Yet somehow in contemporary America those who become obscenely wealthy are celebrated as great men. (Occasionally women also)
I maintain its actually evidence of deep psychological problems. The need to have more and more. The desperate need to prove that mine is bigger than yours.
So one of the things that would be part of my system of Bounded Capitalism is a graduated income tax. One that if plotted would have an almost hyperbolic curve to it. So that lower and middle incomes would pay low levels of tax, but at some level- a million dollars for example- the curve would get very steep.
The conservatives would say that this creates a negative incentive to wealth creation. That people would stop working if most of their incremental income was going to taxes. Great I say.
Then there might be more work for other people to do. Spread the work and the income around.
Its also very true that the real wealth creators out there don’t really work for money. They work for the joy that creating something new gives them.
How many stories have you seen about the original founder of a new business being pushed aside, or leaving voluntarily when the business gets big and bureaucratic. They often then go on to start another business, they work ridiculous hours and yes they make money, but they seem not to care about it.
The people that are focused in on the amount of money they have, and how much more they want, are the source of all our economic and political problems. We have to get them back under control or we are never going to get out from under.
After all, once you have a million dollars do you really need more? For what? More Ferrari’s? A bigger plasma TV? Do things like this actually make you happy?
If so then you are a victim of the disease I am ranting about.
Is there a cure for it? Probably not. We need to palliate the symptoms so the rest of us don’t get infected, or suffer from the results of their sickness.
Will this sort of program ever get enacted? I am an eternal optimist, but not in the short term. Because the rich are powerful will not sit idly by. And because my view is clearly a minority one. And if all the troubles that The Great Recession has caused did not stir a mass movement to rein the wealthy in, what will it take? Something I do not want to live through I think.
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