The Return of the Tribe – Vancouvered Weblog

I don't want to live among a majority of rude, selfish people of any class, so I think the trend will be the struggling middle class moves into the dignified poverty of small farming among established rural farming communities that are outside the reach of urban or suburban blight.

Many who can afford it will move into giant private citadel communities created by the ultra-rich. Think Vegas but focused on not sinning.

> You can raise taxes on “the rich” and many will cheer, but the wealthy are also the most mobile. They move jurisdictions, restructure assets, or simply stop realizing taxable income.

This is largely a false narrative that doesn’t hold up to real-world cases.

1. The wealthy already use many techniques to disguise “income”, such as receiving shares and taking out loans on the valuation of those shares to pay for living expenses. There are ways to close those loopholes tightly, the problem is that some politicians also use those same loopholes, so why would they cut off their own noses? And most politicians are funded by the wealthy, so why would they bite the hand that feeds them? This means that increased taxation of the wealthy is a political cock-blocking, not any sort of structural difficulty.

2. If said wealth is from a business, especially any kind of non-virtual one where there is a physical presence (factory, etc.), they are most definitely NOT mobile. It costs massive amounts of money to just move a business down the street - usually 3-12× annual earnings, and that is keeping the same workforce and with exceptionally low-cost short-distance moving - and you’re worrying about them leaving the entire jurisdiction?? Offshoring alone took 75 years to achieve, so most “wealth flight” isn’t going to happen within a single quarter-century.

3. There are much better ways to combat wealth accumulation, such as taxing the profit margins of businesses themselves. This forces business owners to increase “costs” such as employee wages and infrastructure/equipment investment, and reducing dividends and other forms of for-the-wealthy disbursements. Taxation can also happen to the company based on aggregate executive compensation regardless of whom it goes to, cutting off specific loopholes in favour of a wider, more difficult to evade net that is completely independent of individual incomes.

The options for effective redistribution of wealth away from those who have done nothing to earn it, and bringing it back to the working class who are the entire source of said wealth, exist and can be implemented. We just need the political will and stomach to actually put them into practice.