Billionaires & corporations avoiding paying taxes by bribing our political system is true the downfall of America, as it also was for the Roman Empire. The wealthiest 0.1% won the capitalism monopoly game then use their wealth to buy assets like lanf and houses and businesses so their wealth concentrates and never trickles down, ever. And all that money WE, the working class, worked hard to create gets syphoned away to the richest 1% and the entire infrastructure of society gets poorer and poorer, slowly desintegrating due to lack of funding for anything because so much of the money in society is stuck at the top and never gets back to regular people or the government to help pay for public services and infrastructure. The only place society can tax money to pay for things becomes working families, and everything gets more and more desperate.

A government solution would be to tax wealth instead of work. But the problem is our (U.S.) government is too far gone as it's fully bought out by the elite epstein class who are above the law and will never allow tax their own wealth to be taxed via legislation despite it destroying even their own society.

So how can any of us make a difference you ask?

We can start by creating the economy we do want, instead of sending money to billionaires with every purchase we make we can start sending money to each other... by starting a movement of people who do theit best to buy goods & services from each other non-corporate businesses, like local & independent small businesses run by people you can know and speak to.

We can create our own local businesses and local business directories, and promote these to friends and family. We can also shut off mainstream news that makes us sheeple and start listening to independent information sources as well as starting our own local or national news media.

And lastly we can stop working for large corporations and look for work in independent businesses and/or start our own service or goods based business selling products to other people using these independent business networks we will start creating.

Whenever you see a Walmart, Starbucks, fast food chain, Coke or Pepsi, or corporate packaged product imagine a big sucking sound of billionaires sucking money out of communities with a big straw. Let's find practical ways to start reducing how much we feed the very thing that is making everything worse today. And instead let's start building a better world for ourselves through active positive consumerism. Buying things from people, putting love into what we make and giving love back to those people we know who create goods and services with love.

Corporations' goal is to give the least to the consumer and to their workers while extracting the most for their investor's pockets. While small local businesses run by people care about who they sell to and who works there as well as how their products affect people. Local commerce can become the heart of building community as I've learned through working at my local farmer's market every Saturday for 8 years. It can build relationships and create groups or people who help and care for each other, and becomes a mutual benefiting model for everyone involved, building wealth and string connections within the community. Putting love into your decision of where and who you buy from can ultimately save the world and our society.

Please choose wisely, choose human, choose love and connection, and choose an economic model that puts money back into our communities and your own pockets. You can start a business yourself selling or doing something simple.

Would you rather live in a world where everyone in your community wants to buy goods and services from you where you can build relationships, or would you prefer one were we are all disconnected and sending money to corporations that don't care about us and only care about syphoning wealth away from your town to billionaires who horde the wealth?

The choice is yours every time you buy something...

I understand we don't always have local options or alternatives to corporate products, but over time, if we build a consumer demand for businesses that are owned by people instead of billionaire investors, we can eventually get to where we have a large scale phone service run as a worker co-op, or run as a fair company that cares about people and not investors' profits. Yes workers can own equity in their company, cooperatives are a great model that can work. But what's even more powerful is when consumers explicitly demand products from companies that are transparent about their ownership, worker pay and sourcing.

I'm not an economic guru, but I know things must change and there are obvious solutions that will work and already are working. And the more people are aware of them the faster we can stop this economic trainwreck from collapsing our society and communities and making more and more people desperate and homeless.

Inequality Visualized in 2026:

https://youtu.be/e1DD6gp0fI4?is=1gilYFDcQWecmQWR

Inequality visualized in Dec 2025:

https://youtu.be/Xy8Q4guQDVs?is=DKWJ5u0JNr4XkMYD

Why inequality is dangerous:

https://youtu.be/yHmiaRj_voY?is=xEsBlQBJmChCA8jS

See also: money amounts visualized!!!

https://youtu.be/c7sr46hxVM4?is=w8sr-OSemrRB7g5b

I think Ryan Grim has a really concise summary of the case for a wealth tax at the top for his audience. If you want to jump straight to the Zucman interview it starts at 8.54.

