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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Theory — the new unrealized capital gain tax is designed (or will have the effect of) forcing people like Elon Musk to surrender control of corporations resulting in PMC control instead of founder control.

As some detail, there is a proposed 25% tax on unrealized gains for the super wealthy coupled with a 44% tax on realized gains. So let’s say you own 10b of a 100b company. If you do nothing you will owe 2.5b of tax. But if you sell 2.5b, you’d actually owe more! So you end up having to sell a pretty big chunk of your stake. This means that before companies get really large founders have to sell a big chunk of their equity preventing super wealth. It also changes incentive structures for founders making them more likely to cash out.

Once they cash out, PMC will take control. PMC coexists with modern democratic policy. Therefore, the democrat tax proposals help ensure corporations are run by allies.

Perhaps you should be more specific than “PMC,” since most founders are, in fact, professionals and/or managers. Who exactly do you have in mind? Does this tax favor them, rather than just anyone who isn’t super wealthy?

“Preventing super wealth” sounds like a pretty normal Democrat plank. What does the extra theory add?

  • -10

most founders are, in fact, professionals and/or managers

You are committing a common mistake. The term refers to a class of people, a group that has converging interests in the specifically Marxian sense (indeed the term PMC was coined by socialists to describe what Burnham called the Managerial class). It is not a descriptor of function or status.

When people who have been poor all their life come onto money, they do not become capitalists by mere virtue of owning stock. In quite the same way, people who do management and/or are professionals are not necessarily PMCs.

What does the extra theory add?

Read James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and you'll understand. This isn't about wealth. It's about power and control and how they are shaped by the structure of organizations.

By making public corporations (as opposed to private), independant agencies and QUANGOs the fonts of power since the 1940s, the managerial class (the PMCs) have managed to wrest power away from capitalists and become the ruling class of the contemporary West. People are often puzzled at why companies make moves that agree with the politics of their internal staff but are not financially sustainable. This is why.

Disney or the WHO's present behavior looks insane to the casual observer, but it is entirely predicted by this lens.

The practical structure of a public company makes the CEO beholden to his board and staff rather than the shareholders, because the shareholders are a disorganized mass while the board and staff are an organized minority. Replicated in all the modern forms of organizations, this makes the influence of the sort of people who tend to be on boards and to be managers greater than that of capitalists.

For a very clear example of this mechanism, you can compare Twitter under Jack Dorsey (a public company run by its board and managers often against the wishes of the CEO and shareholders) to X under Elon Musk (a private company run at the behest and whim of its sole owner).

OP's point is that the proposed tax structure goes further in this direction. And is a move to seize accumulated power away from the techno-capitalists of the world to dilute it in a way that can be better controlled by managers. That it's a attempt to shut down a potential counter elite.