[troutman]

Originally Posted by heep223

Yeah good luck with that. The entire world is a series of random events and lucky/unlucky breaks. It's what you make of it that makes you who you are.

What about globally? We as Canadians, when compared to other regions or countries, are born into extraordinary fortunate circumstances whether you are lower, middle or upper class. Should we reset to 0 because we are luckier than those born as a refugee from a war-torn country? We certainly have a lucky leg-up on them. Or does his little idealistic utopia only exist within western countries?

IMO, in the larger context of history, we are living in one of the most equal and happiest meritocracies that has ever existed. Maybe we should feel grateful for it. I've read Gladwell's books. Meh. Lots of people wave their arms and proclaim that they have the answer. They just never describe what it is.

Piketty proposes a global wealth tax. He realizes it is a utopian pipe dream. How do you get every country to sign up for it? It is an answer in theory only.

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles...e-a-crazy-idea

Most of the coverage of Piketty’s book has focused on his diagnosis, but the most interesting part is the cure. He proposes a global tax on capital—by which he means real assets such as land, natural resources, houses, office buildings, factories, machines, software, and patents, as well as pieces of paper, such as stocks and bonds, that represent a financial interest in those assets. In his terminology, capital is essentially the same as wealth. So taxing capital is taking a chunk of rich people’s money. His tax would start small but rise to as high as 5 percent to 10 percent annually for fortunes in the billions. The proceeds in Piketty’s view should not fund an expansion of government: “The state’s great leap forward has already taken place: there will be no second leap—not like the first one, in any event,” he writes.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to see that Piketty’s tax is a far stretch—or in his words, “utopian.” Today most countries tax the income produced by wealth—dividends, rents, capital gains—but they don’t go after the wealth itself. Doing so smacks of confiscation, which was widely practiced in the French Revolution but not the American one. Even if Congress did pass a wealth tax, the IRS would have trouble collecting because the wealthy might transfer title to their assets abroad. Piketty recognizes that, which is why he insists that the tax be global. But getting every tax haven on earth to tax equally and to share data is highly unlikely.

Piketty isn’t willing to concede that his wealth tax is dead on arrival. In an e-mail exchange, he said, “First there’s a lot countries can do on their own. It would be very easy in the U.S. to turn the property tax into a progressive tax on net worth. In effect, we would be reducing the property tax on people with little net wealth (because of large debt) and raising it on people with high financial wealth.” He added: “I understand that many people don’t want this to happen, just like many people did not want the progressive income tax to happen around 1900-1910; but it did happen.” As for capital flight, he said tax havens could be punished. “If the U.S. (a quarter of world GDP) and the EU (another quarter of world GDP) want this to happen, then this can happen. Again, this is political, not technical.”