Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Proposed: An International Income Cap for Individuals

Over the course of this blog, I will put forward arguments supporting the creation of an international individual income cap. To illustrate, international trade agreements could include tenets that require countries to tax all individual earnings after the first 10 million Euros (or equivalent) at a 100 percent rate. In that way, no individual would be able to earn more than 10 million Euros in one year.

All the implications of this income cap need to be dealt with in extensive examinations. I intend on doing that by discussing the following topics over the coming days. I expect that I'll have to work out many different issues under each of these topics, write multiple articles under each topic.
  1. Profit motives, value creation and self-improvement are paramount and foremost for THE GROWTH of our market-based economies.    
  2. Market-based economies work best when sellers and buyers both realize their own gains from the exchanges.    
  3. Monetary profit opportunities are permitted under social norms and values, and within the social systems created by the culture, history and the consensus of a society.    
  4. In market economies, great majorities of people become dependent upon earning monetary incomes from employment by business owners (subsistence farming vanishes in market economies).    
  5. Business owners do and must take economic advantage of employees in the creation of economic value if they are to continue their businesses. Business owners should not be allowed to recklessly profit based upon this advantage over employees.    
  6. The rights of individuals should not be violated by others . . . neither because a majority votes to do so, nor because some potential economic profit may be gained by doing so.    
  7. Business owners, corporations and the ultra-rich too often take unnecessary risks with employees’ lives and rights, the lives and rights of others, and societal and public resources. High monetary incentives, and the social status associated with wealth, seem to become focal objectives for business owners, corporations and the ultra-rich. The risks created and placed on others have been and continue to be ignored as a result of seeking these high monetary incentives.    
  8. We live in a Regulated-Market Economy, not in a Free-Market Economy.    
  9. Society can regulate greed and regulate the associated risk-taking in some ways, especially once society members agree that The Market does at times fail in regulating itself.    
  10. Human rights are unalienable rights. Our laws endow corporations, unions, political organizations, government bodies and other legal entities with some abilities. If human rights are extended to those legal inventions, then those rights are being alienated from the people. 
  11. An excessive income gap creates a second class of citizens.
To comment on these 11 ideas, please visit the https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEV4SkVaV0JKT3JsMHRMZHJxNndEN3c6MQ survey.

I still do not clearly see how I will move from proving these 11 ideas to be true to the recommendation that an income cap be placed on individuals. My hope is that the effort of working out these ideas will lead me to such a leap. Hopefully too, others will see the blossoming of this idea and contribute what criticisms and other links are necessary to better round out this hypothesis.

All my best,
Auntie Greed 
 

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