 Hello there. In my previous video, I responded to a video by the YouTube channel PropagandaU, which complains that rich people's taxes are too high. I was very critical of this claim, but I feel kind of bad about that. You know, if rich people feel that they pay too much tax, we should help them, and we can help them by expropriating their wealth. If we expropriate their wealth, they'll be broke, and then they won't have to pay so much tax. It's a win-win for everyone. But in the meantime, is it actually true that rich people pay too much tax? In the previous video, I talked about how this is definitely not the case for rich people who are capitalists, because they get rich off of other people's labor, not their own. They make money by taking surplus value from the proletariat, also known as the working class, or to quote Karl Marx, Holy moly, it sucks to be proly. All your surplus gets a stowly. But this critique is directed at rich capitalists. It doesn't address rich people who are not capitalists. For example, movie stars, professional sports players, dentists, doctors, lawyers, accountants, scientists, now to drink my own piss for science. I'm not saying everyone in these job categories is rich, but a lot of them are. So in this video, I will be shifting the focus to people who are not capitalists, but are still rich, or at least upper income. Nobody can deny that a lot of the tax revenue comes from people in the top 10% of income. In the United States, if you look at the total tax revenue, not just from income tax, but from all types of taxes combined, you'll see that about 42% of all tax money comes from the richest 10% of Americans. They're only one tenth of the population, but they pay about four tenths of the taxes. Now here's the question. What is the justification? Why is it justified for 10% of the population to pay that much tax? We'll start with the usual liberal justification because despite its limitations, I do think it has merit. But after the liberalism, we're gonna kick it up a notch. So it's true that the top 10% of Americans pay about four tenths of the country's taxes, but they make about half of the country's income, so the amount they pay is not even proportional to the amount they make. If you believe someone's share of taxation should be proportional to their share of the income, then the top 10% pay too little, not too much. But this still doesn't explain why it's justified for the rich to pay more. The usual justification is those who have more should pay more because they can afford it. And they'll still have plenty of money left over for a nice, cushy life. I do agree with this justification, but it's limited by its failure to question or challenge the assumptions of capitalism. So let's shift our perspective a little bit. If the richest one tenth of the population pays four tenths of the taxes, this means that they pay four tenths of the cost of our public schools, our public hospitals, and all our public goods and services. So does this mean they deserve four tenths of the credit for our public goods and services? In other words, did the richest 10% contribute more to society than the rest of us? Do they in fact support the rest of us? For capitalists in the top 10%, the answer is no, for reasons that I explained in the previous video. But again, we're going to focus on people in the top 10% who are not capitalists, but our workers who have jobs with high-paying salaries. Their income is not profit, it is payment for their own work, and yet they still pay a high share of the taxes. So isn't it fair to say that they contribute more than the rest of us? Our answer to this question depends on whether we accept the assumption that the wage or salary that people receive is fair. In other words, it depends on whether we accept that the existing wage inequality is justified. If we believe that existing wage inequality is justified, then those who make lots of money deserve to have lots of money. And when they pay tax, they are taking their rightfully earned money and contributing it to society. But if we believe that existing wage inequality is not justified, then those who make lots of money have more of it than they rightfully should have. So when they pay tax, they're not so much contributing to society as they are paying back in excess of what they shouldn't have in the first place. So to answer the question, do the top 10% contribute more than the bottom 90%, we must first ask the question, is existing wage inequality justified? How much money a worker gets paid is based on the market value of their labor, which just means it's based on the market's evaluation of what their labor is worth. Other influences on wages include minimum wage laws and also the extra bargaining power that comes when workers are organized in a union. But generally speaking, the market sets the price of labor. Thanks a lot, market. You fucking suck. The market evaluation of what people should be paid is not totally arbitrary, but it's also not this ultimate truth that it's often taken for. It's not the one true way of measuring the value of people's work. This will be blasphemous to orthodox economists, but the market is not an all-wise, all-knowing God. Though, I will admit that, like the gods of many religions, the market does seem to enjoy human sacrifice. But the market is no god, it's just a social construct created by human beings. It's just one possible method of assessing how much things are worth, and it's not inherently superior to other methods. One of these other methods of evaluation is used in a research report by the New Economics Foundation. In their report, they evaluate the benefits that various jobs have for society, and they also evaluate the harm that these jobs have on society. So in other words, they evaluate the good, the bad, and the ugly. That is my face. Oh my god, not another one. The report concluded that if people got paid based on how much good or bad they actually do, then some of the lowest paid jobs would be the highest paid, and some of the highest paid would be the lowest paid. Here's an example. Job. Hospital janitors. Benefit to society. Cleaning hospitals protects against infection outbreak, and the janitors do this in an environment where lack of cleanliness would make these outbreaks very likely. Wage to value ratio. Note that this is measured in pounds to the British currency because this was a British study. For every one pound that hospital janitors are paid, they generate over 10 pounds in social value. In other words, if hospital janitors were paid according to how valuable they are to society, their wage would be 10 times higher. So I do have an issue with this study, which is that the New Economics Foundation made these calculations based on the market value of a job's negative and positive externalities. This includes the market price set on a human life, which by the way they valued at 63,000 pounds or 100,000 US dollars. So you can see the problem here. This study is still bowing to the market as the otherwise determiner of value. But who can say what the correct price should be for a life or for any type of social value? After all, social value is subjective. What one person values highly, another won't value at all. And who's to say who's right? Hospital janitors prevent infection, but maybe I like it when hospitals become cesspools of infection. And you can't say I'm wrong because it's subjective. Okay, so just get off my back about it. My point is that because there's no one true measure of social value, anyone could argue that the New Economics Foundation has set the prices for the social value of these jobs either too low or too high. But still, the general point that they make is both true and important that the market value of labor does not accurately reflect its social value. So with that in mind, let's take a look at another