I like his way of thinking but I really don’t like his nothing burger suggestions.
Like why are you telling civilians to do it. Like I’m gonna say “oh, ok I’ll go tax the wealthy then”. If you’re that rich as he claims to be why not go be a politican and represent us? Tax the rich my ass. Like it’s our fault. Like we can do anything at all.
There was one vid of him saying “oh I got richer because I bought oil commodity when the war started” like what the fuck man. And then he kept saying tax the rich again.
Also his book sucked. He was basically telling how clever he was and how everyone is else was an asshole tools. Sorry but unless he uses his power (money) and start moving some stones, he’s just another rich cunt that just talks bs to me.
Sorry, downvote all you want. But I’m sick of hearing people telling me to do something while they already have all the power to blast the things. I got fucking bills to pay and I’m dead on the evening can barely read a single page of a book without falling asleep. What the fuck am I supposed to do more? I’m drained.
Lmfao “downvote all you want”
Upvoted
But seriously guys like him sound like they just wanna hear themselves talk and look smart / on the morally right side of things. Absolute tool I guess. However not gonna tell him to stop saying it because the more people that do, maybe it’ll help.
If you watch any of this youtube video you will find he repeatedly says that he is a stock trader and economist, and that he knows exactly where his expertise starts and ends. He knows very confidently that his past predictions have been highly accurate and successful, so he can see where this is heading.
But he also knows that he doesnt know how to implement the changes he wants to see. He knows his limitations and lack of skills as a politician, a taxation designer, lobbiest, etc. and that he isnt the right person for the job, which is why he is promoting Gabriel Zucman to design the taxation system, and is in contact with other figures to convince the politicians that vote on the laws.What he does say is that he knows the problem, he knows the solution, he knows whats going to happen if we dont act. His whole goal is to get the message out to people and find the right voices to make the change, whether its the comman man who knows what to care about when voting, the people with power to change minds to talk to the politicians and law makers to make the change, and the economists to forge the right tax to actually effectively target the 1% before everything is taken from us.
So no, he doesnt have all the answers, but he just wants people to know there is a problem, what that problem is, how it will affect everyone and to not sit on your hands. I dont hold it against him that he doesnt have the whole package A to Z, he has gone above and beyond for a cause he is essentially committing his life to, even though he is (probably) wealthy enough to not give a shit.
Even worse at least the local noble was local and would usually invest within their community instead of what we have now where they barely have to see us.
Uh…
Medieval robber barons most often imposed high or unauthorized tolls on rivers or roads passing through their territory. Some robbed merchants, land travelers, and river traffic—seizing money, cargoes, even entire ships—or engaged in kidnapping for ransom.
I mean, we have a kind of tentative re-implementation of this in the US/Iran fight over the Strait of Hormuz. Also, with the vision of the Network State professed by Silicon Valley elites. And then there’s the Trump economic plan of high tariffs and walled-off borders, which seems to echo the Israeli strategy of segregated micro-communities and settler expansion into neighboring enclaves.
Idk if I’d call any of this “investment” in the neoliberal sense. Much of it seems to involve rent-seeking through enclosure and extortion. There’s no real value-add to any of it.
He’s fucking right
He is wrong in one thing. The timeline. Digital feudalism already exists and we are living it.
Have been a while. The American tech monopolies and their awful business practices have been with us decades. Been “too big to fail” and “too big to jail” for a while. Just now it’s in everyone’s faces.
his discussion with Dan Neidle indicates strongly that this is slopulism
it needs to happen but not in the magical way gary the dunce suggests
Yes thats entirely the point. All these ketamine snorting tech bros have hyped each other up into believing they are the new aristocracy who deserve an underclass
Tax Wealth?
I want wealth caps!
Say, 10 million dollars, is simply the maximum amount of money anyone can have / control. Any income after that is 100% taxed
No more extreme riches
Governments get huge influx of resources which they can use for free healthcare, free education, universal basic income
Poverty could disappear. Poverty related crimes could disappear
Companies can no longer have huge share holders and owners, now requiring loads of smaller shareholders.
Limit company worths to max 1 billion too while we’re at it.l, because no ultra large company ever did something that was good for humanity
Now we have boat loads of smaller companies, makes your economy more stable
Since you can’t pass that wealth limit, incentives to screw over customers are gone because it won’t get you more anyway.
