Revolution should be the result of wealth inequality.
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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It’s worse than that. Wealth inequality is inevitable in any system that allows private ownership of the means of production. Marx wrote about this in great detail.
Wealth inequality is in the inevitable outcome of a market system. It's mathematically baked in. A tax system like this just makes it faster.
I've heard it said that as long as investment returns average higher than wage increases, society will continue to get worse.
Make housing prices increases an investment and you give the rich a force multiplier.
This is basically the central thesis of world famous economist Thomas Piketty.
Inequality inevitably worsens if the rate on capital exceeds the rate on labour. That is, when society rewards simply owning capital and wealth more than working.
r > g
There should be laws against predatory and fascist forms of Capitalism. CEOs going to jail should be a regular occurrence for a few years at least.
There should be set ratios between worker pay, CEO pay and profits. It's the only way a just society can be returned.
We need a corporate death penalty. If corporations are people, we should be be able to charge them like people. Well-Fargo scammed over a hundred million dollars from their customers. I see no reason why they can't be in a corporate jail, where damaged parties are paid out first, then the customers, then the employees, then the executives, and if there is anything left, let the investors have it.
Same for Equifax, they lost literally everyone's personal data after collecting and selling it without their consent. If I did something like that, I would get multiple life sentences. The company and its assets should be liquidated, and the money generated should be used to setup a Identify Theft taskforce proactively checks for identity theft on affected individuals and pays out 100% if they are damaged by Equifax's actions.
fascist forms of Capitalism
There is no other form, the difference is only in what state of fascism it is.
Even if you tax capital gain more than working normally its easy to create inequality. If you make 1m a year with 90% tax you still end up with 100k a year. That's still more than most people have. As long as we allow companys andsindividuals to exploit the workforce and extract value from it there will be inequality. If every worker you hired gives you just 1k after tax per year and you have 100 workers you still make more money than every single worker whose money you stole.
Read Marx
And after that, Kropotkin
I've not read much Kropotkin, I started his book on the French Rev but got pulled into other stuff. Need to get back to it.
I am a huge fan of Malatesta though. Why don't more anarchists recommend him?
The earned income tax is complete bullshit. Why would people be taxes for earning money through labor? You've already spent your time, and earning money through labor is already one of the least efficient ways of generating wealth.Besides you're still going to have to pay sales tax
The central bank emits money, and gets it back with taxes. Without taxes we'd just have galloping inflation and probably wealth hoarding.
Today we also have wealth hoarding, which could be at least alleviated with taxes, and taxing work more than capital gains is ofc utter bullshit. IMO.
No, the central bank does not get money from taxes. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
The central bank emits money that turns into inflation. On purpose. Because the only thing worse than galloping inflation is no inflation or deflation.
The way to not get galloping inflation is to not print crazy amounts of money.
Taxes are primarily there to fund the state (which has a much, much higher budget than what the central bank emits) and secondarily to discourage undesired behaviour.
Income tax is used because it's super simple to collect, compared to e.g. a wealth tax or a capital gains tax which is more complex. Together with property tax and VAT (or other forms of sales tax) it's the backbone of most tax systems because these taxes are simple to calculate, are simple to collect and are hard to evade. Also, they disproportionally affect lower and middle classes so the rich people in power like them as well.
Income tax is used because it’s super simple to collect, compared to e.g. a wealth tax or a capital gains tax which is more complex.
The real reason is that the people who are wealthy and make their money off of capital gains wanted to use the idea of income tax being easier to avoid being taxed themselves.
It's a bit of both, surely, but it really is much more difficult to move employees, real estate and sales outside of the country than it is to move capital outside of the country.
Because it's the greater way for the government to get money.
I'll give my country example. 2023.
State tax income was 270.000 million euros.
Out of those 120.000 million were labor income tax.
Business tax was 35.000 million
Sales tax were 80.000 million.
The rest were other taxes.
Work is easy to tax, and more fair.
Sale tax is 21% to everyone. Labor tax depends on your income. The more your income the more you pay, so it's proportional.
Removing all labor tax for sale tax would be highly unfair to people with low income.
I'm more on the opposite route. Sale tax should be lower and income tax higher.
...what about capital gains tax?
Taxed from 19% to 21% depending on quantity.
The reality is that not enough people have a significant amount of capital gains. My country only have 30 people with over a billion euro. For contrast USA have 900. I think here only one million people have over one million euros in total net worth.
The truth is that it's not rational to pretend that society get sustained only taxing capital gains, even if they were taxed 100%.
I'm all for augmenting capital tax, mostly because I don't think there should be billionaires at all. But I do not think their disappear would make my taxes significantly lower. At the end of the day they are very few. If we want the current amount government expending most people, workers, will have to keep paying a ton of taxes, even if we were to expropiate and execute all the billionaires.
Yeah, so you completely missed the point. A sales tax is based on consumption rates. People with more money will consume more and pay more in taxes which is appropriate because it's proportional to not only their income but also they're spending power. This brings us to our next point a persons spending power doesn't have anything to do with their earned income, or The labor they provide, or the value they provide to the country overall at least in the United States. If you were born rich and you never worked a day in your life you would never pay an income tax you would pay a nominal 15% capital gains tax on the trust fund that your parents set up for you and then keeping sales taxes low and property taxes low basically just subsidizes you.
So increase capital gain tax. And run a net worth tax.
That is why we need robot overlords everyone is equal if we're all slaves to our robot overlords!
Almost as if by design… 🤔
Yeah I always found the won't invest to be bs. its like people don't stop working because they pay taxes on it and actually its the more likely scenario with high taxes. Having the capital gains lower over time to encourage holding investments is sorta good but it need not be lower than income tax. Also a transaction tax would curtail daytrading nicely.