#power gravity

Power tends to concentrate in the hands of fewer entities over time. If not opposed or mitigated, this is the inevitable trend.

Because the more power you have over someone, the more chances there are for your actions to force or coerce them in ways that change the balance of power further in your favor. Like gravity - an object with more mass pulls harder, so it is more likely to pull in other mass, which makes it pull even harder.

Unlike gravity, power has many dimensions. You can be stronger in some ways, weaker in others.

If the power advantage is small or fleeting, or only in some dimensions, it rarely snowballs into an intractable difference. Like gravity - for small things, other forces or other masses dominate.

how to protect against power gravity, and

A name that self-descriptively captures the full general effect instead of an opaque name that refers to a piece describing only one part of how money gravity manifests.

It's like I gave you the name and rules of addition and you were like "I don't know... I read that one '1 + 1 = 2' blog post and I'm just not seeing what this adds over that."

The basic arguments against tax rates approaching 100% look something like "the most productive people will stop working as hard!" and "that's punishing people for success!"

Good, actually. Money is power, and power has gravity. We should stop people from gaining too much power relative to everyone else.

Even if your income reliably tracks the value you are contributing to society, too much power in too few hands is always eventually harmful to society and most of its people.

There's a real market price of what real humans with real demand for housing would pay for the housing supply, and there's this other largely decoupled market price of what people holding and flipping houses for profit are willing to pay.

But money that's not circulating might as well just not exist for a lot of purposes, and I think therein lies some sort of clue as to how we fix this. If we had a system that deliberately did the equivalent of making stagnant pools of money worth less, more than inflation already does because clearly that's not disincentive enough.

Presumably just a non-use tax would do it - of course a tax which hits harder the more you have, because we don't want to disincentivize grandma from saving money for a great retirement life in a bank account which isn't being used, and we want to put just a little disincentive on some CEO's third house which is unused most of the time, but we absolutely want to put strong disincentive on people and companies sitting on thousands of homes without matching them with real people looking for housing right now.

Of course, this is profound oversimplification, and is perhaps justifiably dismissable. This is also playing with the definition of "death" the same way that "you're already dead" said to someone who's about to lose a life-or-death fight with you is, or even the same way as "we're all slowly dying all the time".

In another view, Rome died because it could only succeed as it did by having an inherently unsustainable pattern of feeding itself with unceasing conquest, and it eventually stalled out on all fronts as it reached terrain or peoples that it was unable to sustainably conquer or control, or stretched so far that its communication technology could not keep its parts as one sufficiently cohesive nimble whole.

And then Rome started to gradually falter and fail and weaken, and many complex interconnected failure modes started to express themselves, and the whole thing kinda rattled apart internally while increasingly failing to deal well with external pressures over the course of centuries. Wealth influx flowed, suppression and bribery of conquered and neighboring territories weakened, internal loyalty and cohesion weakened, and each time that boiled over into violence the affected areas faltered or took damage which in turn made those areas contribute less to the health of the empire, and so on.

But the point I'm trying to make is that I think, crucially, if more of the countless people in Rome had a real say in how things were run, if Rome had managed to stay a Republic and improve at being a representative government rather than turning into a dictatorial one, then Rome could've had a better chance at figuring out better solutions.

Instead of tapping the wisdom of the crowd, instead of using the massive distributed parallel processing capabilities inherent in such a large population, instead of listening to the full "sensory" data and "thinking" that the Roman organism had from each of its human "cells", Rome silenced itself, damaged and drugged itself with censorship, punishment, fear, gladiatorial games, a culture and value system favorable to having a dictatorial emperor, and so on. A tiny little piece of the whole Roman "mind" running the whole show, increasingly ignoring the rest, increasingly optimizing for itself with increasingly more willful ignorance and disregard for how that hurts the whole body.

It takes a certain disproportionate concentration of power to ignore or neglect your people's wants and needs. And yes, sometimes, that power is at first willingly given in the form of popular support - Caesar was able to prototype the dictator role because he had popular support - but Caesar only got that popular support because power had already concentrated too much in the ruling class, in the political elite, in the relatively small number of people who got to effectively dominate the Senate.

He had popular support because people under the boot of an entrenched unrepresentative power structure just dig themselves deeper by emotionally resonating with the idea of a single amazing leader who can fix things.