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Aran Brown's avatar

I don't disagree with too mucemh you are saying but taxing the super wealthy tends to be rather inefficient as government redistribution tends to come with excessive waste and inefficiency which in an interesting conundrum I shall touch upon in a moment. But maybe a better option might be to require all public and private companies over a certain size to hold a large percentage of shares in trust for their employees (or for private companies to pay a % of profit back to their employees). That way those who actually generate the profit get a fair share of the return. Which brings me back to the earlier conundrum... On a planet with limited resources inefficient use of those resources is bad and one of the positives of capitalism in its purest form is that it drives efficiency in terms of respurce use. But perhaps that just highlights that our solutions will not come from the old left to right spectrum. Ideologies tend in the end to be poisonous... Lets move towards evidence based solutions (tough in our post truth world I know!!!). Lets pod cast this out bro! Peace and light brother.

Aran

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Christopher von Roy's avatar

Love this Aran! It all makes sense, yet on the flip side, eventhough capitalism has a core motivation to be resource and energy efficient, it also has the number priority of "growth and profit at all cost" which on a planet with finite resources is like playing Russian roulette with a loaded gun - there is only ever one outcome. In order to maximise shareholder value, damage to the environment needs to be viewed as an externality.

We need to follow a path that values live whales more greatly than whale meat, orangutans over palm oil and so on. I fully agree with the workers/employees harvesting the profit via share buy backs, it makes imminent sense.

Would love to have you as a guest on the podcast Aran - am looking forward to reading your substack in the near future brother! Ngā mihi, love and light to the fatherland.

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