"Capped Capitalism" - What is it?

[drbubb]

"Capped Capitalism" - What is it?

 

 

The following is from Ron Van Dyke's Youtube channel -

 

Link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k82ascRR6Zo

 

= Quote =

 

There's a concept called "Capped Capitalism", where Free Enterprise is encouraged, and so is less government involvement in our lives.

But there are much higher taxes, even wealth taxes, on those at the very top, such as the 1%, or the 1% of the 1%. The idea is : to limit the POWER of those who are wealthy. Since when people amass more wealth than they can spend, and their children and grand-children can spend, they most often turn towards scheming to accumulate power. This is dangerous, and the "wealth caps" are to limit that accumulation of power.

 

= Unquote =

 

What have people heard of this? It seems like a good idea.

 

As one of the posters there said:

 

+ I like the idea of limiting the power of the 1%

+ I want to see small and local businesses encouraged, not just giant corporations, with "global" agendas

[FriarN]

Yeah.

I commented on that thread - as follows:

 

(1) FN:

Sounds good - do tell more !
+ I like the idea of limiting the power of the 1%
+ I want to see small and local businesses encouraged, not just giant corporations, with "global" agendas

 

(2) C.H. responded

It used to be the case here. people like Parkinson who were on mad wages used to be taxed 90% (or there abouts). Then Jersey, Isle of man and Guernsey were tax havens. Now tax havens are so abundant that it just depends where you want to set up. Bust the tax havens and keep the higher rate up IN EVERY COUNTRY and this al goes away.

 

(3) FN:

We need LOWER taxes on the middle class, and less government involvement in our day-to-day affairs.
But CAP THE RICH, yes !

 

(4) FN / Now that I am started):

The wealthy change the laws, to make it easier to accumulate and preserve their wealth. They do things like: reducing taxes on passive income, to where it is more lightly taxed than earned income. They allow the commons (ie the wealth we naturally share) to be encircled, and captured, and taken into private hands. They fight wars, that allow them to enlarge their wealth through selling weapons, and making loans. They use banks to manipulate markets and exaggerate cycles in the economy, so they can profit from those cycles. These are all "legal" ways to be increase wealth at the expense of the masses.

 

Meantime, "little" people face more red-tape in their own small businesses, and day to day lives. They pay higher taxes, and pay-for and fight the wars that the puppet-masters drag the country into.

 

How do we stop this? We need to regain power for We-the-people.

To me, that means practical things, like: seeing which candidates are favored by the moneyed interestst, and voting them out. Joining and supporting Third Parties with different agendas. Changing the campaign laws (McCain-Finegold), so that money does flow so easily from outside the state, and outside the country. The supreme court has said that "Campaign funds are free speech". Really? No way; it is just buying elections! Who in the Supreme Court was bribed? This needs and investigation. As does Justice Roberts, who switched his vote at the last minute to support Obamacare, and allowed to stand as law.

[FriarN]

The thread-starter posted more:

 

G.L.

Great comments. Thanks. I agree with most of them.
Let's keep the discussion going here on Ron's channel, if he does not object. As said: "there's much work to be done." BTW, I have seen that large fortunes tend to get dissipated over 2, 3, or 4 generations. One way to hold onto money, is to turn people into psychopaths, so they will be ruthless enough to exploit the power their money buys, and use that power to hold onto fortunes.

I wish that Ron would ask the Ambassadoir what techniques the Dragon families use to retain their fortunes.

What efforts do they make to stay ethical? (if any)

=====

If you do a Google search on Capped Capitalism - the most recent link seems to come here - to GEI,

But I also spotted two others:

(1)

Capped Capitalism
At the moment you can have a yacht if you work hard / get lucky / are the heiress... etc, but with limited resources and 7 billion of us feeling a growing unrest* on a fragile planet, there's a need to find a way to share what we have more fairly.

So I am talking about changing the whole global economic model. Putting a cap on an individual's asset and earnings ceiling. Say £2,000,000 per person. You're reading this and thinking "there aint no way some people are giving up their 4 houses and grand a week cigar habit without a fight". I think so too. But the alternatives are hard thoughts to swallow. It means if you want to build a skyscraper, you can, but you have to get 10,000 other people on board with you buying into your idea.

Capped Capitalism allows for some competition (that capitalism loves), the goal of having and deserving more while being intelligent about our situation. A pragmatic balance between capitalism, socialism and global community. Would be good for the environment and peace. For a better grasp of our situation with regard to global resources watch Chris Martenson's presentation here.
> website may be coming with more info and thoughts: http://www.gauntlettandson.com/sos.html

(2)

Free Market Capitalism has failed. Is it time for Capped Capitalism : Oct 15, 2008 - 29 posts - ‎3 authors

I'm not an economist (no, really), so would love some debate on Capped Capitalism as a concept: a trade off between incentive and ...

(He is talking about a 10% cap on dividends - that's a pretty mild, and useless cap)

... later, it gets better, when he starts talking about the need to preserve the Commons:

Capitalism 3.0 by Peter Barnes.
Link: [link to www.capitalism3.com]

Thus far I’ve argued that Capitalism 2.0—or surplus capitalism—has three tragic flaws: it devours nature, widens inequality, and fails to make us happier in the end. It behaves this way because it’s programmed to do so. Neither enlightened managers nor the occasional zealous regulator can make it behave much differently.

In this part of the book I advance a solution. The essence of it is to fix capitalism’s operating system by adding a commons sector to balance the corporate sector. The new sector would supply proxies for unrepresented stakeholders: future generations, pollutees, and nonhuman species. And it would offset the corporate sector’s negative externalities with positive externalities of comparable magnitude.

If the corporate sector devours nature, the commons sector would protect it. If the corporate sector widens inequality, the commons sector would reduce it. If the corporate sector turns us into self-obsessed consumers, the commons sector would reconnect us to nature, community, and culture. All this would happen automatically once the commons sector is set up. The result would be a balanced economy that gives us the best of both sectors and the worst of neither.

To be sure, building an economic sector from scratch is a formidable task. Fortunately, the commons sector needn’t be built from scratch; it has an enormous potential asset base just waiting to be claimed. That asset base is the commons itself, the gifts of nature and society we inherit and create together. These gifts are worth more than all private assets combined. It’s the job of the commons sector to organize and protect these gifts, and by so doing, to save capitalism from itself.
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