I agree with this, of course, but we should remember what framing wealth distribution through taxation encourages us to forget. It's as much about relations between currencies as it is units of currency. It's uncomfortable to say, but some of us have too much purchasing power.
https://twitter.com/pseudocia/status/1366481254929981440
It's easy to agree to tax the rich, even if the political reality of power structure mean that such abstract agreement cannot be concretely realised. It's much harder to agree to a smaller share of the fruits of the global production process. Stay aware of that difficulty.
It's the basis of a form of economic complicity that hurts not just those outside of rich nations but also the poor within them. Neoliberalism's 'spatial fix' to problems with local labour by outsourcing it to poorer nations helped crush labour power at home.
This outsourcing then refluxes into insourcing, in the form of immigrants rushing to compete for poorly paid but 'essential' work. The ruling class then keeps the 'native' and 'alien' working classes at each others throats to prevent labour power from coalescing.
If you want the relations of inequality that create these situations to be modified in a way that resolves and guards against them, then you've got to want not simply charity through taxation, but the rebalancing of your own purchasing power, and its logistic consequences.
This is the really insidious aspect of the ideology of growth. Not so much the environmental consequences, which are drastic and incredibly serious, but something that would remain even if governance was handling those consequences, a false-consciousness of prosperity.
The plan has *never* been to grow the productive bases of other nations in a way that generates equality of consumptive opportunity, modulo comparative advantage. It has always been to maintain differentials in purchasing power by any means necessary, such as holding back growth.
I'm not saying that this is a *maximally* intentional conspiratorial plan, though in comparison to most conspiracy theories there's well documented history of the explicit decisions made in the forging the current regime of global trade. But there's a Veblenite narrative here.
It's not just that capitalists will happily sabotage economic infrastructure they control in order to extract more profit from the niche they've embedded themselves in within national industry, but that the same basic drives operate at the global level: power vs. prosperity.
International corporations and the nation states whose interests are increasingly bent by their sheer fiscal influence will kill any form of competition or innovation that threatens their respective niches (oligo/mono-polies/psonies). Commerce yokes industrial evolution.
No interoperable standards without franchises, backroom deals, unanticipated accidents, brutal necessities, or rare generosity (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcom_Mc…). Or worse, interoperable lures that become monocultures as one is slowly locked into a private platform or quasi-market.
We see wars between autochthonous industrial evolution and strategic commercial sabotage in every economic sector, fought more intensely in the post-industrial West than anywhere, as neofeudal privatisation and other forms of fealty give established players a competitive edge.
Look no further than the pandemic: an immediate crisis not simply for public health but for economic health, wiping out wealth and small businesses left, right, and centre. The US/UK are distinguished by nothing so much as commercial bottlenecks to every technical response.
Every wretched cronyism and irrational obstacle to the proper functioning of our health systems that a junior executive could imagine has been visited upon us, and we've done our best to ensure this venality influence is spread far and wide. Fuck intellectual property.
Taxing those who extract wealth from these industrial bottlenecks is a good idea, but in isolation it threatens to legitimise their behaviour, to pretend that it's an aspect of any 'well functioning market', when nothing could be further from the truth. Redistribution has limits.
Wealth isn't a number on a balance sheet, but access to the fruits of the process of production (and the power this accrues). The true resolution of inequality isn't the shuffling of such numbers, but the reconfiguration of industry and the tendencies through which it adapts.
Solidarity in buying less and earning more, consuming better and producing smarter. We've had enough of the opposite.🖖
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