I can go on listing the benefits for another hour but you get the idea …
I literally can’t see bad sides to limiting wealth. It’s a simple rule to get control of the narcissist psychopaths that are ruining the world
Why haven’t we ever done that before?
The resources required to enforce such rules are controlled by the people who benefit from that not being the rules. Hell, the IRS has essentially said they don’t have the resources to go after the biggest tax evaders because it costs too much.
https://www.gq.com/story/no-irs-audits-for-the-richExcuses it cost everyone more if they don’t
“It costs too much” is a horseshit excuse when the result of the audit would likely pay for itself many times over. Use the first couple of years to automate/streamline as much of the process as you can, and they’ll likely start just paying the damn things like they should have been in the first place, if only to avoid the hassle.
I realize that’s an old article, but the problem is just the fucking MAGAt Rapepublicans gutting the IRS. I mean, on one hand you are right, they don’t have the manpower. By design. By the oligarchs who own the gov’t.
Ofc he’s not going to suggest that, that means he’ll lose his monies. “Rules for them but not me!”
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Isn’t that explicitly the goal of alt-right “thinkers” like Yarvin and his “Dark Enlightenment” (not clever enough for “Endarkenment”?)? Peter Thiel hopes to apply/spread it to all Western civilizations, not just the US.
I know Gary likes to play dumb and assume this isn’t actually the goal of the rich and powerful all along but they have been executing this class war now for 45 years. Its not like its new and its had universal support from every government since the early 1980s. It is what the ruling class wants, because they get to own everything and live even better. There is a reason you can’t get Labour to do anything about it they have been pursuing this intentionally since the 2000s.
My brother in Christ, class war has been active for thousands of years.
Ever since the priests convinced others to work for them. The orginal lazy wealty class.
And also bizzarely attached to Labour.
Even his chats with Polanski seem to get ended with a “come and talk to me Labour-daddy and I’ll play with you instead, he’s not my first choice” attitude.
Maybe its genuine on his part then and he isn’t playing dumb he just doesn’t actually realise that Labour has been bought and paid for by the rich and wealthy since the end of the 90s. He does keep thinking he can get Labour to change tune, yesterdays interview on channel 4 he is still talking like Labour can be pressured into wealth taxes to save themselves from wipe out in 2028.
I think he is just hedging his bets and knows that he has to pick a horse with the power to make the change, however likely that is, rather than betting on the fastest horse around but which is never going to get out of the gates.
How does he play dumb?
I think he does so in that he makes it out as best as he can to not be left vs right as people have been propogandised as to what those terms mean, and he wants to appeal to the masses; but in practice it’s pretty left coded.
Facts are facts regardless of who says them. It doesnt matter that people think it’s a left wing idea bcz honestly this affects everybody and is the reason right wing demagogues such as Trump have risen to power.
They offer simple solutions to problems that don’t address the root issue.
By not admitting this is actually something the government is intending and helping happen. He is treating the powerful as if they are unaware of the impact of what is clearly their chosen strategy and what will happen.
Tax Wealth, or well shift from Trickle Down Economics to Robin Hood Economics, which usually doesn’t turn out well for the leadership.
Why do you think the tech bros are so busy investing ? When you don’t even need the other people to maintain your luxury, they can just die off and leave the planet to them. Clean, empty, serviced by “I have no mouth and I must scream” AI robots and rewilding. Paradise for them and death for the rest of us. The stench of death will only last 10 years and then the robots can clean up.
Clean, empty, serviced by “I have no mouth and I must scream” AI robots and rewilding.
A very tempting offer of my death brings the dystopian, apocalyptic hell of “I have no mouth and I must scream” for billionaires.
Abandoning tech for a few generations might be a good thing. It seems all of society is forced to re-engineer itself based on the latest tech/gizmo/widget invention, in order to streamline “business”, but everything gets more expensive with diminishing quality over time. Knee-jerk reactions to the shiny and new aren’t good for anybody.
Abandoning tech for a few generations might be a good thing.
Are we “abandoning tech” or just segregating access to infrastructure based on professed loyalties to surveillance tyrants?
You’re either on the bus or off the bus.
Ludd is love
Tech is dreck
Somewhere we lost sight of the idea that just because a person has an idea, does not make it a GOOD idea.
