About the Increasing Wealth Inequality

I’ve had that interesting discussion again. The discussion almost every time starts with something along the lines of “Eat the rich!” and then people basically start to ask “Who do we eat exactly?”.

I personally would start with the closest person to you, that earns your yearly salary from passive income within a day. If you can’t find a person within a 300 mile radius, throw a barbecue for yourself (you know, just to get more intel from others, for your friends, not for eating you, please don’t do that).

If anybody reads this as an actuall call to cannibalism, you might just have misunderstood me. I’m not a native speaker.

What if you would actually attempt to solve this without violence?

This is very likely extremely hard to do. We painted us in a corner, where we can’t keep up increasing economic growth while also concentrating wealth without causing very obvious harm to democracy, society and the economy.

I do not want to go too deep into the environment - as in ’the place where every human lives, except for the poor souls we forget in space from time to time’ - I just want to quickly note:

Some of the biggest accelerators of wealth concentration were and are also terrible for the environment (i.e. modern oil and gas extraction, shein, openai’s cloud bill, meta’s cloud bill, bitcoin-mining, aso).

Speaking of harm, the concentration of wealth also leads to serious harm to people. Hunger, homelessness, untreated illnesses and drug abuse are regularly directly tied to corporate or private greed by investigative journalism and in some rare cases even by law.

Now, I’ve just read an idea on how to handle this inequality, to which I might have had a few points to add, that I did not want to cobble into a thread on the fediverse.

So here it goes

Very obviously, these numbers are all wonky at best. If something like this could become policy, we will very likely have do adjust factors to something that is actually anchored somewhere outside of my head, maybe even in reality. Also this is vastly simplyfied and not entirely possible without as well adjusting a lot of things in context.

1. The minimum wage needs to be directly tied to salary of representatives of the people.

I would suggest that it should be 25% of that. Nobody should earn less from hard work.

This will relief all future parlaments from having continous discussions about increasing the minimum wage. Without any hesitation politicians through history give themselves a generous raise plus inflationary adjustment for the great work they are doing. Just do it for everyone.

Here are examples for the U.S. and Germany, calculated with the assumption that all of the representatives work for 4 weeks per month with 40h each week.

2. No single household should be allowed to earn (passive or active) more than 700 times the minimum wage.

Why 700? I don’t know, I vaguely remember a close number in a German book by Martin Sonneborn titled “99 ideas for the reanimation of the political utopia”. I want people to be able to become sufficiently rich (buying yachts, keeping the four seasons open, etc), just not dangerously rich (overthrowing foreign governments, ruining living for millions, etc).

3. Nobody should be allowed to accumulate wealth above a hundred times the yearly income cap noted

Realistically a very small minority of humans will live longer than a hundred years, so I left enough room for the vast majority of people to accumulate enough wealth to still be as rich as the highest earners but stop earning entirely. Hopefully this helps rich people to not get too competitive and prevent future space-penis issues.

Further reading/viewing/etc

If you want more details on the wealth inequality, I can highly recomment the work of Gary Stevenson in particular his YouTube video titled “What is wealth inequality”.

If you are a German reader, I can also recommend the works of Maurice Hoefgen