Ask HN: Ideas either implemented or proposed historically to level playing field
3 by unexaminedlife | 5 comments on Hacker News.
I had an idea the other day which I'm sure is not totally unique, but I thought was at least worth discussing in terms of relatively simple / organic ways a government could level the playing field in a (mostly) capitalist economy. I'm not saying the economy isn't already a "hybrid" of many ideas. In no way do I think the economy is purely capitalist (nor has any probably ever been). The idea is based on revenue. How much money has "passed through" a business / entity. These numbers could be tracked by a government, and published in "tiers" (so as not to disclose precise information). These tiers wouldn't dictate how a government "taxes" the entity, but would dictate how the rest of the economy was (by law) required to treat these entities. Specifically around raw material consumption and/or other commodities such as energy prices, and even human resources, etc. I would imagine the formula would be based on how many standard deviations from the mean or median a given company was, which would exponentially affect commodity prices for those entities as the entity's revenue grew / shrank. The question then becomes well how do you track the honesty of these entities? Technically it could be impossible, but based on statistical polling of consumers and/or other businesses it's likely the wealth would be distributed "evenly enough" that there would be no way to collude on a grand scale. This idea would likely require different human beings to be registered as the "controlling interests" in said entity so a company couldn't just spawn many companies all controlled by the same person. This would also potentially make room to sway conservative viewpoints on issues since conservatives are generally against higher taxes. But if the tax was "transferred" into the economy directly there wouldn't be a middle man for some of this wealth distribution that we (almost all of us) seem to agree should happen in the US. Also, would be interested (if a discussion occurs on this thread) what other promising ideas have been attempted / proposed historically and how did they pan out?