It’s Shopify’s Tobi Lutke.
A reminder that he’s behind Build Canada and Build Toronto, and that Build Toronto’s Eric Lombardi is running for the Ontario Librral Party leadership as we speak.
When you said “under fire” I thought you meant literally, as in there is a squad of soldiers currently training their machine guns on the lad’s home.
One could dream
I actually find his idea of weighed voting based on tax paid a good idea. But then percentage wise based on both income and wealth. So if you pay 2% tax you get 2 votes, if you pay 50% you get 50 votes.
Awwww too bad billionaires don’t / barely pay taxes. No votes for those arrogant rich assholes. Now we can vote to arrest billionaires who don’t pay taxes, imprison them for tax evasion and Epstein files and take away their wealth which can be used to improve quality of life of the general public.
Nah there’s no way that ends up working out to the betterment of the people. Rich people are the ones in power and they will engineer it so they stay in power and get even more. They would rather change tax policy so that they pay all of it. That would allow them to consolidate power to they point that they can exploit people even more and come out even richer. Even if they make less money, being able to directly pay for power would be a worthy trade off. It’s better that voting reflects the value that all people are inherently equal.
But they already do that. Its called lobbying.
Has he considered that voting is free, but bullets are cheap? If he were smart, he’d be wary of taking the ballot box out of the equation.
This is Canada, nobody is going to shoot him. Getting torn apart by a mob is not out of the equation though.
Slathered in maple syrup, rolled in worms and fed to a bloodthirsty swarm of Canada geese.
No one should vote. Representative democracy by popular vote isn’t an effective way to administrate a nation.
Bring back qualified sortition.
For those downvoting, Sortion isn’t such a bad idea. Its basically a lottery to put a group of people in charge. I honestly think 100 random Canadians probably would do a better job than career politicians only out for themselves and the corporations funding them.
And importantly, a group of people who have already been identified as qualified for the specific office in question through experience or education.
We need to stop letting bankers and business owners run our country, then act surprised when they run it with profit and economic growth as their primary focus…
We also have the technological infrastructure for more reliable direct democracy. I would love to see everyone over the age a majority issued a smart device (phone, tablet, whatever) where the administration could push plainly worded surveys daily or weekly to solicit public feedback on relevant issues to help direct prioritization.
I like the idea of a Technocracy with highly paid 4 year terms selected by lottery. It should not be hard to be an expert just 10 years works experience or any post-secondary would work. About 25% of the population is what I would call malicious voters. They don’t want progress, they just want bad things to happen to people they don’t like. The 75% of normal people would cancel their evil out. The end result is you be ruled by the majority and they would have a guaranteed level of knowledge. You need to be highly paid because your term could trash your career if it hit at the wrong time.
I’m also a fan of Technocracy, but I’ve almost never seen that well received.
Talk like this is almost like they are BEGGING for the guillotines to start rolling out.
They’ve been begging for decades
Wealthy arrogance is suicidal.
My brother was one of the first 10 or so hires of Shopify so seeing the little company grow into the massive company it is now in the 2010s made me like this guy a lot. He seemed to treat the team with respect and recognized/rewarded them for their work.
Then he totally ended up being yet another shitty billionaire (MAGA supporter iirc).
Thankfully, my brother quit before Toby’s dickishness was made obvious, and so he remains the nicest, down-to-earth guy that I know.
Hang em
I used to work at Shopify. Wouldn’t recommend it.
Anything you can share without doxxing yourself too much?
He’s right though. The oligarchs having to own news and social media to get the election outcomes they want, and then also having to lobby those politicians to enact the right policies is incredibly inefficient. It would be simpler if the politicians were unelected and simply payrolled employees of the owner class.
That sounds an awful lot like Feudalism in the making.
Pretty clear sign that democracy is an impediment to capitalism.
I just want world wide wealth caps. 10 million is the max that any person canboen or control. Any additional income after that goes 100% straight to taxes.
This simple rule has wide spread implications from ending poverty to likely ending wars, removing power from narcissist politicians, and souch more
Yes. but corruption always exists. Caps just push that wealth underground. There are no simple answers like that.
In the 1970’s, $1 million and you were rich.Today, it’s $10 million and even that is less than a lottery win. The limit would have to be $100 million.
The multimillionaires would end inflation very quickly.
The hell they would. Inflation is what makes them multimillionaires. Once you become that rich, inflation does not affect you. 89%of your income gores to investments, things you WANT to increase in price.
Inflation would steadily decrease their real wealth cap. Wealth includes investments.
Wrong.Inflation increases the value of their investments. The stock market relies completely on inflation to increase profits. Every inflationary increase directly results in increase profits. That is the purpose of inflation.
Right, but I’m talking about the hypothetical in which their wealth is capped at a fixed number of dollars. They’d reach the cap and then raise the ladder up after them.
On it’s own that won’t end poverty, but coupled with something like a basic income it could. It would definitely end all the extreme wealth stupidity, and if it was retroactive nobody could really flee with their wealth, like they might manage to with a lesser wealth tax.
You might want to go up to 15, though. There’s bound to be some sympathetic retiree couple with a house in inner Vancouver.
A 100% income tax means there’s no incentive to remove profits from a business beyond that income, since you can’t spend any of it, so it will just encourage increased accounting trickery to justify “business expenses” for things like purchasing private islands, sports cars, and luxury vacations.
80% is high enough; for every $10 million they withdraw for personal spending, they keep 2, and the other $8 million would go to pay for the services requested to run the rest of the country that enables them to produce their wealth. (Including all their employees and customers.)
Then we still benefit from the efficiencies inherent in the profit motive while having the ultra wealthy pay their fair share.
