The planet’s wealthiest people are putting Earth on a countdown to extinction. Wealth inequality is a global crisis and taxing the super-rich is a pathway to saving the planet from environmental catastrophe, writes Robert Gordon.
We can save the small remaining part of nature which can be saved and make Australia egalitarian again, by taxing the rich according to Northern European norms (inheritance and wealth taxes) and raising welfare support by 60% to the OECD average.
Red meat production is causing environmental pollution and global warming.
Great big new wealth and inheritance taxes. Intelligent, humane people would plan for the planet to thrive for a few more million years.
It’s honestly exhausting to keep seeing people come so so close to the correct conclusion and then chicken out right before it comes the time to say it out loud: capitalism is the problem, and it has been designed to be reform-resistant.
We’re past taxing the rich, it is time to end the system that enables and encourages people to hoard that much wealth and power in the first place.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist, and the fact that they do is an indictment of the system, not something to try and preserve (it’s never going to be you!).
Capitalism with strong free market provisions (very few meters and acquisitions and actively breaking up large companies) + wealth taxes etc. is a very good system. People are greedy, and any system of governance needs to use that to its benefit.
Communism is decent in theory but results in stupid amounts of corruption in practice as you need some people with disproportionate power to administer the system.
Capitalism does tend towards concentration of wealth, and fails when markets become too concentrated (e.g. The gas market or supermarket duopoly in Australia). However, wealth taxes and properly powerful competition bodies can prevent that.