> That's the fundamental issue though - I think we should structure society in such a way that money cannot buy political power. That way, wealth is just economic - you can hire people, or buy things, but you can't pay off voters or buy political ads or lobby in your interests or bribe politicians.

Money can always buy power. If you can hire people and buy things, you can hire people to canvass for your candidate and you can buy publications to gain greater control of the ideological zeitgeist. That's political power.

But even if you could somehow "structure society in such a way that money cannot buy political power," you still have the problem of what to do now about currently existing problems like inequality. In some ways you seem to be holding out impossible goals and conditions in a way that merely justifies inaction against real problems. Letting the perfect become the enemy of the good, and all that. That kind of thing probably makes the people who benefit from those problems rest easy.

> Money can always buy power. If you can hire people and buy things, you can hire people to canvass for your candidate and you can buy publications to push them and your ideas.

I don't have all the answers. I'm talking about the problem we should be solving, not the specific solution. I can't proscriptively design a society in a social media comment. But I don't think the problem of money in politics is intractable.

> But even if you could "structure society in such a way that money cannot buy political power," you still have the problem of what to do now about currently existing inequality. In some ways you seem to be holding out impossible goals and conditions in a way that merely prevents actual action against real problems.

That's not what I'm doing at all. I'm saying that actions that move in the direction of preventing wealth accumulation are less optimal than actions that move in the direction of preventing money from influencing politics. We need ideals to orient ourselves towards even if the perfect solution is impossible to attain.

> I'm talking about the problem we should be solving, not the specific solution. I can't proscriptively design a society in a social media comment. But I don't think the problem of money in politics is intractable.

> I'm saying that actions that move in the direction of preventing wealth accumulation are less optimal than actions that move in the direction of preventing money from influencing politics.

Well, how do you propose money be prevented from influencing politics? (In a way the preserves present-day extreme economic inequality, something that I'm not at all convinced is something we should endeavor to save).

I'd wager reducing inequality is a problem that's easier to measure and there are better understood actions to accomplish the goal.

But demanding we focus on a problem that we don't know how to solve, and refraining from enacting "less optimal" solutions in the meantime, is an argument for inaction and letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

> Well, how do you propose money be prevented from influencing politics? (In a way the preserves present-day extreme economic inequality, something that I'm not at all convinced is something we should endeavor to save).

You're asking a massive question. How should we stop money from influencing politics? By understanding how money influences politics, and looking for ways to reduce that influence. Lobbying is an obvious example, people with more money should not have their voices amplified in politics, so that could be delegitimised. For less obvious questions like how to prevent the wealthy from funding more biased news, I have some ideas but I don't have a perfect design here ready for you and I don't think some random guy on the internet not being the world's greatest systems designer affects whether money in politics is the problem.

> I'd wager reducing inequality is a problem that's easier to measure and there are better understood actions to accomplish the goal.

First off, reducing inequality is a proposed solution to the problem, not the problem itself. It sounds nitpicky, but that's an important difference because we have to know if successful application of the solution actually solves the problem. We've identified a couple of different problems to solve - corruption in politics and poverty. So, does reducing inequality by highly taxing the wealthy increase the average living standard? I don't think that's a given. There are a lot of factors at play - it would potentially decrease investment capital, disincentivise entrepreneurialism, and the money taken from the rich may not even be enough to make a difference - the idea that the 1% own 50% of the wealth is a bit misleading because much of that value is based on shares in the companies they started, which can't necessarily be liquidated for their paper value and definitely not all at the same time. Personally, I think the idea of "owning" a company is one of the drivers of these bizarre numbers and the existence of billionaires. I guess I'm a bit of a syndicalist in that way - I think equity investment shouldn't exist and companies should not be considered an asset. So if you wanted to reduce wealth inequality, that dubious means of acquiring massive wealth might be a good place to start. But I could bitch about wealth accumulation and representation in an economy with stock markets all day.

> But demanding we focus on a problem that we don't know how to solve, and refraining from enacting "less optimal" solutions in the meantime, is an argument for inaction and letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

That's a blatantly incorrect argument. You can advocate for increased taxes on wealth, or you can advocate for making lobbying illegal. What I'm arguing is that the problem we need to solve is multi-faceted and fraught with complexity, and the solution may not be straight forward. Reducing wealth inequality is a simple solution that targets a symptom rather than the root cause, so it's liable to be ineffective. It's not even like it's not been tried before - TFA posits that marginal tax was 90% in the 60s yet I'm pretty sure that life is better now than it was then.

>It's not even like it's not been tried before - TFA posits that marginal tax was 90% in the 60s yet I'm pretty sure that life is better now than it was then.

To nitpick here a bit, it's funny that you call out his argument as being blatantly incorrect while making a blatantly incorrect one yourself.

There are many things that have contributed to the reasons why overall QoL has gone up and trying to correlate lower taxes to better QoL is absurd, considering we've seen the improvements globally in places with both high and low tax rates.

I wasn't trying to correlate low taxes and high qol - merely pointing out that the opposite is not inherently true. Either way it was a side note, not a key argument.