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[wierd]

No, that's the damned autocorrect chomping at the bit to correct "Plutocrat" into something it thinks I meant to write.

Gotta love technology, eh?

[thompson]

Redistribution of wealth by random lottery sounds like some kind of anarchist.

Not any anarchist I've ever heard of.  Re-distribution of wealth, sure, although not unique to anarchism.  But the random lottery part has no relation to any anarchist school of thought I'm aware of.

I can see it working in an anarchist kind of way. It would break up the power structures of the elite, and the new elite wouldn't have the experience to quickly get their own empires up and running. If wealth lotteries were sufficiently frequent people would be discouraged from saving money and we'd transition to the ultimate consumption economy. But who knows, maybe some people might donate to the poor instead and build social status that way. The government can't take something like that from someone. Interesting concept. Not sure it would get past congress though.

[JoshuaFH]

Redistribution of wealth by random lottery sounds like some kind of anarchist.

Not any anarchist I've ever heard of.  Re-distribution of wealth, sure, although not unique to anarchism.  But the random lottery part has no relation to any anarchist school of thought I'm aware of.

I can see it working in an anarchist kind of way. It would break up the power structures of the elite, and the new elite wouldn't have the experience to quickly get their own empires up and running. If wealth lotteries were sufficiently frequent people would be discouraged from saving money and we'd transition to the ultimate consumption economy. But who knows, maybe some people might donate to the poor instead and build social status that way. The government can't take something like that from someone. Interesting concept. Not sure it would get past congress though.

I proposed the random lottery idea a while ago, and I initially thought it was a great idea, but then realized that while it helps to maintain social order domestically, it sacrifices foreign and international legitimacy, which is a far worse deal. I mean, suppose you're a neighboring country, or a businessman in a neighboring country, do you want to deal with the country that has a totally unstable social hierarchy? No you don't, but they sure look like easy targets...

[Kagus]

Apparently there was some random ancient Greek dude who strongly considered lottery as a form of government, so I guess that means it's pretty legit.

[Starver]

Random ancient Greek dudes always prefer lotteries, because it's random people who win, and they're random so naturally they would win!

(Though not currently available to listen, Mark Steel has dealt with this on at least one occasion, with variations, and I'm sure Mark Thomas has covered this as well along the way.)

[Trekkin]

Apparently there was some random ancient Greek dude who strongly considered lottery as a form of government, so I guess that means it's pretty legit.

A lot of random ancient Greek dudes, on point of fact, since sortition was how Athenian magistrates were appointed for ~300 years.

[Folly]

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/436197-trump-fbi-doj-to-review-outrageous-jussie-smollett-case

FBI & DOJ to review the outrageous Jussie Smollett case in Chicago. It is an embarrassment to our Nation!

Huh...I did not expect Trump to get involved with this one.
Trump might want to think twice before declaring that the FBI and DOJ are responsible for investigating national embarrassments...

[smjjames]

The tweet looks like he ordered it, but the article sounds like the FBI and DOJ started it on their own. Can't tell which one it's supposed to be considering Trump.

[sluissa]

Fox News can't stop talking about it. (Although admittedly it's all over most of the cable news stations.) So obviously he has to do something about it.

[nenjin]

It's playing to the exact narrative they like to put forward.

[Karnewarrior]

it also would serve no real purpose;

The randomly assigned people would just become the new plutarchs overnight.   The problem is the gross difference between incomes among the populace, not who is currently wealthy and who is not.


Personally, I think it would be better to impose increasingly burdensome bads on people who fixate on being the wealthiest of the wealthy instead.  Taxes have been a historically tried one (that gets loopholed to death).  I would suggest something more constructive though.

The major quasi-religious petard I keep hearing is that "private interests" can do a better job with helping the poor and all that, so we should codify into law that they are responsible for that, with the degree of responsibility heaped on them being consistent with the curve distribution of their wealth.  EG, people in the top 1% are legally responsible for the healthcare and welfare of the bottom 99%, with the top earners being responsible for the greater portion of that assistance.  They can render that assistance directly if they want (such as via a charity, or even writing checks for medical care for poor people) but they have to keep reciepts, and must provide that proof at the end of each year; The goal being that all that capital gain and wealth increase they are engaging in must also reimburse the society for its extraction from society, with the goal of harnessing that drive to improve standards of living across the whole of society, and not just in the top 1%.

It's a silly idea sure-- but I think it might be interesting to try.  Throw in actual penalties for trying to game the system though, and I mean "No, we are confiscating ALL of your holdings, and sending you to prison, asshole" levels of punishment here.  To have even the slightest chance of working, the penalties for gaming the system must be equivalent to ostracism from the society. (EG, the financial equivalent there to.)

The thing to keep in mind is that people should be incentivized to produce work the society can use in a useful way, which has been done through money in every society I can recall larger than maybe 100 people. In other words, you want to incentivize people to become as rich as possible, and then correlate accumulated money with produced "usefulness" as strongly as possible. Leaders are paid because their work, the work of coordinating people, is of use to the society's function. Factory Workers are paid because them running the machines to produce goods assists the society in maintaining QoL for X group.

If you dis-incentivize accumulation of money by forcing it all to be spent on charities, you dis-incentivize a lot of people from self-maximizing their output. The solution isn't to dis-incentivize money accumulation, we need to retighten the screws binding our money to actual work, since right now the correlation is pretty loose. Charity is, imo, very much a "give a man a fish" situation, when the system should account for them naturally and give them a means of fixing their own destitution, preferably without outside input. the question is how to accomplish that.

[smjjames]

*points at Bay12 as a society*

Seriously though, there are certainly organizations or groups of more than 100 people who don't need to incentivize using money. Sometimes it's perks, sometimes it's other stuff or don't need to.

Also, early on it would have been bartering through an exchange of goods, services, or a mix of both. Currency is just an advanced form of bartering anyway.

[Karnewarrior]

Yes, but even bartering still ends up breaking down into "Do this societally useful work, and we will reward you with this personally useful QoL increase". Perks work the same way. But neither Bartering nor Perks particularly scale up well when applied to the macro-societies in the real world; just look at attempts to form a communist state (which could be seen as a society which rewards Work with Perks instead of Currency)

Bay 12 doesn't qualify since it's a spin-off of a different transaction: you pay in Work (money) to gain access to a useful resource (the Internet). We've all done, or had someone else do, Work to provide us with the chance to be here, and if we stop doing the Work, we lose access to the Internet and thus to Bay 12. It's not a society so much as a reward, like a VIP lounge. It acts as an incentive to do Work.

[smjjames]

I was joking around with pointing at Bay12, hence the ‘Seriously though,’

[RedKing]

When the workers have democratic control of the means of shitposting, only then will Bay12 know true freedom.