example. Job, advertising executive, benefit to society, harm to society, encouraging people to have insatiable aspirations which leads to feelings of dissatisfaction, inadequacy and stress, overconsumption leading to environmental damage, and of course everyone's favorite, debt. Ratio of value created to value destroyed. For every one pound in social value that top advertising executives create, they destroy 11 pounds of social value. This means that if advertising executives were getting paid according to their value to society, they wouldn't be getting paid anything. They'd be getting fined for damages which I think we can all agree is a very, very, very good idea. But their actual salary is between 50,000 pounds and 12 million pounds. Woo. Now, of course, not all highly paid jobs destroy more social value than they create. Doctors and dentists, for example, are highly paid jobs and they definitely contribute a lot of social value. And who could forget the brave and trepid scientists who drink their own piss in the name of human progress? So what's the point of all this? Am I saying that people's pay should be based on a calculation of the social value that they contribute? No, I'm not. Am I saying that people who make lots of money are bad people who should feel guilty? No, I'm not saying that either. My point is only that the wage or salary that someone is paid should never be thought of as any sort of accurate reflection of what that person deserves or of how much value they contribute to society. For example, I get paid nothing to make YouTube videos, but the amount that I actually deserve is... Okay, when I said that it's never an accurate reflection, I mean, I guess there's some exceptions. Personally, I think it's ridiculous to say that person A who works 40 hours a week deserves $300 and that person B who also works 40 hours a week deserves $3,000 or $30,000 or $300,000. All humans have equal value, not in terms of the value of our economic contribution, but in terms of the inherent value of our humanity. We all have only one life to live and each life is of equal value. Therefore, the hours and minutes that make up our life should be seen as having equal value. This is just one reason why communists call for the total abolition of wage labor and instead advocate for society with no money where everything is free. But even if you don't take it that far, if you believe that every human life is of equal value, then it seems appropriate that every single person should earn an equal amount per hour, the same income for the same amount of work. But as a wise philosopher once said... Yeah, well, you know, that's just like your opinion, man. And yeah, I can't claim this as absolute truth because there is no absolute truth on this issue, but I think it's a valid perspective. You might agree with this in principle. You might even agree with abolishing wage labor, again, at least in principle. But even if you agree in principle, you might still have objections. Like would we have enough doctors and scientists and carpenters and other highly trained professionals if they didn't have the incentive of money, or at least the incentive of earning more money than others? We can't predict this for sure one way or the other, but personally I think that we would have enough highly trained professionals. People like these types of careers because they're interesting and satisfying. We would just have to remove the financial barriers that stand in the way of people getting these careers. So how do we do that? Well, there's the communist solution. Just make everything free. Or if you prefer something more moderate, we can just make education free. No tuition. And we can pay students to go to school so that they can afford to live while they get their degree. If for some reason a profession still had a shortage, then we could attract people to that profession by doing public outreach and ad campaigns. Kind of like how the military does now. Hey, finally advertisers would be producing real social value. Good work guys. I know this isn't a fully satisfying answer of how to have enough highly trained professionals without using financial incentives, but I'm keeping the explanation brief because it's a topic that I will explore in depth in a future video. So let's just briefly review and sum up the thesis of this video and the one before it. The belief that the rich pay an unfairly high share of the taxes is based on the belief that they receive a fair share of the wealth and income in the first place. But this is not the case for three reasons. One, because we are equal in our humanity and therefore one person's time is not worth more than another's. Two, because the market value of people's labor does not accurately reflect its social value. And three, because for many rich people, specifically capitalists, they get rich not by their own work, but by work done by others. So there you have it. That's the summary. But now we come to the question, what do socialists think should be done about this? Raise taxes on the rich? Is that the socialist solution? Despite what most people think, the answer is no. What about paying each individual worker their full surplus value? Is that the socialist solution? Again, no. Some of that surplus value is needed for public goods like healthcare and education and public transit. And some of it is also needed to support the elderly and students and people with disabilities that prevent them from working. So what is the socialist solution? It is to create a classless society to end the long and brutal history of one class dominating and exploiting others for their own enrichment. We do this by making the means of production the property of all humanity and used for the good of all humanity. Okay, sounds good. But now we have the question, in a socialist society, how would we divide resources between the individual workers and society as a whole? Or in other words, how much of the wealth that we produce should go towards individual consumption and how much should go towards public goods? There is no preset answer for this. It would be a matter to be decided by the people who live in the socialist societies of the future. Those lucky bastards. I mean, if we hurry up and have the revolution soon, it could be us. Huh? Come on, guys. Get on it. And as libertarian socialists and libertarian communists will remind us, this should not be decided by a state. It should not be imposed from the top down by a group of political rulers deciding things for everyone else. This is something that people should freely decide for themselves through a participatory and egalitarian decision-making process. The bottom line, though, is that in socialism, the wealth we produce is something for everyone to enjoy, benefit from, and prosper from together. Anyways, so that was part two of my video on taxing the rich. Stay tuned for part three, which will just be a live stream of me expropriating the means of production. Though I think that might go against YouTube's terms of service. I'll have to check. And while we're on the subject, if we want to move beyond capitalism, we need to get organized, and a key part of that is organizing as workers. I'll be discussing this in future videos, but for now, check the link in the video description for a list of learning resources. Hi, I'm Lucky Blackcat, and these are my ears. If you want to see my upcoming videos, be sure to subscribe. And because YouTube doesn't always put my videos in subscriber feed, you also might want to click the bell and turn on all notifications. And you can also help by clicking the thumbs up button and leaving me a comment. If you'd like to watch more of my videos, there are a couple of options up there on the screen for you right now. Thank you very much for watching. And remember to love yourself and each other. And I hope you have a very, very awesome day.