On Mon, 7 Apr 2008, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>> So if we're dreaming, what you want it to change the tax discourse
>> permanently.
>
> [WS:] This also strikes me as a rather timid dream. A far more radical
> proposal would be socialization of the financial sector, that is, public
> ownership of financial institutions, like banks, stock exchanges and
> insurance....In short, if one is dreaming about exploiting the current
> crisis, why not dreaming big? Why stopping at a wussy liberal proposal
> of taxing the rich instead of a really radical one of changing the
> ownership structuere of the economy?
Because socializing the commanding heights of finance would require the profoundest change in national worldview imaginable. (I think the odds are against it ever being possible in the US -- and surely not until after it's done and accepted in the norms in all the other rich countries.)
That's not something you can launch on the back of short-term opportunistic anger. But much higher taxes on the rich you could. (It's not unprecedented -- we actually had it before in this country during its most anti-communist period. Now communists barely exist!) And the next step you reach for is to make them the norm. Which would be a fungible gain useful for many things. And it's way, a big little change.
I'm all for you dreaming your dream, Woj. If you start a website to propagate it I'll even join you to help. But surely you realize that's a dream with a time horizon of decades of ideological preparation before it. That dream is where single payer was in 1929. Good luck with it!
Michael