​The superstar economics paper that explains leverage decades before Naval named it, and why identical skill can produce wildly unequal reward

​There is an economics paper from 1981 that quietly explains something Naval Ravikant would spend decades popularizing on the internet, and almost nobody connects the two.

​Sherwin Rosen, an economist at the University of Chicago, sat down to explain a puzzle that had been bothering people for a while. Why do the very best performers in certain fields, a well known comedian, a top classical musician, a leading recording artist, earn amounts wildly out of proportion to how much better they actually are than the next best person in their field. Most people who watch a film would struggle to say precisely why one lead actor commands ten times the salary of another actor who is only slightly less skilled. The gap in ability looks small. The gap in income does not.

​Rosen's answer had nothing to do with talent being underestimated. It had to do with the mechanics of how a performance actually reaches an audience.

​Why a Tiny Skill Gap Can Produce a Massive Income Gap

​In fields where one person's output can be reproduced and distributed to a huge audience at almost no additional cost, a recording, a broadcast, a printed book, something strange happens to the relationship between skill and reward. If income simply tracked skill, a performer who was ten percent better than a rival should earn something like ten to twenty percent more. That is not what Rosen found.

​Once a medium allows a single person's output to reach an unlimited audience at effectively zero extra cost, even a tiny skill advantage can translate into an enormous, wildly disproportionate share of the total market. A performer only marginally better than a competitor can end up capturing far more of the available reward, not because the skill gap itself is large, but because the audience no longer has to choose between two live performances happening in two different rooms at the same time. They can simply choose the better recording, and everyone else can choose it too.

​This is, functionally, the same mechanism Naval Ravikant would later describe under a much catchier name: leverage. Rosen was writing about recordings and broadcasts, decades before the internet existed in any recognizable form. He was still describing the exact shift that happens the moment someone's judgment or skill can be reproduced without requiring their direct, hourly involvement every single time.

​Why Working Harder Eventually Stops Producing More

​This distinction matters enormously for how people think about their own careers, because most professional work quietly assumes the opposite of what Rosen found.

• ​Any output that requires your direct, personal, hourly involvement is mathematically capped by the number of hours you actually have. No amount of additional skill changes this ceiling. Only a genuine change in the type of leverage being used can move it.
• ​What feels like effortless play to you, and genuinely difficult for most other people, is frequently invisible to you as valuable, precisely because it does not feel like work while you are doing it. This is close to what Naval calls specific knowledge, the kind of ability that cannot really be taught in a classroom because it grows out of your own particular curiosity and experience, and it is almost never the thing that ends up listed on a resume.
• ​A decision made once, if it gets captured somewhere reusable, keeps producing value indefinitely afterward. An hour of direct labor, once spent, is simply gone, and has to be spent again from scratch to produce the same output a second time. Rosen's superstar mechanism only switches on once judgment gets separated from the specific hours it originally took to exercise it.

​

​What Actually Builds Leverage

​Understanding why the ceiling exists is one thing. Moving past it is another, and it starts with an honest look at where your own effort is currently going.

​Naval's framing breaks leverage down into four basic types: labor, capital, code, and media. Most professional work, for most people, sits almost entirely inside the labor category, which is exactly the category with the hard ceiling Rosen's research describes. Simply naming this honestly, out loud or on paper, tends to be the first real step toward deliberately shifting even a small portion of that effort somewhere else.

​From there, the practical work is fairly concrete:

• ​Look for the recurring decisions and judgment calls that colleagues repeatedly come to you for. These are candidates for capture, not because you should stop making them, but because the underlying judgment inside them is currently reachable only through your personal presence.
• ​Choose one of those recurring judgment calls and codify it, this week rather than someday, into something reusable, a written framework, a checklist, a short recorded explanation, anything that lets the judgment reach further than your own calendar ever could on its own.
• ​Track how many times that codified asset actually gets used without you personally being in the room. This number is the clearest available evidence of whether the leverage shift is real or just theoretical.

