When it comes to the spicier cultural issues that generate flame wars online, I tend to find myself falling on the side of the conservatives. The exceptions to this are LGBT rights and drug use, but these days, these issues seem to divide more on old/young lines than conservative/liberal lines anyway.
I'm strongly against all forms of gun control. I believe that nations often have the responsibility to get involved in the affairs of other nations, including militarily. My diet consists mostly of red meat and I have a longstanding beef with vegans. I find media that overtly panders to minorities irritating whether or not I'm in said minority. I believe that wealthy liberals are intentionally and maliciously fanning the flames of race and gender conflicts to break down community bonds to make people easier to manipulate. Yadda yadda.
In short, when it comes to cultural views, I'm a milquetoast example of exactly what you'd expect to find from a young, online, cultural conservative, or at least libertarian.
And yet, despite all of this, I'm a Socialist. Not a Socialist-lite or Social Democrat in the vein of Bernie Sanders, but a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist.
I believe corporations are fundamentally evil to the core. I believe the overwhelming majority of working people in the US (and probably the world) are being ruthlessly exploited by a class of nobles we'd all be better off without. As a result, I believe we have an ethical responsibility to favor trade unions, strikes, and literally anything that protects workers from corporations. I believe the only realistic long-term result of unchecked Capitalism with rapidly improving technology is a dystopia. Yadda yadda.
Now, neither my cultural beliefs nor my economic beliefs are particularly unusual. The proportion of people in the US identifying as an Economic Leftists or Socialists has gone up every year since 1989, and the cultural conservatives, reactionaries, anti-progs, and anti-woke types are growing rapidly as well. Yet, I've never met anyone else in the overlap.
The combination of cultural Conservatism and economic Socialism is what's historically been called Populism, so that's how I'll be using that word. (I'm clarifying this because some people call Trump a "populist", but he's about as anti-socialist as someone can be, so I'm not using that word the same way as these people.)
Looking to the past, I can see lots of examples of this kind of Populism, especially in the first half of the 20th century, but practically nothing in the present. Libertarians are culturally liberal and economically conservative, and there's loads of them, so you'd think the opposite would also be true, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
With this in mind, I have 3 questions for this community:
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Why are there drastically fewer Populists today than there were in the past?
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Besides "Populist", what are some other names for the belief system I'm describing?
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Where are all the Populists that are left? I assume there's not literally zero, and that some of them hang out online together somewhere, so where are they? Are there populist blogs? Populist forums? Populist subreddits?
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Notes -
That sounds to me like exactly what's already happening right now in basically every first-world nation.
I mean "bad" is subjective, but "impossible" sounds like a pretty extreme overstatement. Some assets may be difficult to tax, but most seem pretty straightforward.
Also, out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on Geoism?
“Easy to tax” is doing work. A wealth tax requires establishing ownership and appraising value. Neither of those is easy in general for the class of people you’d want to target. Assets exist outside of the US and are illiquid, volatile, and not systematically inventoried. Good luck figuring out who actually owns what when the rest of the world is a mix of actively colluding against you for profit, too incompetent to figure it out in the first place, or legally disbarred from disclosing the information.
To the best of my knowledge, no country has ever successfully implemented a wealth tax. As in some (France) have tried and then shortly given up. Rich people can and will spend 100% of the money you are trying to confiscate on hiding it. If that doesn’t work, they’ll just up and leave. This is an enormous waste of resources for both parties.
As for Georgism proper… I don’t see any path to getting there. If we did, the most likely outcome would be income tax, property taxes, capital gains tax, sales tax, and a land value tax because that’s how all of the others worked and fuck you. I’d probably fight it tooth and nail. Consider the shift in the burden of income tax before claiming fairness and efficiency in victory.
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