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gary mate, i think thats what they want
Me resisting the urge to explain how modern medieval historians consider feudalism to have never existed:
But yeah he’s right. Or well something will give before that, but that’s the limit state we’re looking at.
??? which part didn’t exist, the serfs, the literal kings and tiers of nobility, what
I’d love to know that, too. Would definitely like to have some books recommended by reputable historians who say feudalism never existed.
Taxing wealth strikes me as like trying to scoop out the ocean. We have to recreate beaver dams and restore the metaphorical flood plains. Spread out and soak in. The water table is going down and the land is subsiding; moving some water isn’t enough.
How is a wealth tax just moving water? What would you say is more effective? A wealth tax isn’t just about recapturing some of the wealth back from the wealthy, arguably that isn’t even the most important aspect of it, but rather having the mechanisms in place to map out and track wealth. Having that in place would massively benefit us to understand the velocity of wealth and where exactly it is being accumulated so that we can more effectively act to remedy massive inequalities.
If you want to learn more, this video goes into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmK74mfpHQA
It takes a long time to construct those things though right - you can take a bucket to the beach today.
Even if its the tiniest fraction of what they have, if it can fund campaigns and programmes that work toward a more just society, its helpful, right? Obviously it’s more important that we build those things, but while we’re building them if we can get a bucketful its better than nothing
True!
This man is a clown and can safely be ignored without negatively affecting any part of your life.
It’s a parody that this charlatan is making bank shilling populism to a magazine that is sold on the street by the homeless.
Listen to this self-aggrandising spiv winge about the “academics in their ivory tower” and how he’s so smart that none of them take him seriously, while making a career out of surface level platitudes like the title. It’s wild that anyone can listen to him without cringing out of their skull.
Apparently the hosts of that video you shared don’t like graphs either because they covered the most critical part of the graph with their dumb grinning faces:
Gary has a point, there can be endless playing about with numbers, and looking at a single graph is not enough to draw a vast conclusion. How about we look at a stat from the same page that graph was pulled from?
and that stat highlights the point Gary was trying to make about looking at the wealth of the top 0.1% who are largely the ones taking wealth from everyone else, including from the rest of the top 10%. The host trying to pull a gotcha on Gary can’t even read the graph he handpicked because he said that things are better now than in 1980 before trying to correct himself by saying “they’re kind of like they were in 1980” even though actually the share of wealth for the top 10% was lower in 1980 and the share of wealth for the bottom 50% was higher.
On top of all that, the numbers end at 2020, which is right before plundering frenzy that the wealthy did thanks to all the money printing that took place during the pandemic. Here’s the page with graphs and stats for anyone interested: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/
Your framing of that video is complete rubbish. The hosts repeatedly state that they agree there are problems with economic inequality, and accurately describe the problem at every point. Their point isn’t about the stats, it’s about how Gary is a grifter that tailors his message to attract simpletons who like shiney words and empty rhetoric. That he can’t even engage with a chart that might support his message because actual data isn’t a part of the equation for him, only rhetoric and whatever cherry picked headlines he can find to support it.
You’re also just framing this as a gotcha for the same reasons, that Gary is constantly playing victim, so his fans carry that message as well. He wasn’t a victim, he’s a grown ass man that can’t handle any push back without crying like a little bitch.
You complain about a graph not being enough to draw a conclusion then point to an even worse data point that completely misses 49.999% of the population in its analysis. That’s some turbo charged populist brainrot, and Gary will definitely add it to his grab bag of factoids to dazzle his audience for year to come, like jingling keys in front of babies.
Those two hosts agree there are problems with economic inequality, so then what’s the point of the graph? Is the graph showing there isn’t an inequality problem? If so, doesn’t that mean the hosts themselves are dismissing the graph?
Their point isn’t about the stats, it’s about how Gary is a grifter that tailors his message to attract simpletons who like shiney words and empty rhetoric. That he can’t even engage with a chart that might support his message because actual data isn’t a part of the equation for him, only rhetoric and whatever cherry picked headlines he can find to support it.
You claim it’s not about stats and yet their issue is that he didn’t want to get dragged into a pointless argument over the minutia of some chart. If these hosts agree that wealth inequality is a problem, then it’s an established point that doesn’t need to be rehashed through arguments over a chart. Gary knows this, his audience knows this, the hosts know this, and we know this, and many are living through this. What purpose does arguing over a chart do other than to try to distract from the message? If you want a strong message that resonates with people, you have to keep it simple and straightforward.