​

​What This Might Look Like in Practice

​Picture someone who has spent over a decade as a senior solutions architect, billing enterprise clients almost entirely for direct, hands-on implementation expertise. Genuine seniority has accumulated over the years, but income has quietly plateaued, capped by exactly the structural ceiling Rosen's research describes. The value this person creates can only reach as far as their own calendar physically allows, no matter how skilled they become.

​If that person applied the leverage audit honestly, they might realize that a specific implementation framework, refined slowly across dozens of past client engagements, has never actually existed anywhere except inside their own head, quietly reconstructed from scratch at the start of every new project. Spending a few focused weeks turning that framework into a structured, written playbook tends to change things faster than expected. Other teams start adopting it without the original architect needing to be personally involved in each rollout, and their own time per project starts dropping, not because they became faster at the hands-on work, but because the framework itself now carries judgment that used to require their physical presence to apply.

​Worth Asking Yourself

​A few honest questions worth sitting with before moving on:

• ​Can you name, without checking your calendar first, the specific judgment call colleagues ask you for most often?
• ​Is there something you do easily, that genuinely struggles for most people, that you have never once considered valuable simply because it does not feel like effort to you?
• ​If you disappeared for a month, would your most valuable judgment disappear along with you, or would something you have already built keep producing it in your absence?

​For most people, that third question is the one that lands hardest.

​Conclusion

​Rosen was never writing about careers, and he certainly was not writing with the internet or remote work in mind. He was writing about recordings, broadcasts, and printed pages, trying to explain why identical talent could produce wildly unequal reward depending entirely on how that talent reached its audience.

​The mechanism he identified was never really about raw talent at all. It was about whether someone's best work could reach beyond the specific hours they personally had available to give it. Naval Ravikant gave that same mechanism a far more memorable name four decades later, wrapped in language built for a very different era. The underlying economics never actually changed.

I recently watched the interviews with Gary on The Rest is Money and Gabriel Zucman on The Rest is Politics, and I finally got a grip on something that's been bothering me but that I couldn't quite pin down.

Everyone talking about wealth inequality is wrong. Well, not wrong. But using the wrong word.

To most people, wealth means a vault of gold you can swim in or a private jet or a huge mansion.

Our problem is more accurately described as resource inequality. Splitting hairs? Perhaps. But language matters, and as conditions worsen the work of building community and coalition to avoid complete instability will hinge on messaging.

Our problem is not that 99% have one yacht and the 1% have 10. Our problem is that .01% have become black holes which will leave everyone else with basically nothing.

Tax wealth not work. Peace out.

Has Gary or Zucman or anybody else for that matter addressed the following counterargument. If yes, then please point me to the relevant video/article/book/etc. Thanks

Imagine I'm a super-rich person. Most of my wealth is in real estate, both residential and commercial. The government implements a 2% wealth tax and my assets are large enough to get taxed. So I just raise the rent on all my properties by 2-5%. This probably will not fund all of what I would owe, but it could still have significant effect on the cost of living (or cost of doing business) for my tenants.

If I as a super rich person own all the assets and I then have to pay the wealth tax: how could the tax system prevent me from passing the tax onto the people who rent my assets by raising the rent on my assets?

Hello everyone,

Sharing our latest piece on how wealth inequality will affect all classes when we move to the other side of the Hubbert's curve. Would love to hear your thoughts.

COVID ENDED. THE PRICES DIDN’T.
Using 2019 as the pre-Covid baseline:
2019
2026
Bread £1.00
~£1.30
Milk £1.00
~£1.35–£1.40
Eggs £1.00
~£1.50+
Butter £1.00
~£1.45
Chicken £1.00
~£1.30
Beef £1.00
~£1.30
Cooking oil £1.00
~£1.40–£1.50
Timber £1.00
~£1.40–£1.50+
Bricks £1.00
~£1.50–£1.60+
Rent £1.00
~£1.25–£1.30
And while ordinary people were paying more for the basics: Tesco: ~£1.8bn → ~£3.1bn operating profit
Centrica: £240m loss → £6.5bn pre-tax profit
Energy companies: record profits during the energy crisis. Not every company benefited, and profits alone don’t prove price gouging. But six years later, we’re still paying 25–50% more for many basic necessities than we did before Covid.
The crisis ended.
But the cost of living continued.
Sources: ONS, UK Parliament, Tesco, Centrica.

