Having wealth over 1000 times the median family income.
I’d prefer it was simply prevented via policy rather than punished if breached.
I would prefer a mixed system. All wealth over 1000x the median household income taxed at 100%. So no one should have a fortune larger than that, a number that would be approximately $80 million today. But if you secretly gather a fortune much larger than that? If you somehow secretly amass a fortune 10,000x the median household income? At that point I would apply severe criminal penalties, like a mandatory minimum 20 year sentence. I don’t want to throw the book at someone just because they accidentally let their fortune grow a bit beyond the limit. But if you’re a whole order of magnitude above it? Then that’s when severe criminal penalties should apply. At some point your wealth becomes so large that you personally become a threat to national security. Amassing a fortune in the billions should be treated like a private citizen trying to build their own nuclear bomb. No one should have that much power, and we should treat both the same.
Scale that back to 100x tops
I like the 1000x threshold because that is approximately the maximum possible fortune one can amass in one’s lifetime off of ordinary salary work and extreme frugality.
1000x the median income would be about $80 million. Consider the highest-earning non-executive salaried employees - people who spend years in school in very challenging fields. People like neurosurgeons. Imagine if there was a couple composed of two neurosurgeons, and they earn very good salaries. They’re also so frugal that they spend basically nothing. You have a pair of neurosurgeons literally sleeping on the sidewalk out front of the hospital. They live like that, and they invest and save every penny they can. The highest salaried incomes combined with pathological frugality.
Even if they did all of that. Even if two highly educated workers lived off nothing and saved everything, even then those people would still struggle to earn, over their whole life, a fortune that exceeded 1000x the median household income.
Such a system allows for a capitalism that actually does live up to the marketing. You’re allowed to earn a fortune as large as your own labor and skills will allow. However, the only way to obtain a fortune larger than this is to get into the business of labor arbitrage - hiring other people and harnessing the surplus of their labor. I want people to be able to earn as much money from the sweat of their own brow as they can. But I don’t want people to be able to hoard strategically dangerous fortunes by exploiting the labor of others. And 1000x the median household income is a nice even number that’s easy to explain to people and that achieves this goal.
Private financing of political campaigns, lobbying, billionaire tax evasion, corporate personhood, corporate tax evasion, wealth over 100 million, private equity in housing or healthcare, employment dependent health insurance, misinformation presented as news, not enforcing laws on the wealthy, corporate subsidies, big farm subsidies(small community farms only), gerrymandering, for profit prisons and felons running for office.
misinformation presented as news
I mean, that one’s easier said than done. There’s been laws like that, but somebody has to decide what’s misinformation, and they usually abuse it.
Advertising.
Political lobbying and lifetime politicians.
Willful violations of the Constitution. Right now, elected officials can brazenly disregard the Constitution and the worst that happens is they are told not to do that again in the future, pretty please.
It was willful violation of the Constitution that led to the end of slavery and suffrage for women. Not always a bad thing.
Religion
All you have to do is make it illegal to expose or proselytize religion to anyone under 22, and religion would likely die out within 2-3 generations.
When you have been raised as a rationalist and know, at a fundamental level, the bullshit detection system called the Scientific Method, you need to have some pretty powerful mental illness in play to willingly grasp at religion.
Agreed. And yet there are plenty of Gen Z and Gen Alpha religous zealots.
Brainwashing gets increasingly easy the younger the subject is. Children, in particular, have an evolutionary need to automatically trust adults and what adults tell them, as they don’t yet have the cognitive tools to handle the world around them. Trusting adults have been baked into that part of childhood development because, historically speaking, it gave a distinct evolutionary advantage. Those children that listened to adults had a much stronger probability of surviving until adulthood.
It’s why religions so strongly proselytize the young – get them young, get them for life.
I wonder what the most effective way to de-radicalize these individuals is.
The Socratic Method tends to be effective in many cases so long as the other person remains open to reason and logic, especially the requirement for evidence.
How does that contradict what OP said? Gen alpha is literally all kids and teens, even.
Supporting the state of “israel” with financial or other material means.
Lying as a politician.
earning more than 360,000 usd per year.
And how will Californians and New Yorkers be able to afford a new home next year?
Housing costs will go down when demand drops due to enough people being imprisoned
Anytbing that annoys me personally.
Telling any support staff individual
“It just says error.”
Punishment compounded based upon the degree of detailed information you simply decided to not bother reading before seeking assistance.
Lol
No, it should be punishable to build a system that just says “error” when it fails.
And just like that, Microsoft goes straight to jail LMAO.
But oh yeah, I’ve seen those. Those would also be included under this law! We can have both! Lol
Seriously though, I’m talking specifically when any little thing that stops someone from doing what they’re doing and it’ll usually say “Hey, this is why it’s not working. Please tell someone this message.”
“…it just says error?”
Hurt my soul. I’m so done with that nonsense lol.
And just like that, Microsoft goes straight to jail LMAO.
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
It says software has encountered an error: blahblahblah, click ok to quit
Every fucking time they skip over the bit we actually need to hear
Production of cigarettes and tobacco.
As ex smoker who tried to quit so many times during almost two decades - I know how tough this drug can be and that it’s wide acceptance as social norm makes it so much worse.
Because the war on drugs is working out great…
What percentage of people smoke cigarettes compared to the percentage that do cocaine? Perhaps prohibition would dramatically reduce the number of users, even if that number is guaranteed to never reach 0?
Different drugs, which is why considerably more people smoked marijuana while it was illegal than did cocaine.
And also, at what cost? Look at how many lives are ruined because of the war on drugs. Look at how many resources are wasted enforcing it.
Tobacco usage is already a fraction of what it was decades ago.
And everything he’s saying about tobacco can be applied to, you guessed it, alcohol! So we should make booze illegal again? Because that worked out so well the first time?
(to play devil’s advocate, I also think that alcohol has a much greater case for being outlawed than tobacco for the collective harm it does to society)
Using your children to farm engagement online
Leaving a shopping cart in a parking space instead of bringing it back to the cart shelter.
Cart narcs out ✊
Advertising, political parties and religions. All of them.
Political parties?
Did I misspell all of them?
How will your country be ruled without political parties?
ask the founding fathers, they didn’t want them either
Government
