Ben > Recent Status Updates

"Multiple trajectories are always possible... unfortunately, there is a very real danger that countries will try to avoid fundamental change by intensifying the competition of all against all and engaging in a new round of fiscal and social dumping. This could in turn intensify nationalist and identitarian conflict, which is already conspicuous in Europe, the US, India, Brazil, and China."

"Social position, as important as it is, is not enough to forge a theory of the just society, a theory of property, a theory of borders, a theory of taxes, of education, wages, or democracy.

Without precise answers to these questions, without a clear strategy of political experimentation and social learning, struggle does not know where to turn politically."

"The idea that strictly private property exists and that certain people have an inviolable natural right to it cannot withstand analysis...the only real argument against this logic is the 'Pandora's Box argument'...namely, that any challenge to private property will unleash uncontrollable chaos so that it is better to never open the box. But the experience of the 20th century showed that this argument is bogus.

"The idea that strictly private property exists and that certain people have an inviolable natural right to it cannot withstand analysis"

"I propose that rates assessed on the highest incomes on the order of 60-70% for incomes greater than 10x the national average, and on the order of 80-90% for those 100x the average.

These rates are consistent with those assessed in the 20th century in a number of countries (including the US and the UK). In retrospect, we can see that those decades witnessed some of the strongest growth ever observed."

"Social discontent with the EU and deep incomprehension of the authorities' inability to muster the same energy and deploy the same resources to help large numbers of people as they did to save the financial sector will not magically disappear."

"In the view of the very rapid growth of inequality in the United States, and the stagnation of the standard of living of the majority, it is unlikely that a political-ideological platform centered on the defense of the neo-proprietarian status quo and the celebration of the winners of globalization can last for long."

"..but the reality is that extreme inequality recurs again and again; to deal with it, societies need institutions capable of periodically redefining and redistributing property rights.

The refusal to do so in as transparent and peaceful a manner as possible only increases the likelihood of more violent but less effective remedies."

"At the time of Stalin's death in 1953, more than 5% of the Soviet population was in prison, more than half for "theft of socialist property" and other minor larceny, the purpose of which was to make their daily lives more bearable...to find a similar incarceration rate, one would have to look at the black male population of the United States today (about 5% of adult black males are in prison)."

"...refusing to have a rational debate about a progressive wealth tax and pretending that it is wholly impossible to make the largest fortunes contribute to the common good and that the lower and middle classes have no choice but to pay in their place strikes me as a very dangerous political choice."

"In many countries, the demand for power sharing in firms [by workers], and more generally for redefining ownership and redistributing wealth, have encountered the objection that they are unconstitutional and violate property rights said to be absolute and unlimited; the German Fundamental Law [of 1949] makes this objection moot."

"In the German case, it is clear that the exceptional taxes on private wealth that were levied in 1949-1952 and continued into the 1980s were a much better way of reducing public debt than the hyperinflation of the 1920s, not only from an economic point of view but also a social and democratic one".

"The sacralization of private property is basically a natural response to fear of the void."