Whether he’s a grifter or not is a matter of opinion. Dismissing his message by calling him a grifter is a textbook example of ad hominem. His message is simple:
- There is massive wealth inequality.
- Wealth inequality tends to get worse since the more assets one owns, the more they can use that as leverage to obtain even more assets.
- A wealth tax addresses the heart of the problem by taxing wealth directly.
What is your issue with these key points? That he hasn’t spent enough time in the chart mines? That you think he’s a grifter? Clearly his method of communication has been effective in drawing attention on the issue while offering a solution and I think that’s a great thing.
It’s great for Gary because the 4th bullet point you forgot to add is “involve Gary in economic policy making cause he’s so smart and the academics in their ivory tower are all useless”. He sounds just like the Eric Weinstein complaining that the Trump admin didn’t call the intellectual darkweb for help.
Everything is downstream from that with these people, because they rely on simplifications of complex issues to dupe laymen into thinking they are the only ones with the answers.
Here is a OECD paper looking at the pros and cons of a wealth tax https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-role-and-design-of-net-wealth-taxes-in-the-oecd_9789264290303-en.html it won’t go viral because it isn’t written by slopulist clout goblins like Gary. I doubt he’s read it because it contains a LOT of graphs, but that’s just the kind of thing you need if you’re going to start advocating for tax reform. Showing a graph or two might have helped him if this article is to be believed.
Gary is a flashy spiv with boring, half-baked ideas and he will never provide information in this much detail. He needs to keep it simple for the clicks, inevitably pushing his audience up mount stupid so they can walk into the ballot box with confidence and vote for economic arsonists with shiney slogans like his. People like Nigel Farage who also benefit from Gary’s bipartisan message of broken institutions and elite corruption.
The report won’t go viral because it’s a 100+ page report. Everyone plays a different role, Gary’s role is to raise awareness of the solution of wealth tax and push for an implementation. He’s done a great job at that. I have watched the documentary written about in that article and I agree it wasn’t good, he didn’t push back enough most of the time. His skill was limited in that respect, but his skill at getting clicks is still good to give traction and momentum to the idea of a wealth tax where others can pick up the torch and carry it to the goal.
Farage does not advocate for a wealth tax and Gary has talked about Farage multiple times on his channel, pointing out that he is taking advantage of the situation where institutions and the elites are indeed corrupt, but will not implement a solution to fix it and will actually do the opposite. I don’t see how that messaging benefits Farage. If you make a wealth tax a partisan issue, then you’re cutting along party lines rather than class lines and that will mean people in poorer classes not supporting a wealth tax simply because of allegiance to their party of choice.
Additionally, Gary has talked about working with economists and politicians. He doesn’t claim to be the only one with all the answers.
I think you’re missing the main point a little bit, the problem with Gary is that he oversimplifies everything. He bigs himself up as this decisive voice without actually engaging with inequality research and policy holistically, consistently. He is not an exceptionally good economist, however he has vast reach and a large social media presence. The problems arising from this sort of populism is less apparent while his mission is aligned with what one believes, but is concerning nonetheless. He is just a burnt out millionaire turned influencer/media figure, who larps as this down-to-earth campaigner for good, while building his youtube brand and selling a book about how he was the tippy-top trader at Citibank.
When you want your message to reach the masses, you have to oversimplify, otherwise it gets bogged down in details that ultimately may not even matter. People are having trouble with basic cost of living: shelter, healthcare, education, and even food. Focusing so heavily on numbers and graphs is how you get clowns claiming that it’s just a “vibecession” just because some dumb metric like GDP or their arbitrary basket of goods looks fine, meanwhile these people can’t afford the basics.
The problem is that the field of economics is biased so heavily towards policies that benefit the rich because that is how you get funding. Economists are largely in servitude to the rich and that is why they consider an effective tax on the rich “bad economics”. What these past decades have clearly shown that catering to the rich does not work. Why do you think they’re so vehemently against a wealth tax? If it was so ineffective then they wouldn’t care about a wealth tax getting established.
Love your reply, glad to read that we are agreed on the important things.
