this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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Want to fix all this?
Make one simple change to capitalism: put in. A constitutional hard cap on personal wealth. Anything income or gift or whatever over 1 million goes 100% to taxes
Nobody has some inherent right to be rich or powerful. Nobody got extremely rich by themselves or through hard work, it's just sheer fucking luck and standing on the backs of others
Nobody should have to be poor either
So without changing and overhauling the entire world, just set a hard cap on personal wealth.
May e also company sizes. Any networth over 1 billion? 100% to tax. Companies shouldn't be able to have over, say 1000 employees either.
I don't want a trillion dollar company with 200.000 employees. Give me 10.000 companies worth 100 million dollar companies that each employ a hundred or so workers.
Two simple rules that would change the world. Nobody would be sicher more powerful than anyone else.
All it requires is that everyone in the world says ENOUGH. Enough with the abuses from the rich and powerful
Alright, let's run a quick model.
Let's say the upper cap is $1000k.
You are a CEO and you get a salary of, say, $10k, plus 1000 shares, each worth $1. So, in total, that year your worth is $120k + $1000 = $121k.
Now, you're incredibly successful as a CEO, you make your shareholders drool for your company's shares. Which makes their price skyrocket. Each share is now worth $1000! Such success!
But wait! No! Catastrophe!
Your worth has just gone up to $120k + $1000k! The share's value on their own hits the upper limit of wealth!
They're not your money, mind you, you can't do anything with them unless you cash them in, sell them.
So, you have two choices - you stop getting any salary and have $0 for spending (hopefully the office cafeteria is well stocked!), or you sell some shares, give the money to charity, and pray the stock price doesn't go up. And if it does, you have to sell again, lose the money, and... oh, but now you no longer hold a controlling interest in your own company - some three dudes who work together bought up the shares, spread them around evenly (so neither of them goes above the $1000k), and they effectively control your own company, telling you what to do with it.
So, instead of having some large companies, you end up with chains of "totally not the same" companies that just work together. "Oh, we've outsourced our HR to company X, which is Totally Not The Same as our company, they just don't work with anybody else and we have full data transparency with them."
I am pretty sure than between the current model that is slowly but inexorably going towards: "2 kinds of people in the world: trillionaires and people depending on trillionaire's charity to survive", and the model decribed above, we can find a middle ground.
Not so long ago, the ratio between CEOs pay and median worker pay was 20. Today it's 280. There were successful and motivated CEO at the time.
The US had a period during which the highest tax bracket was 90%. There were CEO, there were rich folks and there were entrepreneurs.
Enough with all the "impossible". The current situation is the anomaly. The current situation is the not sustainable approach. It's not just the US, neo-liberalism has spread over the decades with the very very very exact same results absolutely everywhere it was tried:
-impoverished population overall -reduction of services to the population -increased public deficit -ultra-rich getting immensely richer
Either we keep saying "it's complicated" and keep course. Its end is already known: a collapse of the economy on itself: there is not enough people left making a decent enough living to buy what is produced, and everything belong to the ultra-rich.
Or we change course. It's almost a matter of survival for the poor.
I agree! I'm only saying that often the "simple solutions" aren't really solutions when you stop for a moment to really think about the consequences.
Feudalism was tenable for centuries--until it wasn't. Just because capitalism pulled off a balancing act of sorts doesn't mean we can turn back time.