Shoresy

Switzerland's constitution explicitly guarantees both property ownership and economic freedom.

Article 26 guarantees property and full compensation for restrictions equivalent to expropriation.

Article 27 guarantees the freedom to pursue private economic activity, unlike the USA post-Wickard decision.

Article 94 requires the federal government and cantons to respect economic freedom and says departures from it, such as bureaucratic regulations restraining competition, need constitutional authorization or specified cantonal authority.

Shoresy
And ultimately this is all a distraction. The ultimate point is that rich people shouldn't be paying less than they used to while putting it the middle class and we shouldn't be borrowing money to pay for it all. 


This reads as a moral tax, and not a utilitarian tax. When socialism sweeps through your country and destroys the last shreds of private property rights, there won't be any people left to punish. Because like all socialist countries, the only people with property rights will be those working for/in the government. And they won't punish themselves for being rich. That kind of inequality is perfectly fine and righteous.

Shoresy
I wonder what system this revolution will bring. I don't think socialism is the system people want because the problem of liberal economy is just the corruption and the speculation. Socialism, on the other hand, sucks everywhere with or without corruption


After the violent dismantling of the US government, the new constitution will look more like Singapore's, where it's not easy at all to run up national debt. And hopefully, way stronger private property rights.

Shoresy
You need something to compare to instead of just complaining taxes are high for the rich already. Historically taxes were higher in the usa for the wealthy. If it was good enough to get our country to where we are its good enough now right? Your generation raised taxes on the middle class while lowering them for the upper class. How is that fair? If you want a mega military and mega healthcare instead of national health care that costs half as much like the rest of the world you have to fund it. Our welfare spending is well below the rest of the developed world while we have similar tax and expense situation so you cant really blame welfare. Completely immoral and idiotic to borrow money from future generations and run up debt to give mega tax cuts to the rich. If it wasnt for reagan bush and trumps tax cuts our debt would be half of what it is and manageable. Completely immoral to say, I got mine, while borrowing to fund your lifestyle while fucking up the budget then making future generations deal with it.


USA currently has one of, if not the most progressive tax scale in the civilized world.


Let's see what AI thinks:


Yep. Let's fully grant his fantasy and put it next to the actual debt numbers.

In 2023, the top 1% reported about $3.135 trillion of AGI and already paid about $823 billion in federal individual income taxes.

So imagine:

The government does something vastly more extreme than “tax the rich more”:


It takes 100% of every dollar of the top 1%'s income after their existing federal income tax.

That gives approximately:

$ 3.135 T- $ 0.823 T = $ 2.31 trillion.


Now compare that with today's fiscal situation:

DollarsFantasy confiscation from top 1%

$2.31T

2026 annual federal deficit

$1.9T

Debt held by public

~$32T

Current gross national debt

~$40T


CBO puts the 2026 deficit at $1.9 trillion and debt held by the public at about $32.1 trillion. Gross national debt just crossed $40 trillion this month.

So under the completely impossible fantasy:


Confiscating essentially the entire annual income of the richest 1% would raise about $2.3 trillion.

That would cover roughly one year's current deficit plus ~$400 billion.

If instead you devoted every penny to the existing $40 trillion gross debt, you'd eliminate only about:

402.31​≈5.8%​You'd still owe roughly:

$37.7 trillion. And then comes the killer: you can't do it again next year, because nobody is going to earn millions of dollars of taxable income when the government takes 100% of it. 😂


So even after granting the most ridiculous possible version of “tax the rich”, we've demonstrated something useful: there's enough money there to make a major dent in a SINGLE annual deficit, but nowhere remotely close to enough to pay off the accumulated national debt. And the structural deficit still has to be solved year after year.

Shoresy

It's a ridiculous attempt at soft assimilation. Migrants know to ignore these threats and colonize wherever they want to. As a human right of course, the human right to colonize anywhere.

Shoresy
My God, first they kick a car, then they touch the reflecting pool, one even wrote numbers in the sand with seashells, 


Unfortunately, Pretti won the Darwin Award for taking the seashells as a manifesto from political cultists.

Shoresy
Insurrection: an organized, usually violent revolt or uprising by a group of people against an established government or civil authority.

What's missing?


Alex Pretti kicking an established government car and violently grabbing an established law authority.


Technically, he was killed before he could go to trial as an actual insurrectionist.

Shoresy

The already weak UN is doomed to increasing obscurity because it suffers from a basic contradiction: where nations agree, they rarely need the UN to force agreement; where powerful nations genuinely disagree, the UN usually lacks the power to resolve the dispute. The Security Council's veto allows any permanent member to block substantive action, and recent conflicts have repeatedly exposed that paralysis of inaction, especially in recent conflicts. Meanwhile, declarations and resolutions without meaningful enforcement more resemble statements of platitudes rather than concrete governing authority. The UN cannot provide useful humanitarian coordination, diplomacy, standards, when there exists a forum where virtually every government can talk, but not translate proclaimed universal rules into consistent consequences. An institution that claims global human moral authority while depending on varied and rival sovereign nations to voluntarily supply nearly all of its practical power is simply a very expensive world debating society.

Shoresy

Also, freedom of movement rights and property rights rarely mesh. It's a tradeoff.


And free trade can have severe societal costs; for example, being solely dependent on China for goods and supplies related to national security.

And there are other societal costs the local community bears.


Imagine for a minute that free trade with foreign nations often creates real societal costs even when every individual transaction is voluntary and economically rational. A community is more than just a collection of consumers seeking the lowest possible price. Local commerce dependencies are the incentives that create mutual social dependence, reciprocal obligation, shared institutions, skills, social capital, and, most importantly, value of the neighbor, and by extension, the local neighborhood. It's part of the meta "high-trust" society that America used to have. When people no longer need to support the businesses and workers around them because virtually everything can be purchased more cheaply from halfway around the world, they gradually lose an economic reason or incentive to care about the productive health of their own community. Nobody has to consciously choose China over his neighbor. Millions of individually rational decisions to save $10 can collectively dissolve relationships that nobody individually intended to destroy. It's an unintended consequence of free trade.


I'm not saying free trade is inherently bad, but economic efficiency isn't the only thing a society values. A country can become materially richer while simultaneously becoming less locally self-reliant, less cohesive, and less connected by reciprocal obligations, or a low-trust society. That's a huge societal cost for cheap goods. The "global-citizen" type mistake is treating individual autonomy as though society were merely millions of unrelated individuals across the globe making private transactions. Sovereignty itself depends upon a working network of functioning communities and institutions maintained by people who recognize obligations beyond their immediate self-interest. There are no solutions here, only tradeoffs. Sure, cheaper goods have benefits, but pretending that the social structures and traditional values that bind a community together can be displaced with cheap goods, without that free trade ultimately contributing to that community’s spiritual and cultural malaise, is a myopic take imo. Sometimes people trade their skin for cheap goods so much that they have no skin in the game when it comes to national or even local community existential issues. China learned this the hard way during the Opium Wars, when the people were unable to stop toxic trade that destroyed their communities from within. USA may have to go through that learning loop as well.