Why can’t any government in the world aim to tax ultra rich more whilst making easier for small to medium large businesses to thrive. And policies on property supply rather than property buyers like all sorts of first time buyers programs.

Why are only same old policies keep being peddled when the world is still going to shit?

That doesn’t involve reducing the government size and budget entirely or subscribing to any extreme left or right?

  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 month ago

    These are separate questions, so I’ll answer them in order.

    1. There are governments that focus on reducing wealth inequality and property supply, like the PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. They still have inequality, of course, as well as their own struggles and issues, but there is a concerted effort in Socialist countries to address the needs of the working class through their structures. China in particular does focus on supply a lot, that’s why they are endlessly building new cities to anticipate future necessity, the famous “ghost cities.”

    As for small and medium businesses, these disappear over time and either grow or fail to be capable of influencing the system. In all countries, regardless of economic model, as long as markets persist there will be a gradual increase in proportion of production held by large firms compared to smaller firms, as competition forces growth and centralization. This is actually one of Marx’s most important observations, and forms the basis of Marxism’s view of Socialism compared to earlier Utopian Socialist types like Robert Owen and Saint-Simon.

    1. The “ultra rich,” in Capitalist countries, control the government. In order to truly tax the rich and provide large safety nets, the working class needs to have control of the State. This is far easier said than done, however, even Capitalist democracies aren’t genuinely democratic. If you look at US policy polling, systems like Single Payer healthcare are extremely popular across the board, yet that isn’t seen as a genuine possibility despite being proven in many other countries in various forms.

    The Nordic Countries that seem to have the best of all worlds in this respect hide that they fund these nets through international usury, large IMF loans and the like. They function as landlords in country form, essentially, so their working class is just as exploited internally, yet bribed using much larger exploitation globally. The US, of course, is the largest Empire, but that doesn’t mean the Nordic model would “work” for the US.

    1. Old policies like austerity politics rise as the contradictions within Capitalism, ie wealth inequality, concentration of Capital into fewer and fewer hands, and so forth, sharpen. As Gramsci said,

    The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.

    1. The policies you ask for aren’t extreme anything, really. They are easy to think of, and easy to question why they aren’t seen as a priority. The part where this shifts dramatically to the Left, is translating those ideas into reality. Just like you cannot simply ask a banker to give you free money, Capitalist systems will not let you simply take from the dragon’s hoard, regardless of how that hoard was gained. The “right-wing” answer is Imperialism in order to implement Social Democracy, while the Left-wing answer is Socialism.