First, I definitely appreciate your counterbalance and disagreement. That’s how we all work together to develop ideas. I will do my best to be non-confrontational with this response.

Information work and physical work are both labor. When you refer to a “typical high salary cube dweller,” yes, the information labor of people who work at desks can most certainly command high salaries in the modern world when compared to physical or “unskilled” labor. Those people are still undercompensated. The owners (less so for smaller businesses, as I described elsewhere) are still receiving a portion of the compensation for the value of information workers’ labor solely on the basis of their ownership status, and not for any other value they provide through their own efforts.

I’m not trying to discount the value that leadership, and vision, and true unsocialized capital risk has. What I am saying is that ownership is vastly overvalued and vastly overcompensated for, and that in order to do that overcompensation, the reward has to come from somewhere. The balloon gets squeezed on the labor end in order to shift wealth to the ownership end. Am I talking about a huge proportion of the population being labor and a comparatively tiny part being owners? Yup. That makes it a worse problem, not a meaningless one.

But you’re right, I have not offered any sort of possible solution to this quandary. It’s oh so easy to armchair quarterback, point out the problems, and fold my arms in smug satisfaction, and I say that without sarcasm.

Ideally, everyone would have easy access to everything they need. Food, housing, healthcare, clothing, clean water, personal and property security, education, all sorts of things. And I say access on purpose: individuals should need to express agency about what they need, and make decisions about their own destiny in that context, which includes making the decisions about what is needed, and making the easy level of effort that would ideally be required to receive those things. We are all in this together, and I think we should come to some agreements, together, on what resources all people need, and to what fair degree. And then we should all contribute together, each according to their ability, to make sure that those things are provided to those who need them. Recall that in the mid 20th century, there were marginal tax rates in the 90% and higher range in the US. (For anyone reading this who’s unfamiliar with marginal tax rates, that means that income over a certain amount is taxed at that rate, while income below that amount is taxed at lower rates). That’s something I wouldn’t mind seeing again.

I also wouldn’t mind seeing a separate capital gains tax completely removed. Capital gains, when realized, should be taxed at the same rate as earned income. Why should owners get to pay a reduced tax rate on profits from selling a portion of their ownership? Why should the people who are already higher on the wealth ladder get a tax break? Why do we continually place a larger actual tax burden on people who spend essentially all of their income, who have no wealth to speak of, and a lower actual tax burden on people for whom that burden or a much larger one would come from their surplus and not impact their quality of life at all?

I know I’m doing the thing where I’m “asking questions that I know you know what I want you to think the answer is, which makes you automatically think it inside your own head, which uses human psychology to make my argument seem stronger,” but fuck man, we have to stop doing those things.