mindlight said in post #1:
Given the level of entrenched inequality in Western society, the decreasing levels of social mobility, the increasingly risk averse attitude of shareholders to positive innovations that might cost investment capital and risk existing portfolios the question needs to be asked:
Is Capitalism working?
It's like what Churchill said about democracy: it's the worst form of government, except for the alternatives.
Capitalism is the worst form of economics, except for the alternatives.
Also, entrenched inequality is ultimately based on the rules regarding debt under capitalism.
But the Bible has the answer.
For the Jubilee of Leviticus 25:10 allows all people every fifty years to be set at liberty from being hired servants (Leviticus 25:40), such as wage slaves today; and to return free from all debts to their own plots of land, which they can then work in support of themselves and their families.
This is a wonderful idea, and should be put into practice today. For a future, world economic collapse (similar to, but much worse than, 2008's Great Recession) will be brought about by the continued, unsustainable debt loads of the world's (especially China's) corporate and central banks (in the form of bad loans), and by the unsustainable debt loads of the world's governments, corporations, and individuals. God knew that eternal, recycling debts (that is, borrowing or printing new money to pay off old debts) can only result, in the long term, in widespread economic ruin, due to eventual huge defaults or rampant inflation. It is eternal debt, and the subsequent loss of land ownership by poor and middle class people, which cannot help but eventually result in wage slavery and inescapable poverty for 99% of the world's population. God knew this, and it cannot last.
The Jubilee idea prevents what we are seeing today: The unbelievable concentration of wealth and land ownership by only a relatively few people compared with the population of the planet. For example, Oxfam recently found that eight of the richest people in the world own more wealth than the 3.6
billion poorest people in the world. And even in the U.S., it is said that the top one-tenth of one percent of the population owns more wealth than the bottom 90% of the population. That is, in the U.S., one person out of 1,000 owns more wealth than even the
combined wealth of 900 people out of 1,000. How can this be good? And how can it be rectified without resorting to the failed policies of socialism, which eventually render countries completely destitute, like what happened to poor Venezuela, which used to be prosperous due to its vast oil resources.
Perhaps a good start to rectify the current, extreme situation globally (and in the U.S.), would be to abolish all taxes such as payroll, sales, and income taxes, which hurt the poor and the middle class the most; and replace all taxes with a global
wealth tax of only 10% yearly on people with more than a million dollars in wealth. This wealth tax will have to be global, or else the wealthy will simply move their wealth to tax havens with no wealth tax; just as even today, wealthy people can hide their wealth in offshore shell companies, and in bogus "trusts", such as in the Cook Islands. The money from the global wealth tax can then be distributed to the world's poor in the form of sufficient food, clothing, housing, water supplies, farm animals (compare Heifer International), crop seeds, farm tools, fruit trees,
and land for everyone to be able to support himself and his family by his own work on his own land (Micah 4:4).
So remember the
wealth tax. (And that it has to be global.)
