing a false dichotomy between organization through either private business versus central government.
A common tactic is to bait an antagonist into attacking private business, but then shifting from a defense of business to a criticism of government. It is employed by proponents of marketism, and commonly involves insertion into the discussion, often as a straw man, the Democratic Party or the Soviet Union.
Such proponents often respond poorly to suggestions about cooperative organization, or to reminders over the natural tendency of business to seek increasing protection from the state.
Advances were made and sustained principally through labor organization, not government regulations.
It’s both. It happens because of regulation (otherwise there’d be nothing stopping businesses from exploiting you even harder than they already do) but as has been said many times, regulations are written in blood. They weren’t passed out of the goodness of anyone’s hearts, but as a capitulation to labour organising.
regulations are written in blood
Well, they are ignored the moment labor loses the power to demand their enforcement.
I try not to emphasize regulations. Genuine power never comes from words.
Of course not. But what are we organising for, if not our rights? In our society, those rights are upheld by law. We organise to make those laws happen. And , when it comes to it, to behead them and make our own laws.
Laws are made by the powerful few.
Power for the masses comes from the groundul up.
We organize to build our own power, toward our own interests, to challenge the systems that support the interests of elites.
Laws are made by the powerful few.
Yep, in our current neoliberal capitalist system. This is what we live in, which is why it’s what I’m describing.
Power for the masses comes from the groundul up.
I know, but we don’t have that yet. That’s the goal.
We organize to build our own power, toward our own interests, to challenge the systems that support the interests of elites.
Indeed. No need to repeat my own beliefs at me ;)
It’s a matter of perspective. It doesn’t look so bad when you’re not the one doing the working.
There’s something disconcerting about the structure of that person’s face and the ways it does and does not move how it should when the person it belongs to speaks.
Not many would do well reading that script.
Argh, I watched two seconds of it. Now YouTube will recommend that stuff to me forever.
Holy shit those comments are as cringey as the video somehow.
It’s a wonder the commenters don’t drown staring up at the rain with their mouths agape.
I watched about 7 seconds and turned it off. What a punchable video
Most content from PU is rough to watch, but the one I gave can be used for comic relief.
You can see the Wilks’s oily paw prints all over.
lol it’s literally the argument they use
Zero funny detected
A much better approach is to require all private industry to be cooperatively owned, then replace private lending with a central bank. With this model if people want to start a business they have to run it as a cooperative ensuring that profits are fairly shared amongst all the people working at the business, and that decision making process within the company is democratic. Meanwhile, instead of going to VCs for loans, the company would submit a proposal to the state bank.
Agreed, but eventually someone calls that socialism/communism and we’re all back to square one.
Scaremongering about socialism/communism doesn’t have the same effect it used to nowadays.
How do you keep the singular state bank from being captured and corrupted inside of 2 years?
Captured and corrupted by whom? Without capitalism, you don’t have rich oligarchs running around to corrupt everything. As a real world example, the central bank works fine for over 70 years in USSR.
The USSR was famously corrupt and a massive failure on the overall besides. This is not the example you are looking for.
Oh, do enlighten us in what way USSR was a massive failure. This ought to be good.
Would you like to talk about the inherent limitations of a planned economy vs a free market or the epic level of corruption that is evident to this day.
I don’t agree with the other person you’re talking to, but I also don’t agree with this framing of “planned economy vs free market,” as if planning is doomed to failure, and markets work.
It is true that previously planned economies have had problems. Planning be that way, though. Plans are hard, and when you plan things, sometimes it doesn’t work out, but that doesn’t mean that the notion of planning in and of itself is inherently flawed. Planning fails all the time in all facets of life, but there’s only one facet of life, the economy, where we have for some reason decided that that means the concept of planning itself is broken, rather than previous plans failed.
The market is just the absence of a plan, which is a little bit of a tricky abstraction, and ends up being a bit unfalsifiable. It’s got this teflon quality to it, where even when markets collapse, as they do all the time, they don’t get blamed for it. Right now, we are living through the worst possible failure of an economic system – the literal destruction of the planet. There is no greater failure mode, yet somehow, markets don’t get blamed for it, and are still seen as fundamentally sound.
The dream, for me, is a democratically planned economy. True economic and political democracy. We have a lot to learn to understand how that would work, but dreaming, and then figuring out how to achieve that dream, is the stuff of socialist politics.
It is definitively proved that neither planning nor pure markets fucking work. You need to plan and or regulate the things that markets are known to fail on and let the market allocate the resources not needed to provide basic or societal needs. This isn’t rocket science or credibly in dispute. We know what in broad strokes actually works.
lmfao free market doesn’t even work under capitalism https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/blogs/news/4385-failing-to-plan-how-ayn-rand-destroyed-sears
Meanwhile, here’s what’ actually evident. Maybe learn a bit about the subject before forming opinions?
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possilbe:
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
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Adult mortality increased enormously in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union when the Soviet system collapsed 30 years ago. https://archive.ph/9Z12u
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Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx
And here’s what people who lived under communism feel now that they got a taste of capitalism and your precious free markets
Socialism and communism aren’t really the same thing and entirely aside from what sham wig the USSR put on its corrupt kleptocracy it was a brutal dictatorship that murdered 10s of millions and created mass starvation. How can you have socialism/communism if you replace the market with decisions dictated by some asshole that you all didn’t pick and can’t remove if he fucks up. I don’t see how you can possibly have socialism or indeed ANY economic system without a functional democracy. I also don’t understand how you can look at the history of the USSR and call THAT clusterfuck success.
When I bring up that 80-90% of an average top billionaire’s wealth is their share of their company, it’s usually to counter the perception that those hundreds of billions of dollars are deadweight. I do still think the rich should be taxed, though I would lean towards taxing the personal assets more than business stock.
Nope, all of it. Otherwise it’s a loophole that they will abuse
As if liquid assets are the only thing that can be used to influence and gain more power and wealth. Smh. Capitalists use capital, liquid or not to keep hoarding all of it for themselves.
