"The gap between poor and rich is still increasing, and we need ways to address that."
Do we? For what?
We already have a serious problem in Europe that we totally missed the IT revolution. In the list of the biggest corporations in the world, US tech giants dominate. The first European entry is Louis Vuitton, a producer of luxury handbags.
Either we are going to have a robust economy that can support the levels of taxation which carry the welfare state, but that means that someone is inevitably going to become very rich. If someone succeeds in building European Amazon, they will be in the same category of rich as Jeff Bezos.
Or we will still have our legacy giants like Louis Vuitton and a more equitable distributon of poverty. But hey, no new digital parvenus up there.
You are concerned about the gap between the rich and the poor. What about the gap between the US and the EU economy? That is growing pretty fast.
Already we are small brothers to the big brother overseas. 20 or 30 more years of our current stagnation and we will be global nobodies; no one will bother to implement our strict regulations to gain access to our markets.
Because when the gap gets too large, you get an oligarchy. Like here in the US. And I don't think you want a homegrown Elon Musk to run your country.
Also it makes the economy a sham held up by billionaires. I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots. I'm currently looking to instead get a visa in another country for starting up a business.
On a global markets, there always will be huge corporations, and nowadays they usually grow huge because they provide some useful or at least highly sought-after services. And their owners are certain to become rich.
You can drive them out of your particular tax domicile, but you won't squash them globally, and the result will be that you will be dependent on them anyway. As Europeans, we have to deal with Musk from a position of weakness. European Musk would be easier to control than American one, but hey, we did our best to redirect all the future Musks, European or South African, to the US...
"I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots."
You have to realize that a lot depends on your level of ambition. You can start a small local company anytime, tech or non-tech, plenty of people do that every day, but your market reach will be naturally limited to one city or so.
But if you want to start a globally relevant technological startup, hey, that was NEVER in the power of a random median engineer. At least you now have options, including those VCs. There aren't any such options in other places.
Do we? For what?
We already have a serious problem in Europe that we totally missed the IT revolution. In the list of the biggest corporations in the world, US tech giants dominate. The first European entry is Louis Vuitton, a producer of luxury handbags.
Either we are going to have a robust economy that can support the levels of taxation which carry the welfare state, but that means that someone is inevitably going to become very rich. If someone succeeds in building European Amazon, they will be in the same category of rich as Jeff Bezos.
Or we will still have our legacy giants like Louis Vuitton and a more equitable distributon of poverty. But hey, no new digital parvenus up there.
You are concerned about the gap between the rich and the poor. What about the gap between the US and the EU economy? That is growing pretty fast.
Already we are small brothers to the big brother overseas. 20 or 30 more years of our current stagnation and we will be global nobodies; no one will bother to implement our strict regulations to gain access to our markets.