Ok now find their hidden assets and take them. Criminals shouldn’t be allowed to get away with crime right? These are some of the worst, IMO, as they rose on our backs and then turned around and stole the fair share they owed to society via tax cheating.
Asset security is exactly one of the reasons people seek foreign shelters. If you've got a ton of value to control, you want it to be secure, and sometimes your own government is the primary threat.
This is especially true if your wealth comes from capital markets.
If I buy a bunch of baseball cards at 1c each and later it turns out that the market values them at $100 each, I never actually "took" money from anyone. Yes it's patently unfair that I got that lucky, but it wasn't necessarily at anyone's expense.
Now, when I actually go to sell those cards then I do actually "take" money from someone else, but while those gains are unrealized it's just paper wealth.
In such a case it's also not clear who I am "taking" from. The person buying them off of me gave me the money, but you could also say the baseball card company was exploited and lost out on pricing their cards at $100?
Money has no inherent value; it is just a currency, an indirection, a promise. The economy must always bottom out at a physical good or service. You can keep trading promises of goods and services in various forms, but ultimately you end up with the inescapable tyranny of physical existence that is a closed system, with the one exception that we get energy from the Sun and stored forms of energy on this planet.
No wealth was created by "discovering value" or finding someone with money to buy something that was already there before. If this new person decided to spend $100 on a baseball card, then they didn't spend money on something else, so the market for those other things is naturally going to price them lower. So the $100 came from somewhere[1].
All of these open system chains of thought that assume any "non-zero sum game" either improperly account for devaluation of other goods or they assume accumulation of labor, and typically add a side helping of assumed exponential growth.
[1] Which is not say that money cannot be created from nothing. In fact, it is all the time. Debt--loans, stocks, bonds, IOUs--is money creation.
> you could also say the baseball card company was exploited and lost out on pricing their cards at $100?
The baseball card company is in the business of selling lottery tickets. If there wasn't a secondary market for the ones that get really valuable, they'd sell a lot fewer new cards to people looking for a winning lottery ticket.
It's a weird business for them because they're selling lottery tickets, but don't necessarily know which ones will be winners. Although with all the statistics and moneyball stuff, they'd sell a probably have a better idea now than in the past.
companies aren't baseball cards, their growth is tied directly to work that the humans in the company do, and they sure are paid for it, but if they were paid a fair share of the company's profits then that increase in share price would evaporate, because the workers would be getting the rewards from the productivity.
In other words, you owe taxes on the capital gains because someone is working to make those gains for you.
> their growth is tied directly to work that the humans in the company do
They're linked but it's not 1:1. The whole point of a corporation and a value-add economy is to do a force multiplier on the cost of labor. It doesn't matter how hard you work when digging with a shovel, a lazy guy with an excavator will create value faster than you can.
The guy providing the excavator is currently keeping the lion's share of the productivity gains, and that's not good. But it's also not quite the same as saying all of the wealth comes from exploitation.
The value of the stock is the value of the corporation, right? What’s the value of it if you don’t have humans to man the factory? The only reason Capital has capital is because they’re hoarding it since the beginning of human economics. If everyone shared equally then the guy with a steam shovel becomes a team who built, bought, or traded to get a steam shovel that they share to make their collective load easier.
So in my world view, yes, all wealth is exploitative. No one person can do enough work to earn millions and billions more than others.
it's not unfair since you took the risk of potentially losing your original investment; you also put in the time to learn about baseball cards, while other people were interested in antiques and studied and bought those, also with a risk that what they bought would decrease in value.
Value can be created from nothing, I am sure you can give an example or two, but in general nothing large and valuable is created without the effort of a lot of people together, relying on the societal systems that are funded by taxes.
I suggest that you could count on one hand the number of people in the entire history of humanity who could and would hide this kind of wealth who didn't earn it through somehow relying on others and/or society's structure.
in fact value is created in every transaction: someone sells something for more money than it's worth to them and someone buys the thing for less money than the thing is worth to them (otherwise the transaction would not occur)
Lots of transactions actually destroy value, they just do so in a way that externalizes this cost.
