Scene: design board meeting room, car manufacturer
“What if instead of designing the ventilated seats to blow air, we reversed it? What if we used them as the air intake? Turns out if we consider how the ducts are plumbed, rough calculations indicate we could save $5/car!”
Yeah. It’s policies like these that I want to see Democrats propose. I don’t expect Democrats to argue for the abolishment of private enterprise or to move the economy to central planning. They’re Democrats, not Communists. And frankly, for-profit business has a lot going for it under many circumstances. Price mechanisms are often efficient tools for allocating resources.
I view capitalism like a fire. Fire is useful. It can cook your food, keep you warm, do useful work. But if you let it out of control, it will burn down everything and everyone you care about. That is how capitalism is. Conservatives worship the fire and want to let it burn uncontained. Communists hate the fire and want to snuff it out entirely. I want to keep it in a nice little box, thoroughly shielded, where we can get useful work out of it without letting it burn our house down.
Clearly, right now capitalism is burning out of control. And I want to see it put back in its box where it belongs.
But there are so, so many useful policies we could enact that would sand the hard edges off capitalism, spread the wealth around a bit, and allow everyone to live with dignity. You can have a system that efficiently allocates resources and rewards hard work and innovation…without having some Dickensian nightmare where most of the population has to wallow in misery.
And if we choose, we can choose to simply do away the very concept of billionaires. There is such a thing as a strategically dangerous level of wealth, a point where someone’s fortune becomes so great that they have a great ability to harm others. We shouldn’t have billionaires for the same reason we don’t allow people to own nuclear weapons - that’s just far too much power in the hands of one individual. The only way to obtain such power should be through the will of voters. When you have that much money, you personally become a threat to the nation.
I like the idea of a cap set at 1000x the median household income. It’s a nice clean number, but it has some real meaning. Consider the highest-paid employees who aren’t executives of some kind. People who make their money not through commanding others, but from the direct work of their own hands and minds. Think people like neurosurgeons and other medical specialists. Those people tend have their salaries cap out, at the highest, at the upper six figures. Imagine such a person worked a long career. And they lived like a pauper. They choose to be voluntarily homeless, literally sleep on the sidewalk outside of the hospital they work as a brain surgeon. They live off nothing and invest everything. At the end of their life? They would still struggle to die with a fortune 1000x the median household income.
In other words, 1000x the average family wage is about the largest fortune attainable through education, frugality, and hard work. And that’s only in the most extreme circumstances. The only way to earn more than that is to own or run a business and to make your money primarily through the arbitrage of the labor of others.
I just wish I saw Democrats talking like this more. Just honest conversations about the way wealth and income are distributed in society, and practical policies for how we might actually move the needle on a more equitable society.
Most people don’t live so close to good restaurants. And driving is so miserable that they’ll pay others to do the driving for them.
Oh, you want solutions that make real progress, can work within a capitalist framework, and don’t require a complete revolution? Ok, here are some pragmatic policies that can help people without fundamentally changing the capitalist nature of the economy:
A maximum wealth cap. 1000x the median household income. All wealth and income above this level is taxed so high that trying to have a fortune above the cap is like trying to swim up a waterfall.
A co-op first model of corporate ownership. Each year, every private or publicly traded company must turn over some portion of its equity to its workers. Essentially mandatory stock options for all workers. No one works for a company without gaining an ownership stake in that company. Set the transfer speed low enough that if you found a company, you can still make plenty of profit, and it transfers to employee ownership slowly over say, 50 years. You can found a company and keep control over it until retirement, but your kids don’t get to become newly minted aristocrats by inheriting an empire. They can go start their own thing.
Universal single-payer healthcare. Enough said.
Opt-out unionization. Workers are unionized by default. No vote is required to form a union. Every private employer has a union by default. Workers, if they choose, can vote to suspend the union for a certain number of years if they decide they don’t like unionization for whatever reason.
Tax investment income at higher rates than wage income.
Higher tax rates for companies that require employees to come in to the office for jobs that can be done from home.
Wage theft must be paid back tenfold. Your boss steal $1000 in overtime pay from you? They have to pay you $10,000 if caught.
A return to New Deal-era restrictions on company size and market share. Make it straight up illegal to operate a business like walmart. Break up all the big national franchises.
There. Just a few reforms. These would have a massive impact on the power and wealth balance of the country, but they wouldn’t actually affect the fundamentally capitalist nature of the economy. People can still start companies, produce new things, innovate, and be rewarded for their efforts. We just make the economy more just and fair across the board.
Honestly, one of the most scientifically plausible “love potions” we might actually be able to make someday would something that long term couples might actually be really interested in. You know that initial early head-over-heels “chemical love” that happens right at the start of a relationship? In principle that could be duplicated artificially. That would be something.
Truthfully it’s a design issue. If people keep coming up to a door and pulling on it, it’s because the design of the door is instructing them to do so. Design imparts information. A door in a home can have simple knobs - anyone living there can just learn which doors to push/pull. A door in a public space instead needs to be designed to tell people how to operate it, even without any labeling.
A door is a simple device. It shouldn’t require reading labels or a manual. It’s operation should be abundantly obvious. After all, even those who don’t speak the language or are illiterate need to be able to operate doors. A door that needs instructions is one that is poorly designed.
Honestly I wouldn’t mind paying for news. It has to be paid for somehow, and if we’re not paying for it, the billionaires are. At the same time, I don’t pay for news. The news subscription model is completely broken.
The idea of paying $20+ dollars per month made sense in a world where you got most of your news from your home town newspaper. And in exchange, that newspaper had the funds to do a tons of local and national reporting. But now? Most people get their news from dozens of different news sources. I’m not going to pay to subscribe to dozens of news websites, when I will only visit each one a handful of times. Each paper’s subscription prices assume that they’re going to your primary information source. But my main information sources are news aggregators.
What the industry desperately needs is some distributed payment platform. Maybe you sign up for a subscription clearinghouse for $50/month. The service then distributes your subscription funds to the dozens of different news websites you visit, in proportion to the amount of time spent on or stories read from each.
I want to support journalism, but their prices are just completely divorced from how modern audiences actually consume news. They’re still pricing their newspapers like it’s 1990. (Made up numbers), instead of trying to get $20/month out of 1 million people, they should be trying to get $2/month out of 10 million people. But every news site just wants to charge you an arm and a leg and trap you in their own walled garden.