That was a wealth tax, not a tax on income. So, nobody would be worth more than 10 million, and earning 10 million is almost out of the question. That means you can’t own a huge business by yourself, to start with.
Get a high salary, “lose it” on crypto, retire in Belize.
Well, the “get a high salary” part is definitely doing most of the hard work.
That being said, yes, there’d still be a way, if you’re patient, have the income and don’t care about legality. There’d be a risk of getting caught, which always scales with the amount you’ve hidden. But, maybe you’re smarter than the next white-collar criminal.
If the point is to flatten out the class system, this policy would do it, though.
I might argue that if any single individual is in the position to collect $10M+/year, the economic system is already dysfunctional. That individual is operating as a gatekeeper rather than a value center and the position they occupy needs to be broken up and reorganized.
I could imagine a top surgeon or pro athlete legitimately earning that much from their own labor alone.
a top surgeon or pro athlete
Entertainers and life savers are very different categories of value to society.
They also dress differently
a top surgeon
Tops are a dime a dozen. Bottom surgery is where the big money is at.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Financial obesity
I love it.
I just want world wide wealth caps. 10 million is the max that any person canboen or control. Any additional income after that goes 100% straight to taxes.
This simple rule has wide spread implications from ending poverty to likely ending wars, removing power from narcissist politicians, and souch more
I love that term
I feel like this is a copypasta from somewhere. I think I saw it before I need to start using it.
I throw it at any thread I find relating to financial inequality.
It’s lazy, but it’s honest work.
Better idea - only the middle class can vote.
No, EVERYBODY can vote. It is your most basic right as an American citizen, and it should never be removed for any reason.
We should be automatically registered to vote on the day we are born, and that automatically validates on your 18th birthday. You literally have to do nothing, no IDs, nothing. You have the right to vote simply by being an American citizen, period.
And your right to vote shouldn’t be removed for any reason at all. Even serial killers in prison should be able to vote. Prisoners need representation as much as anyone, probably more.
The right to vote should be sacrosanct, and even the discussion of suppressing votes by candidates should be illegal. That is not a subject for debate.
OTOH, the idea that corporation can vote is an abomination, and politicians who attempt such nonsense should be dealt with harshly. Hear that Delaware?
This is a Canadian site. Canadians are SO not interested in the ‘basic rights’ of Americans. You just do not understand democracy. You vote for who is going to be the dictator for the next four years.
Another fucking American telling Canadians what’s what
Ah, fuck, sorry boys, this was my rant for American voting. I wasn’t paying attention to what sub I was in.
For what it’s worth, it’s the way it should be in Canada, too, but that up to you.
I love Canada, you’re good folks.
True, but this is Canada
What middle class?
In Canada we very much have a middle class. Mostly because of two income households.
The middle class already decides most elections because politicians target the middle class as a voting bloc.
This is why housing prices always seem to trend up: middle class wealth is concentrated in their family home.
This is also why there’s so much government funding for universities (public universities). The middle class disproportionately benefit from it. Taxes on working class people to pay for higher education that their own children don’t benefit from are regressive taxes. Basically a wealth transfer from the working class to the middle class.
In Canad, there is no wealth transfer from the lower class to the middle class through taxes. The wealth transfer all occurs at the retail and rental sectors.
I live in Canada. That’s not true. Higher education is heavily subsidized here, yet many of the paths (STEM majors at the top schools) are essentially closed for all but the most gifted of working class students.
Once you realize how skewed education is based on socioeconomic status, you see how little the working class benefit from having their tax dollars go to pay for higher education.
They may determine the outcome of elections, but they don’t determine what outcomes the outcome chases. That’s the lobbyists
The outcomes are what favour them though.
People who have a good job, plenty of vacation days, 2 cars, own their own home, couple of kids, money saved for school and retirement… these folks are not all that upset about billionaires.
They may be dumb, but they are also affected by housing prices, oil prices, service cuts, taxes raised. They still don’t get politicians that do good for them, just like rest of the bottom 50%
They aren’t better off because of who is elected even if you are accurate and they are the ones that determine the outcome of the elections. The elected politicians still don’t persue the interests of the middle-class. The middleclass may simply be the most complacent because they are too afraid of becoming one of the Poors they seem to hate so much
Crabs in a goddamned bucket
That’s the thing though. Beyond a certain point, people don’t care that much about being “better off.” If they have it all, they have it all, and they’re content. I don’t think they’re afraid either. Fear is mostly the burden of the working class.
I don’t think you have that many middle-class friends, judging by your opinion here. I could be totally off base on that presumption but I don’t understand how you can hold that view if you do. That would be my failing then.
Middle-class isn’t a month vacation every year anywhere they want. It isn’t even retiring early. It’s not getting the best version of everything. It still comes with cares concerns worries stresses challenges and a host of other afflictions that can almost always be solved by more money, just like everyone who is not as well off as the middle class.
It’s a certain amount of comfortable survival, enough to also do more than a few things just because you want to and you have the means, but it’s not a place that has no view of a higher place, it’s just not always having your feet in the muck. Water waiting to drown you with a higher tide than usual or a moment of loss of vigilance and diligence to do the things you MUST do just to keep your head above water
At least that’s been what I’ve come to given my life’s windings
Monkey’s paw curls a finger
Only wealthy business owners who are not royalty can vote
It used to be that only property owners could vote. The laws all favoured the property owners.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
That is why we need to tax them.
Yes. We need to… tax… them.
Im sorry, im hard of hearing. Did you say Axe them?
Only after we decide what the best BBQ sauce is that goes on a rack of billionaire ribs!
… or otherwise cause them to stop existing. I’m flexible on that.
As flexible as a rope on a tree?
There’s ways to make that happen…
Why should billionaires get to vote? They live in an alternate reality.
They shouldn’t even exist.
