It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
This quote is nominally about the ruling class manipulating the state for their own benefits. However, I don’t think he would do away with class as a Marxist revolution would. Rather, he thinks class warfare would end when the rich are taxed a proportion equal to the working class. The state would still exist in service of the bourgeois, ownership of the means of production would still be theirs, and society would still be shaped by them.
capitalism can work if it’s regulated and everyone pays their fare share, but as we all know – that’s not actually capitalism. Still, a lot of people believe in that system and think it can continue to operate as long as the corruptible elements of it are mitigated
Regulations are always, inevitably, destroyed by capitalism. Even when it’s in the market’s best interests, capitalism still needs ever increasing profits for capitalism to function. As the rate of profit declines the capitalists have to go after the very regulations that capitalism needed to work in the first place.
I think as the capital owning class is the ruling class, then it’s capitalism even if everyone pays an equivalent share to the state. I think the crux of the issue is if there is a group of people who can meet their living needs without having to sell their labor.
Capitalism cannot work even if its regulated and people taxed higher, it cannot outpace the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and this tendency forces companies to raise absolute profits through centralization and international hyper-exploitation, both of which have limits. Furthermore, that’s still Capitalism, as Capital is still superior to Humanity, rather than the reverse.
I figured I’d dig a bit and find the source. It’s from a 2006 NYT article. Here’s the quote in context:
This quote is nominally about the ruling class manipulating the state for their own benefits. However, I don’t think he would do away with class as a Marxist revolution would. Rather, he thinks class warfare would end when the rich are taxed a proportion equal to the working class. The state would still exist in service of the bourgeois, ownership of the means of production would still be theirs, and society would still be shaped by them.
capitalism can work if it’s regulated and everyone pays their fare share, but as we all know – that’s not actually capitalism. Still, a lot of people believe in that system and think it can continue to operate as long as the corruptible elements of it are mitigated
Regulations are always, inevitably, destroyed by capitalism. Even when it’s in the market’s best interests, capitalism still needs ever increasing profits for capitalism to function. As the rate of profit declines the capitalists have to go after the very regulations that capitalism needed to work in the first place.
I think as the capital owning class is the ruling class, then it’s capitalism even if everyone pays an equivalent share to the state. I think the crux of the issue is if there is a group of people who can meet their living needs without having to sell their labor.
The disabled and impoverished benefiting from societal programs are not the issue, Capitalists are.
Capitalism cannot work even if its regulated and people taxed higher, it cannot outpace the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and this tendency forces companies to raise absolute profits through centralization and international hyper-exploitation, both of which have limits. Furthermore, that’s still Capitalism, as Capital is still superior to Humanity, rather than the reverse.