Maybe the tectonic plates are shifting just a little
JVL Introduction
A disciple of Thomas Piketty, progressive left economist Gabriel Zucman has prepared a landmark new report at the express request of Brazil, currently holding the presidency of the G20.
Going by the title of “A blueprint for a coordinated minimum effective taxation standard for ultra-high-net-worth individuals” it is a serious proposal with wind in its sails.
No doubt it will meet resistance at the next G20 summit later this month from the US and others with squeals that a global minimum tax on the obscenely wealthy will destroy their incentive to create wealth to aggrandise themselves.
Sam Pizzigati’s article below is followed by the Executive Summary of the report itself.
RK
This article was originally published by Inequality on Thu 27 Jun 2024. Read the original here.
A Practical Prescription for Taxing Our World’s Richest
A bold new proposal from the economist Gabriel Zucman is gaining prime-time backing
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The arithmetical clarity of this article unintentionally reveals the utopianism of social democratic solutions in the present era. For the unanswered question screams off the printed page:
“Who will bell the cat?”
It is widely acknowledged that the lawmakers of the USA and the major western democracies are dominated by the corrupt hirelings of oligarchic capital. Yet just as familiarity breeds contempt so does unfamiliarity breed illusion. It is an absurd fantasy of the campist left in western democracies that somehow this power will be offset by the noble lawmakers of so-called ‘anti-imperialist’ countries. Yet in many if not most of these countries local oligarchs do not even need to employ hirelings to serve as lawmakers – they are happy to fulfil that role themselves.
An obvious example is ‘Communist’ China, the world’s second largest economy. In 2018 the net worth of the wealthiest 153 members of China’s Parliament and its advisory body amounted to $650 billion. (Source: Hurun report cited by NYT). By comparison the combined personal wealth of the US congress pales into insignificance.
As for the rest of the world: Saudi Arabia? India? Iran? Russia?
Once the question in Aesop’s fable is posed it becomes obvious that this solution cannot be achieved by constitutional means; yet if the solution requires the mass revolutionary overthrow of oligarchic control, why would the revolution confine itself to taxing the oligarchs instead of expropriating and socialising their wealth?
This is an anachronistic social democratic fantasy, not a socialist solution.
A very worthy proposal. However, it would still leave the ultra–rich in control of 98% of their income and wealth and its investment. This amounts to leaving them with a substantial degree of control over the global economy, political systems across the world, and thence over the lives of the rest of us. This is an abomination. The control over this wealth and its underlying assets – socially–produced but privately appropriated – should be taken out of their hands and vested in organs of participative democratic management.
We live in a global capitalist society that uses human and natural resources. As a result, emigration because of poverty and war, waste because of over production, pollution of our planet, are partly the consequences of a big gap between distribution of wealth in the world. I am very pleased to hear that Brazil has taken the initiative for a just cause for people as well as the planet.