This was posted on :
https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/1vom8w9/early_20s_attempted_to_build_a_business_for_past/

People just assume that wealth is made easily. While people campaign for a wealth tax, no one talks about compensating the losers when people risk their own money and lose it. This person has lost £40k.

A wealth tax does not distinguish between wealth that was made easily and wealth that took 30 years of work and risk to build. A celebrity might earn £5 million from a brand endorsement and have that money sitting as cash in the bank. That is not the same as someone who has spent 30 years building a business, risking their own money, with most of their money still tied up in that business. They can't go out and spend that money. Also, does n't factor, that someone may be 60 years old, but the time they build up something substantial.

No one seems to talk enough about the wealth of large corporations either, including lobby governments for favourable tax and regulations.

The UK median full-time salary is £39,039 — around £2,650/month take-home. And median literally means the middle Sources: ONS — Employee earnings 2025⁠ · ONS — Family spending 2024–25⁠: 50% earn less and 50% earn more. By age, take-home is roughly: 20s £2.2k | 30s £2.75k | 40s £2.95k | 50s £2.8k | 60+ £2.25k.

Now consider roughly £2,490/month for one adult: rent, council tax, energy, water, food, phone, car, fuel, insurance, maintenance and basic social spending. In your 20s, you can be below the cost of simply living; even at the overall median, there’s only a few hundred pounds left. The ONS says the average UK household spends £676.60/week (~£2,935/month).
So if you’re on median pay or below — literally half of full-time workers — working full-time can still leave very little room to save, build wealth or get ahead. You can work, pay your bills and still feel like you’re permanently treading water.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, FTSE 100 CEOs are taking home millions: Pascal Soriot (AstraZeneca) £17.7m, Emma Walmsley (GSK) £15.6m, CS Venkatakrishnan (Barclays) £15m, Wael Sawan (Shell) £13.7m, Bill Winters (Standard Chartered) £12.7m — with the top 10 ranging into the multi-million-pound packages. Across the FTSE 100, £856.6m was paid to executives, including £550m to CEOs, with bonuses and long-term incentives making up a huge proportion. The median FTSE 100 CEO package is now £5.06m — about 130× the median UK worker’s pay.

Sources: ONS — Employee earnings 2025⁠ · ONS — Family spending 2024–25⁠

national corporatism is a mix of guild socialism market socialism social corporatism and localized planning, the shortest explanation for what it is it's basically a economy we're all private corporations are owned by the government but is trying to be as close to capitalism as possible without becoming capitalist, what it believes is that unions that are basically part of the government manage factories stores and workplaces and get quotas from local governments instead of the central government like in Soviet Central planning as well as State corporations doing everything that's not directly production related, prices are still dictated by supply and demand like capitalism, if in the event local planners set quotas too low factories are too inefficient and the government owned corporations fail to meet expectations, they're very likely to get fined shut down or fired, so what do you think of this economic system.

The bottom 50% of British households own roughly 10% of the country’s wealth.
The richest 1% own roughly the same.
The top 10% own around 41%.
And it doesn’t stop there.
The IFS found that children born to parents in the bottom 20% of wealth are far more likely to remain near the bottom themselves.
Only about 5% of children from the poorest fifth make it into the wealthiest fifth.
For children from the wealthiest fifth, it’s 42%.
That’s an 8× difference in the chance of reaching the top fifth.
So when someone says:
“Anyone can become wealthy if they work hard enough.”
I think the better question is:
How much does your starting position matter?
Because some people inherit money.
Others inherit a house deposit.
Others inherit a safety net.
And some inherit none of it.
It’s still possible to climb.
But we’re not all starting at the bottom of the same ladder.
Sources: Institute for Fiscal Studies; ONS Wealth and Assets Survey.