A good example is advertising: companies are incentivized to dump all available resources into marketing, because those who don't get out-competed by those who do. It is a winner-takes-all game where the strategy that maximizes global value is nowhere close to being a Nash equilibrium.
A more extreme example would be hiring someone to go rob a bank. No value is created (lots is destroyed) but both parties to the transaction come out ahead.
no, how is that relevant? someone has something to sell for $1 that you value more than the $1 in your pocket so you buy it; doesn't matter if someone a block away is selling it for $0.50
The planet's ressources are finite though. When you print money, you don't create value, since there's still the same amount of matter being traded around, you just reduce the value of everybody's money.
And so you rob everybody.
You are conflating money and value. Value is infinite, e.g. compare the world today to 200 years ago. Even relatively poor people live better today than kings did then. Creating value is not the same as printing money.
Value is limited to the total possible energy expenditure of the human population and our autonamous/semi-autonamous proxies (tools, domesticated animals, etc.). It would seem practically limitless because of the scale of human industry in comparison to the energy access afforded to us by nature in it's current state, but obviously value drops commensurate with potential expenditure-destroying events. Natural disasters, war, etc. are examples, but so are things like drops in consumer confidence and labor strikes.
What natural resource are we running short of? Land might be at the top of the list, but we are only utilizing 70% of that. And if we get low on that, we just switch to aqua-farming or floating cities.
No one is hoarding all the natural resources.
No argument that printing money devalues everyone else (this is the definition of inflation). End the Fed.
There is no particular correlation between value creation and energy consumption. Your theory is likely unique. I could burn a log, releasing a lot of energy, and no value would be created. I could carve a figure into a log and create value.
Your examples disagree with your initial statement actually. How did you get the log? How did you carve the figure? Both of these require energy consumption, as we aren't at the stage where we are magically planting trees and teleporting them into our workspaces for carving/burning.
Take away all energy from this world. You get 0 value creation. Everything is dead nothing can move.
That’s the correlation. I don’t understand why you’re using big words like correlation as if this is something that needs to be studied. It’s common sense imo.
Yes, the sun bombards us with free energy that all energy on the earth is sourced from, so dont worry about accounting, since we clearly dont have the same amount of wealth as 5000 years ago
That energy accumulates as low entropy. The earth is a continuous low entropy reservoir soaking up the energy and continuously generating more complexity via evolution and also via economic progress.
That’s how the accounting works out.
The reality is energy is neither created or destroyed. It just reaches a non workable state. In terms of balance of physical energy we technically receive the energy then the energy radiates off the earth. We don’t keep the energy.
What we do keep is the low entropy. The energy comes forth from the sun in a concentrated beam. We extract the low entropy from the beam into complexity. Over millions of years this complexity accumulates making earth a reservoir of increasing complexity and lowering entropy. The beam of energy from the sun gets all of the low entropy extracted and radiates into space in a non useable form.
What's interesting about the Cayman Islands is that they are the 4th largest holder of U.S. debt, with $441 billion[1].
So USD flows into Cayman banks, and those banks need to do something with the massive amounts of money just sitting there. So what do they do? They buy U.S. Treasuries. And half a trillion dollars is just their holdings in U.S. debt, imagine how much more money is hidden in those accounts and invested in other assets.
It would be a wonderful world if only people could force those running a less dumb economy to abide by their dumber rules. Wouldn't it be awesome if NK could park a navy somewhere and make sure everyone does things for the benefits of The People and not in whatever selfish way they do them now?
Also the fact the US Navy doesn’t just make decisions on its own to blockade another nation. It would do so under orders. The person giving that order more than likely would have accounts there themself. So that’s very unlikely to be an order ever actually given.
Well the people who control enforcement are the elite. Right? Trump is one of the elites. So you think they're going to enforce anything? You think it will be easy?
