Political Memes

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.