User:Fasten/YHVH/Dictionary/lucrative
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"Making too much money can be seen as unethical, even if perfectly legal." [1]
Consequently a society with advanced ethics would probably have limitations on personal property and personal economic turnover (e.g. a limit of personal property to € 500.000 [2] seems enough for all practical purposes).
Any property beyond such a limit could be required to be assigned to associations or cooperatives with democratic control and rules for public co-determination.
An alternative system could have several different limits but the higher your limit the lower are your ethics. This is similar to the idea of a voluntary social year as a precondition to the right to vote: There is no force involved but the invididual could make a voluntary contribution and thereby gain the trust of the community in exchange. The individual could also decide to be a declared egoist and suffer the penalty.
- [1] This is especially true for products with near zero replication cost, as music, software and intellectual property. The replicator technology in StarTrek is a hint on this: When in the future anything can be replicated by robots, what would that mean for a capitalist society? Can there be a sensible monetary system in such a society? Today a replicator would put most people employed in production out of job, which would create sever problems for anybody not owning a replicator him - or herself, as the unemployment insurance would probably not be able to support this. [3] The music, movie and software industries own replicators today. [4] [5]
- [2] This is an arbitrarily choosen maximum but it leaves some room for economic motivation and obsoletes the word millionaire at the same time. A progressive variant of this could be a wealth tax that increases by 1% for every 50.000 or 100.000 € and is applied only to the money of each step, so the first 50 - 100.000 € would have a tax of 1% for everybody, the second 50 - 100.000 € would have a tax of 2% for everybody. [6]
- [3] Observing the extrem positions does have its uses, only not the way it is employed in the YHVH language: You can see where trends lead if you try to anticipate more extreme positions.
- [4] This also leads ad absurdum the claim that whatever money you own, when you own it you can do with it whatever you want: With a larger share of economic resources comes higher responsibility, no matter how acquired.
- [5] An industry lacking self-imposed limits on how much profit can be made on products with zero replication cost would have to be regulated by the collective intelligence of its customers.
- [6] A variant could be a wealth tax that is collected and certified by the government but can be (partially) redirected to non-profit organizations of choice, similar to the church tax.
- An advantage of this would be that people would get used to recognizing excess money. The money would be collect as tax, so the initial decision to declare a certain amount of money as excess money would be easy, even for people who usually wouldn't consider the step.
- A second advantage would be that people would get used to making responsible decisions about where to direct this money. People could be free to let the government spend the money but many people would probably make their own choices for charities or non-profit organizations who should receive the money.
